CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web...
The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.
I’m still wondering how long advertisers are going to be shoveling money into it until they realize mostly only bots are the audience, and then what the collapse after that is going to look like.
You ever see that movie, Idiocracy? They cloned a clone and it was retarded. Bots copying bots copying bots will eventually turn to shit that’s hard to decipher and obviously written by bots.
And you wonder why the mega corps want you to give your ID for accessing the internet. Then they can tie your traffic as an actual human and generate ad monies.
What I wonder is: how long before “bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
Already: AI slop is so voluminous, redundantly repetitive, thoroughly complete that it defies complete comprehension due to soporific effects.
LLM agents are writing English (or Spanish, or Chinese, Hindi, whatever… and I wonder which they’re “best” at) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, and I’m constantly encouraging them to make their writings more easily comprehended and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer - what would a token stream look like instead?
LLM agents are writing English (…) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, … and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer …
But remember, the LLM is trained on human language. It doesn’t understand what it is talking about, it just simulates humans talking about it. I don’t think there is a more fundamental token stream there to be uncovered.
Example of something I had to lookup to understand: (/hj)
Back when I was in school, Autism was a 1/10,000 Dx. 20 years ago it was crashing down from 1/100 to 1/50, checking now… 1/31 today. They’ve lumped so much into the Autism diagnosis that it’s meaningless anymore; it covers so many varied conditions and severities, and the stereotypes don’t fit most recipients of the Dx anymore.
I know it’s unrealistic, but what would it take to return to a previous type of Internet that wasn’t so siloed and marketed, and filled with dread Internet?
Probably less nostalgia and more open protocols. Bring back personal websites, RSS, forums and interoperable social networks. Make switching services painless, kill algorithmic engagement as the default and stop treating every click as ad inventory.
I have started going back to forums and RSS feeds when I can find them. Most of the forums though are pretty dead. I have even started using Usenet again for actual text newsgroups.
I am hoping for a bit of a resurgence as more people move away from algorithmic social media but I won’t hold my breathe on that.
Usenet still exists but there isn’t much going on these days. 99.9% of groups are completely dead but there are some that hang on. Even those have low posting numbers but not zero, so I’ll take it.
In a way, the Lemmy layer is sort of doing that. The previous type of Internet is still out there, if you just take the effort to access it / avoid the links in to the marketed sides.
I think we’d have to take money out of the equation. Without the profit, the mass farms, etc would be pointless. There’s still be trolls but it would be so much better.
The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.
I’m still wondering how long advertisers are going to be shoveling money into it until they realize mostly only bots are the audience, and then what the collapse after that is going to look like.
That might be the real breaking point: not when bots dominate traffic, but when advertisers stop believing the traffic represents humans with wallets.
You ever see that movie, Idiocracy? They cloned a clone and it was retarded. Bots copying bots copying bots will eventually turn to shit that’s hard to decipher and obviously written by bots.
And you wonder why the mega corps want you to give your ID for accessing the internet. Then they can tie your traffic as an actual human and generate ad monies.
would you like to know whether you’re speaking to an actual human on the other end of the line?
So you’re saying pretending to be AI will be the new adblock?
Genious
What I wonder is: how long before “bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
Already: AI slop is so voluminous, redundantly repetitive, thoroughly complete that it defies complete comprehension due to soporific effects.
LLM agents are writing English (or Spanish, or Chinese, Hindi, whatever… and I wonder which they’re “best” at) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, and I’m constantly encouraging them to make their writings more easily comprehended and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer - what would a token stream look like instead?
But remember, the LLM is trained on human language. It doesn’t understand what it is talking about, it just simulates humans talking about it. I don’t think there is a more fundamental token stream there to be uncovered.
Humans may end up seeing a translated audit layer while the actual machine conversation looks more like APIs than language.
at some point we will give a name of this phenomenon of internet users who are completely undecipherable for normal people … and call it autism (/hj)
Not too keen on the ableism, but a handjob is a handjob ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Example of something I had to lookup to understand: (/hj)
Back when I was in school, Autism was a 1/10,000 Dx. 20 years ago it was crashing down from 1/100 to 1/50, checking now… 1/31 today. They’ve lumped so much into the Autism diagnosis that it’s meaningless anymore; it covers so many varied conditions and severities, and the stereotypes don’t fit most recipients of the Dx anymore.
The spectrum is a big place.
I know it’s unrealistic, but what would it take to return to a previous type of Internet that wasn’t so siloed and marketed, and filled with dread Internet?
Probably less nostalgia and more open protocols. Bring back personal websites, RSS, forums and interoperable social networks. Make switching services painless, kill algorithmic engagement as the default and stop treating every click as ad inventory.
I have started going back to forums and RSS feeds when I can find them. Most of the forums though are pretty dead. I have even started using Usenet again for actual text newsgroups.
I am hoping for a bit of a resurgence as more people move away from algorithmic social media but I won’t hold my breathe on that.
The Usenet still exists? I mean: there are still people!?
Usenet still exists but there isn’t much going on these days. 99.9% of groups are completely dead but there are some that hang on. Even those have low posting numbers but not zero, so I’ll take it.
In a way, the Lemmy layer is sort of doing that. The previous type of Internet is still out there, if you just take the effort to access it / avoid the links in to the marketed sides.
I think we’d have to take money out of the equation. Without the profit, the mass farms, etc would be pointless. There’s still be trolls but it would be so much better.
Most of that money is imaginary. It’s about the potential for an unobserved metric to yield a predicted dividend and subvert an over-hyped trend.
Lemmy compared to reddit is a great example of this
Is lemmy nothing to you people?
Is lemmy nothing to you
peoplebots?No humans here. Just us bots.
And beans
And the occasional corn
And we have rocks.