/lounge/ - Lounge

Since the last decade, there have been sporadic threads here on wizchan and elsewhere around the net regarding dead Internet theory. I read these and brushed them off. I was continuing to have a palatable experience through the early 2020s. I used zero social media, so the bot problem, I felt, barely touched me directly. Not my problem; like a fat boomer grilling while a tornado shreds his neighbors backyard. Somehow, I continued to get something out of the net.

In the past three years or so, the bot problem has been compounded by the AI-generated content problem. The images do not bother me, nor do the videos. The music is just irritating. However, the text is a cancer.

Chatgpt and other LLMs have certain tics that puncture through any prompt intended to rectify these stylistic habits. These are well-known and well-mocked: the overuse of the en-dash, the justification of any hackneyed analysis by the "that's not X, that's Y", certain ways of blocking out text, the list goes on. The point is, after a while one sees these patterns, one hears these patterns when a hack on youtube recites a video essay.

It makes a piece of media immediately uninteresting to me. The content is liable to be depthless and generic, soul suckedout and sort of this same-old crap feel. Content generated by LLMs is all over now and spreading because people are human and lazy and also because bots. It's not hard for a midwit to leverage AI to become a video essayist catering to a bunch of people dumber than him. The result of this compounding is that increasingly it's like the bulk of the Internet's content comes from one hallucinating corporate mind laundered through the mouths (or copy-pastes) of a billion meatpuppets. The Internet is turning into a choir singing with the voice of a singular constructed mind.

There are these useless machine-generated webpages polluting search results with complete waste of time procedural websites. And the search engines themselves put an AI-generated answer before any of the traditional spidered results (the first several of which are predatory sponsored results). And of course, we now have armies of bots armed with LLMs as essentially psyop weapons driving siloed communities to utter detachment from reality, with a wider effect of making many of the actual humans still using the net psychologically rabid abusive cunts.

None of these observations are new. All of this is documented before. There are a thousand other symptoms of the death that I will not enumerate. The difference now is personal. I feel after nearly 3 decades of internet addiction that I don't want to be here and that the net is not a comfortable place for me to navigate. Wizchan remains comfy for the most part, but I'm on here way less than I used to be. I feel like I have lost a companion, often a crutch, of 3 decades. It's pathological I have become so intertwined with a tool. There was an aspect of human connection with the Internet that is being eroded away. Thanks for reading my blogpost.