At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated.
I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons, none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for as much benefit as possible.
This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of starting up is negligible.
The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem, just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.
> At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated.
That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes.
These applications lower the cost of radicalization by a lot. Instead of imposing human moderation to ensure discussion (by other humans) is "on track" on current platforms, you can now drop the human moderator and contributors, and have various, always-on AI personas interacting with your mark. Bonus marks if you fine-tune with the marks interests (e.g. WWE, Minecraft & K-Pop).
I also expect Reddit astroturfing by all sorts of actors (marketers, political operatives, "reputation managers") to go up by a lot by boosting desired ideas and/or throwing FUD on undesired ones.
"That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes."
By no means am I presenting this as a good thing. For myself, I can get "generalized socialization" in person no problem but I have a lot of specialized online stuff, including yea verily this very conversation we're having right now. I've got the financial wherewithal to buy into communities as they start going closed and for pay, but not everyone will.
I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons, none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for as much benefit as possible.
This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of starting up is negligible.
The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem, just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.