Rapid changes, fueled by AI, are impacting the large pockets of the internet, argues a new column. An excerpt:
In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.”
Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.” The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it’s been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it’s dying again – and, as the litany above suggests, there’s a new catalyst at play: AI.
Another symptom, every tutorial is a video now. I just want to read a quick 1 minute answer with no sound, not watch a 10 minute video and smash subscribe buttons.
Don’t worry, we will (may already) have ML/AI models to process the videos to create your tutorial, just input URL and desired length. Then you can use LLM to elaborate further. But what if static texts ain’t good enough for you? You ask those big models to do text-to-video generation for you.
Several of those thoughts have absolutely zero to do with AI, though. Well, none of them, because it’s ml, not ai, but that’s a different battle.
Enshittification.
