The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

We should start donating more heavily to archive.org - the way back machine may soon be the only way to find useful data on the internet, by cutting out anything published after ~2020 or so.

That’s true. I thought I missed the internet before ClosedAI ruined it but man, I would love to go back to 2020 internet now. LLM research is going to be the downfall of society in so many ways. Even at a basic level my friend is taking a masters and EVERYONE is using chatgpt for responses. It’s so obvious with the PC way it phrases things and then summarizes it at the end. I hope they just get expelled.

A work-friend and I were musing in our chat yesterday about a boilerplate support email from Microsoft he received after he filed a ticket, that was simply chock full of spelling and grammar errors, alongside numerous typos (newlines where inappropriate, spaces before punctuation, that sort of thing) and as a joke he fired up his AI (honestly I have no idea what he uses, he gets it from a work account as part of some software so don't ask me) and asked it to write the email with the same basic information and with a given style, and it drafted up an email that was remarkably similar, but with absolutely perfect english.

On that front, at least, I welcome AI to be integrated in businesses. Business communication is fucking abysmal most of the time. It genuinely shocks me how poorly so many people who's job is communication do at communicating, the thing they're supposed to have as their trade.

You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do.

I used to do SEO copywriting in high school and yeah, ChatGPT's output is pretty much at the level of what I was producing (primarily, use certain keywords, secondarily, write a surface-level informative article tangential to what you want to sell to the customer).

At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I think over time there could be a weird eddy-like effect to AI intelligence. Today you can ask ChatGPT a Stack Overflow-style and get a Stack Overflow-style response instantly (complete with taking a bit of a gamble on whether it's true and accurate). Hooray for increased productivity?

But then, looking forward years in time, people start leaning more heavily on that and stop posting to Stack Overflow and the well of information for AI to train on starts to dry up, instead becoming a loop of sometimes-correct goop. Maybe that becomes a problem as technology evolves? Or maybe they train on technical documentation at that point?

Things go in cycle. Search engine was so much better at discovering linked websites. Then people play the SEO game, write bogus articles, cross link this and that, everyone got into writing. Everyone write the same cliches over and over, quality of search engine plumets. But then since we are regurgitating the same thought over and over again, why not automate it. Over time people will forget where the quality post comes up in the first place. e.g. LLM replaces stackoverflow replaces technical documentation. When the cost of production is dirt cheap, no one cares about quality. When enough is enough, people will start to curate a web of word of mouth of everything again.

What I typed above is extrememly broad stroking and lacking of nuances. But generally I think quality of online content will go to shit until people have had enough, then behaviour will swing to other side

With practice I’ve found that it’s not hard to tell LLM output from human written content. LLM’s seemed very impressive at first but the more LLM output I’ve seen, the more obvious the stylistic tells have become.

LLM trash is one thing but if you follow OP link all I see is the headline and a giant subscribe takeover. Whenever I see trash sites like this I block the domain from my network. The growth hack culture is what ruins content. Kind of similar to when authors started phoning in lots of articles (every newspaper) or even entire books (Crichton for example) to keep publishers happy. If we keep supporting websites like the one above, quality will continue to degrade.

Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts.

Or just a post from a non-native speaker.

There might be a reversal. Humans might start intentionally misspelling stuff in novel ways to signal that they are really human. Gen Zs already don't use capitals or any other punctuation.

Interesting point about the spelling and grammar. I wonder if that could be used as a method of proving you are a human..

Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts.

Timee to stert misspelling and using poorr grammar again. This way know we LLM didn't write it. Unlearn we what learned!

that we have lost a useful heuristic

But we've gained some new ones. I find ChatGPT-generated text predictable in structure and lacking any kind of flair. It seems to avoid hyperbole, emotional language and extreme positions. Worthless is subjective, but ChatGPT-generated text could be considered worthless to a lot of people in a lot of situations.

I agree. I've noticed the other heuristic that works is "wordiness". Content generated by AI tends to be verbose. But, as you suggested, it might just be a matter of time until this heuristic also no longer becomes obsolete.

It won't help as much with local models, but you could add an 'aligned AI' captcha that requires someone to type a slur or swear word. Modern problems/modern solutions.

At the moment we can at least still use the poor quality of AI text to speech to filter out the dogshit when it comes to shorts/reel/tik toks etc... but we'll eventually lose that ability as well.

The current crop of LLMs at least have a style and voice. It's a bit like reading Simple English Wikipedia articles, the tone is flat and the variety of sentence and paragraph structure is limited.

The heuristic for this is not as simple as bad spelling and grammar, but it's consistent enough to learn to recognize.

I’ve thought about that a lot - a while back I heard about problems with a contract team supplying people who didn’t have the skills requested. The thing which are it easiest to break the deal was that they plagiarized a lot of technical documentation and code and continued after being warned, which removed most of the possible nuance. Lawyers might not fully understand code but they certainly know what it means when the level of language proficiency and style changes significantly in the middle of what’s supposed to be original work, exactly matching someone else’s published work, or code which is supposedly your property matches a file on GitHub.

An LLM wouldn’t have made them capable of doing the job but the degree to which it could have made that harder to convincingly demonstrate made me wonder how much longer something like that could now be drawn out, especially if there was enough background politics to exploit ambiguity about intent or the details. Someone must already have tried to argue that they didn’t break a license, Copilot ChatGPT must have emitted that open source code and oh yes I’ll be much more careful about using them in the future!

Well, unless Discord starts selling it to ai companies right?

AI spam bots will invade discord.

I strongly disagree. I've been answering immigration questions online for a long time. People frequently comment on threads from years ago, or ask about them in private. In other words, public content helps a lot of other people over time.

On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best.

If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.

The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectively all the players are conspiring to generate revenue from people's free time, attention, and coerce them into consumption, while amusing them to death. Big entities in the space have trouble coming up with successful models other than advertising--not because those models are unsuccessful, but because 20+ years of compounded exponential growth has made them so big that it's no longer worth their while and will not help them achieve their yearly growth targets.

Just a case in point. I joined Google in 2010 and left in 2019. In 2010 annual revenue was ~$30 billion. Last year, it was $300 billion. Google has grown at ~20% YoY very consistently since its inception. To meet that for 2024, they'll have to find $60 billion in new revenue. So they need to find two 2010-Google's worth of revenue in just one year. And of course 2010-Google took twelve years to build. It's just bonkers.

I can't see how being used as training data has anything to do with this problem. Being able to differentiate between the AI slop and the accurate information is the issue.

Discord is searchable: https://www.answeroverflow.com/

I can't really see a relevance between "we should spend more time with trusted people", which is an argument for restricting who can write to our online spaces, and "we should be unindexable and untrainable", which is an argument for restricting who can read our online spaces.

I still hold that moving to proprietary, informational-black-hole platforms like Discord is a bad thing. Sure, use platforms that don't allow guest writing access to keep out spam; but this doesn't mean you should restrict read access. One big example: Lobsters. Or better-curated search engines and indexes.

Discord will die and there's no way that I'm aware of to easily export all that information.

time to abandon google and go back to web rings.

Humans are the original bullshit generator. AI is only doing what humans have been doing since forever.

Human shitposting is at least entertaining.

There are purveyors of artisanal organic bullshit now, but it's pricey.

you mean like stack overflow scraped answer spam? wasn't that like last year? I hardly ever Google anymore I just ask Bing chat.

Finally switched to Kagi when I realized Google could not find a particular ThreeJS class doc page for me no matter what keywords I used, I had to paste the very URL of the page for it to appear at the top of my search results.

Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.

You think that spammers dont use AI to write on reddit now?

one thing to always remember, which may also easily repulse you from ever using google search again - it does not give search results. it generates a carefully crafted page which caters to your bubble. so does FB, so does Twitter, etc. just using different algos. Google search does not return the same results for the same query for different people, which a) makes it so different from AltaVista and historical search engines (from ElasticSearch if you want); and b) this is enough to NOT treat it as a search engine, even though is still billed as one....but as a personal wall of ad-designated BS.

Yes but the content from the web flows into social media, news, “books” (now e-books) in an intangible cyclone of fabricated information.

If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.

Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2.

I feel the same way.

I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me.

I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.

Totally agreed, SEO spammers wrecked the public web years ago and Google did everything they could to enable it for more ad revenue.

With respect, I think you're missing a key variable, which is volume.

Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap.

Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.

I agree that low quality content has always existed.

But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now.

Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume.

Good insight about Apps.

Articles written by interns or _Indian virtual assistants_ about generic topics are pretty much as bad…

The Internet belongs to the Indians as much as it to any other nation, do you have data behind this crass comment?

Are such racist comments really welcome at a forum like Hacker news?

Going to? It already has. I get about 50 articles for software fixes that have a lot of hot garbage in them before getting to the point. For example I had a discord issue and instead of laying out a fix, the “article” apparently needed a multi paragraph ChatGPT explanation of what discord is before even attempting to show remedies.

oh, AI is doing it? I thought it was spammers using AI tools

if I use a computer to break a bank can I blame the computer too?

"going to"

In my experience, there's not far to go!

AI is generating content, not consuming it. If people are easily duped by fake or bad products with advertisements or content generated by AI (which, they are) then this will continue to drive revenue for Google. The only reason Google dislikes SEO manipulation is because it's a way for sites to get top real estate on google without paying for the promoted results; the quality of the product doesn't matter to them

It only becomes a problem when it results in a collapse of trust; when people have been burned by too many bad products and decide to no longer trust the sites or search results which they used to. Due to my job, I get a lot of ads for gray market drugs on Instagram. I know, however, that all of these are not tested by the FDA and most are either snake oil or research chemicals masquerading as Amanita Muscaria or Delta-8 THC, and so I ignore these ads.

Why wouldn't it result in humans spending dollars? The ads are real and the visitors are real, it doesn't matter if the content is real. In fact people are probably more likely to click on an ad if the page it's on is generic and uninteresting.

At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars.

You seem to have a hilariously over generous opinion of ad tech spending. The biggest players are already doing this themselves.

That's an interesting take, but Google won't suffer before the advertisers decide that they are wasting their money on online advertising. Some topics should already have dried up, but perhaps scams are fueling the advertising machine for now on those. You can't really use Google for things like fitness or weight-loss. When we remodeled it also became clear that building materials and especially paint have become unsearchable. In the end I resulted to just go to the store and ask, it as the only way to get reliable information and recommendation.

Google is still working for most areas, but where it's really good is the ads for products. If there's something you want to buy, Googles ads engine will find it for you, you just have to know exactly what you want.

Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars.

Google might notice but has no incentive to spend money to stop it because they're not the ones the humans stopped paying. The companies that advertise with Google might notice a drop in ROI on their ads, but it will be a while before they abandon Google because most of them don't see any other option.

I dread what the internet will look like if we wait for this this to hit Google's bottom line.

Big tech has always been laying off, firing, even in the best of years.

And today, right now, they're all still hiring.

It doesn’t need to be solved before as most internet users could easily identify algorithmically generated stuff and stop spreading it, but not so anymore.

Maybe one day we’ll all be able to “smell” ai generate text easily, but we’re not there yet

AI solves that problem - it’s pretty easy to look at behavioral data and identify low v high quality users. Optimize towards what the AI thinks is users likely to convert and the problem Is solved.

I've not really considered this before, but I might actually be interested in a 'white-listed' web. This is obviously possible entirely client-side with a plug-in that white-lists domains and allows you to edit the list.

I'm wondering if there's a genuine opportunity here to go further. A client-side browser plug-in, plus a SaaS which automatically vets pages on-the-fly to guesstimate the chance they're AI-generated, spammy, etc. So if you visit a new domain the plug-in auto-updates the white-list, prompting you to confirm the judgement, maybe prompting to add the domain to UB0 or similar.

Again, this could all be done entirely client-side if the guesstimation algorithm is efficient enough. But a centralised database would confer other obvious advantages, like basing the guesstimation score on decisions from similar users, building a giant up-to-date list with fast lookup, that sort of thing. Site listings and other data from Kagi, marginalia.nu and Mwmble.com would be a great starting place. Obviously it would have to protect against the system being gamed, Sybil attacks and what have you.

I'd pay a dozen CURRENCY per year for that.

Maybe this exists already, or something similar?

...and lose all your privacy as those paid internet sites siphon off your search terms, pattern match your purchasing and consumption, and sell advanced psychological profiles to Cambridge Analytica so they can turn around and use it to psyop you into voting for another shitbag Billionaire.

I never really thought it was stupid, more that it was hyperbole - but very mild hyperbole with a solid basis in reality. The endless tide of email spam would be a good example where the theory rings true.

Even closed platforms like FB is dogshit now.

Click on any story, and the comment section is 80% bots. Doesn't mater if it's serious users like NYT, CNN, or whatever.

I've also noticed a huge uptick in spammy pages and groups that pump out AI generated pictures and stories, with nothing but bots upvoting and commenting the content.

These days I only use FB for private hobby groups, and messenger to talk with friends and family.

It's the "grey goo" scenario playing out in cyberspace.

Need to bring back Encarta ;)

Jk. Wikipedia is much larger and better as an encyclopedia.

Signed content is the only way to get that.

This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it.

It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can always defraud it.

This is the same reason that no one ever successfully used blockchains for supply-chain authentication. Yes, you can verify that item #523 has a valid hash associated with it, but you can't prove that the hash was applied to item #523 instead of something fraudulent.

agree 100%. there's no going back at this point and it's an inevitable problem anyway. so we need to innovate further.

The way out is authenticity. Signed content is the only way to get that.

This is the real play IMO. With the push for identity systems that support attestation [1], it doesn't matter if AI is successful at producing high quality results or if it only ever produces massive amounts of pure garbage.

In the latter case, it's a huge win for platform owners like Apple, Google, or Microsoft (via TPM) because they're the ones that can attest to you being "not a bot". I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now you need a relationship with one of those 3 companies to participate online in any meaningful way.

So, even if AI "fails", they'll keep pushing it because it's going to allow them to shift a large portion of internet users to a subscription model for identity and attestation. If you don't pay, your content won't ever get surfaced because the default will be to assume it's generated trash.

On the business side we could see schemes that make old-school SSL and code signing systems look like charities. Imagine something like BIMI [2], but for all content you publish, with a pay-per-something scheme. There could even be price discrimination in those systems (similar to OV, EV SSL) where the more you pay the more "trustworthy" you are.

My fear is that eventually you'll start seeing government services where identity and auth are handed off to private companies like Google and Apple. Imagine having your real identity tied to an attestation by one of those companies.

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/#sctn-defined-attestation-for...

2. https://bimigroup.org/

the craziest part is that jaron lanier said this like 20 years ago, if not more

Ye like the canned responses in Teams. Removes the fine grained nuances.

Or maybe "I wish I were a bird."

If this is true it implies all news and history for the past 10 years is also human-generated bullshit. I’m not saying you’re wrong – just that you have to follow your beliefs to their conclusions.

They don't have to, the fandom will do it for free.

EDIT: Also, the odds are close to 100%.

I just did a demo this week for someone who asked how well GPT4 would write forum replies in their voice. The results were startling to be honest. The only way I would (maybe) tell the comments were AI is that they were slightly better quality replies than the author themselves would have written.

I wouldn't go forward with it because it felt unethical, but it was a really fascinating thought experiment.

Honestly I don't see Google having any killer feature left. The next killer feature is AI to do search, which MS is doing, but Google is failling at so hard they had to fiddle with their own demo.

Why do a web search to hope to get answers to my question, when I can have an AI write me a custom article that actually answers my question?

Oh how I yearn for the days when people's life stories were written into recipes -- by what I'm told were actual people.

There's too much value in undetectable AI for an AI detector to last long. Any technology behind a tool that can accurately detect it will used against itself: keep on trying until it can't detect its own output.

Create the disease and sell the cure

That's it. Google is loosing the ground here. It is no longer "the gateway to the Internet." There has always been dog shit, it's just there will now be much more dog shit than ever. Indexing dog shit is not working anymore. There is still Internet out there with useful information, it's just you cannot access it by searching. Are we back to the era of curated sources, encyclopedias and web rings?

Who will create the information then? They won't have traffic, an audience or even any recognition. Who would want to do that?

Actually if AIs become good at reasoning, composition, logic better than humans, AI content will be sought-after and more trusted than human content for the sheer ability of AIs to better at those tasks than humans. Of course there will be need for human bubbles for "authentic" experiences but for most of technical content AI will be preferred for its ability to tailor it (for brevity, style, recipient's technical know-how, language, context).

    “Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost
    useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright
    misleading information,” Sammann said.
   
    “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
   
    “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses
    were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever
    plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put
    crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their
    products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole
    purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good
    crap.”
   
    “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
   
    “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random
    letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written
    document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and
    one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At
    first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by
    taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for
    another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got
    interested.”
   
    “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you
    mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the
    Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”
   
    “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous
    sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa
    has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial
    sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind.
    The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that
    lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

I like "Artificial Inanity" as a description of LLMs

I've figured that was the future for almost 25 years now, see #5:

https://ymlibrary.com/download/Topics/Self/Work-School/Work-...

That's an interesting idea. Until AIs will get access to keyboard drivers to type their dogshit.

You have to account for the amplification effect when a large number of people read false information so it becomes true.

“Truth” in the most practical sense is whatever most people believe and espouse.

Sure we’re all more sophisticated and intelligent to believe the actual truth, but do you have the willpower to fight that battle every day?

Before that though, it already felt like a lot of those outlets - blogs, SO, comment sections - were either bot or low-value, almost automatic comments. And of course, low wage content writers who get paid by the word to write "where do I find this item" guides for video game websites, somehow managing to change "it's in this chest in this region" to ten paragraph articles.

It just got a lot cheaper to generate convincing dogshit

How old are you?

Xillenial here and the internet was a utopia when I first explored it.

Everyone you interacted with was similarly curious and interesting. All the content was some flavor of passion project.

I’ve recently been getting into ham radio because it has a similar feel to me as the early internet. You need a license and an outlay of equipment and everyone else is a hobbyist also. It’s not an app anyone can use with their thumbs.

I think we’ll see a backlash at some point where people abandon these app-driven spaces and we go back to grass roots communities.

At least I hope so

How about 'internet content which is dependent on ad-revenue inevitably turns anything associated with it to dogshit'?

Indeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network") wrote "Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information."

"So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity".

The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day."

A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.

The problem is that the dogshit machine was constrained in its output by the organization creating it. Sure you may have paid small amounts per article but your resources were still limited as cost scaled linearly with content creation. Now any size of organization can make a metric tonne of lexically unique content with a fixed cost given the incentive to do so at the moment, it’s all but inevitable.

That sounds like a bad human translation from Chinese. AI mistakes are a different category.

Google Image search has been hopeless for a long time now, you'll get better results typically on Yandex or Bing to the point I won't use Google for images.

Regarding the last sentence: The problem is that capitalism knows no limits. Sure, it would be nice to pay a monthly subscription for genuinely good and desirable content/search results...

But what if the CEO of the service provider needs another $5m bonus? What if the stock needs to go up so that the shareholder gamblers can get more dividend paid? What if all of a sudden the service gets bought out?

The truth is that what you are seeking is more likely to come from someone who is just passionate about it with not that much motivation based on profit. That doesn't mean that this entity or person can't be financially supported but it gets problematic when profit is the _main_ incentive.

For a good example of an interesting search engine built by a single guy, see Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

chatgpt rewrites of popular books on sell on amazon. the author wrote 24 books in a year.

https://twitter.com/MelMitchell1/status/1742936379796193612

This is the worst of it.

All of googles' top suggestions, highlights, and whatever other garbage they put in the top two scroll pages, is just junk. Garbage. It's right perhaps 5% of the time for me.

So not only do I have to hunt through their horrible search results, I have to hunt through junk they add on top of that.

The sad part is, their buffoonery in aliasing words is 90% of the problem. No, I searched for David, not Dave. No, I searched for Debian, not Ubuntu. On and on, unless I use verbatim, I get nothing even remotely useful.

It's like Google is completely disconnected from the real world. I bet they don't even dogfood. They probably have a Google Employee search that actually works, and doesn't alias or something.

I wonder what startling revelations Google would have, if they flew to the middle of Missouri, told people how to use verbatim, and then saw the wondrous expressions of "oh, it works now?" in grandmas.

They blew the AI game, screwing around, messing about, giving up a decade lead on OpenAI. They're destroying their search engine, their brand, with this junky, modern lack of effort. They're making gmail less and less friendly, losing cherished photos of loved ones in Google Drive, their entire Pii based income stream is coming to an end, frankly, Google is done, unless they do something dramatic.

They're on the path to becoming IBM. A washed up has been, ruminating on past glories.

They should be hiring right now. Massive amounts of talent is being set free, they should scoop them up, and reap 5 year research and dev rewards. They have the excess capital... now, something they will lose soon.

But no. Onward, we march into oblivious irrelevance, says they! Yay!

Not if you're using it to still read Sports Illustrated.

My favorite example is if I search Google for "tide me over vs tie me over" it comes up with "Tie me over is correct". Not only is this wrong, but if you click the link, the source itself says it is wrong! The source is literally on the importance of fact checking, and Google is pulling a quote that the article uses as an example of an incorrect fact.

Google: WARNING: It is a common misconception that the phrase “tie me over” is actually pronounced “tide me over.” Some even go so far as to say the “tide” refers to the ebb and flow of hunger, but this is not the case. Rest assured “tie me over” is correct.

Actual source: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tie-me-over-vs-tid...

We are racing right towards that, accelerating as we go. The web's toast. Maybe we can somehow build up different, more resilient platforms.

Dogs make some of the best clients for paying creative work.

I live in Norway, and I've noticed that identification systems like BankID have become ubiquitous - even necessary - if you want to do anything serious on the web.

Those cyber lobsters are our only hope!

Are you sure about that? Can you conceive of LLM generated SEO spam blogs receiving comments from completely unrelated LLM generated comment spammers?