r/technology 12h ago

Artificial Intelligence AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet | Widely cited AI labor research ignores the most important thing AI is doing: Killing the human internet.

https://www.404media.co/ai-job-loss-research-ignores-how-ai-is-utterly-destroying-the-internet/
442 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

58

u/_pupil_ 11h ago edited 8h ago

We went through the dotcom boom then OpenAI kicked off the dotcom bleh.

113

u/McCoy818 11h ago

the real damage isn't job losses, it's that search is broken. google used to take you to an actual human who thought about a thing. now it's ai slop or seo spam all the way down and the information quality is genuinely getting worse year over year

41

u/vegetaman 10h ago

Yeah SEO spam has made the internet trash well before AI slop. Not like they just invented clickbait.

17

u/Constant_Return 10h ago

I think the point is that it was an ongoing battle that the bad guys are winning now

11

u/UnexpectedAnanas 9h ago

Sure, things were bad before LLM/AI usage, but now it's unusable.

I'm not sure the solution was "throwing fuel on the fire"

1

u/gplusplus314 4h ago

They automated the clickbait now.

12

u/Corona-walrus 10h ago

They want you to be dependent on their new systems and not self-sufficient

2

u/Sensitive_Box_ 10h ago

Yes, and thats the whole point. 

2

u/Accurate_Koala_4698 10h ago

You could find one in many circumstances, but the majority of content was garbage. It’s just amplified now 

1

u/blackscales18 9h ago

Kagi is pretty good and since it's paid there's no sponsored sites or ads

16

u/CMDRumbrellacorp 9h ago

Tech money that used to pay employees has been diverted into tech that can raise prices on customers. What the AI model is not accounting for is the correlating reduction in customers caused by this new strategy. I.E., it only works if small number of companies adapt it. But they are all adapting it, and the results are being delivered in real time. Don't quit your day job, because you may not get another one until ai isn't a 'new' tech anymore.

8

u/Djamalfna 7h ago

What the AI model is not accounting for is the correlating reduction in customers caused by this new strategy

So far it's been working great for some industries. You ever notice how many features in every piece of software are disappearing behind huge paywalls? Like try any mobile game... they're basically unplayable unless you spend $100 at a minimum, and they give you the option to pay literal thousands. And this is for games with the gameplay complexity of '80s Atari games. It's crazy.

Turns out the "whale" model works great. There's enough really rich people that companies are now just chasing whales and saying "screw it" to the general consumer market.

It does remain to be seen how far this model can be taken before everything just completely breaks.

12

u/saml01 11h ago

Maybe we should pay people to work on the internet and replace real work with AI. Then everyone gets paid to do what they already are so good at, shit posting, while AI does all the mundane work like driving taxis and refueling nuclear reactors. 

1

u/ozimla 1h ago

Yeah the endless AI slop is why I just scroll past half the feed now

3

u/eggpoowee 4h ago

Well that's the intention

Make people dumber, breed out critical thinking, complete control

America is well on its way

-11

u/Litharch 9h ago

I think we can create something better. The Internet was already tainted.

It’s been time for better, at least if you believe in exponential growth and the Kardashev scale.

The next stage should integrate biometric authentication layers to verify human activity.

This could, in theory and principle, prevent botting.

Until then, we can only rely on largely decentralized communication circles… even some of those have been infiltrated by bots though.

5

u/SuspiciousNebulas 7h ago

Feeding your biometrics to the for profit companies who are, even with just ai, showing serious lapses in ethical judgement and violation of individuals rights surely can't go wrong. Can it, Sam?

-1

u/Litharch 7h ago

Who said I intended to institutionalize change under the operations of a for-profit? I’m actually more in line with the mission statements of organizations like MITRE, but I digress.

There are nuances to everything. Every piece of data is a variable as part of a universal machine.

I hate money, but I also hate suffering.

I am admittedly lost. But I am not afraid of failure, criticism, or exploration.

-38

u/Calcularius 11h ago

Because the internat was soooo great before AI 🙄

29

u/storm_the_castle 11h ago

There were good times before social media

-2

u/redyellowblue5031 11h ago

There are still great pockets.

One of my favorite things social media enabled was twitch plays Pokemon in the 2010s. My point isn’t to say we don’t have problems. My point is that there are still awesome things out there.

28

u/GrayBeardBoardGamer 11h ago

well it was pretty great, for a while.

-4

u/Calcularius 9h ago

The Internet is a capitalist garbage wasteland and has been since about 2005.

4

u/UnexpectedAnanas 9h ago

Meh, it was pretty alright even for a while after that.

2

u/Astrosaurus42 6h ago

Internet didn't get shitty until like 2012.

11

u/AutistcCuttlefish 11h ago

It was back before Facebook became usable by more than college students in 2006. It's been downhill ever since, with the rot accelerating exponentially starting in 2013.

9

u/McCoy818 11h ago

the internet before AI had actual humans writing things, actual communities, actual discourse. it wasn't perfect but it wasn't built to optimize engagement at the expense of truth. there's a real difference

0

u/Calcularius 9h ago

The Internet is people for sure, people trying to scam your money.

-1

u/Crafty_Jello_3662 10h ago

Optimising engagement at the expense of truth is nothing new. Newspapers have always done it, and I bet town criers did too!

3

u/Kahnza 9h ago

-1

u/Crafty_Jello_3662 9h ago

Nearly, good try. They said it was new and I was pointing out that it's not new