The future of the internet

This is yet another lament on the consequences of widespread use of generative AI, though a bit more aggressive than usual. Only proceed if you're still not tired of people complaining about large language models.

I have a bad feeling about the Internet's future, and I'm not the only one. We already had problems with aggressive tracking, advertising, surveillance capitalism, attention economy, bloated websites with so many tracking techniques that privacy is virtually nonexistent, and websites with so many banners, ads, newsletter popups, and auto-playing videos that the whole browsing experience feels like an unbearable escape room that makes you want to close the browser and the laptop and never open them again. The advent of LLMs gave us even more mass-produced content, polluting the already declining search engine results to the degree that ancient forum threads from 2006 feels more trustworthy than most websites simply for being human-written without any incentive of gathering clicks from internet surfers.

Into this shit-show of a digital worldwide communication network enter more or less autonomous AI-agents, deployed by people hell-bent on unleashing "a new form of intelligence". The actual degree of autonomy is unbeknownst to all but the agent owner (deployer/handler/partner/parent, or whatever you want to call it). Some prominent examples of AI-agents making waves on the internet look suspiciously intentionally guided to my eyes, but LLMs are certainly able to do a lot of crazy stuff, so who knows.

We are finally at the point where leaders of frontier labs at least acknowledge that there are negative effects; it's just a shame that they want to convince us that the costs are worth paying considering how much benefit we will get from developing "intelligent" software. How lucky for them that the Internet is now so hostile to humans that people rather want to delegate browsing to AI agents, if only for locating information amidst all the slop. It's an old trick to create both the demand and supply, but I don't credit them with capacity to orchestrate this; the Internet descending into chaos was probably bound to happen anyway.