AI is enshittfying both the web and our entire society (just look at what it’s done to education) and it’s not even fucking profitable lmao. This is just madness. Nobody asked for this.
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Nobody asked for this.
You just made a Google exec with a yacht really angry. How can he buy his second yacht if AI doesn't generate enough of that sweet, sweet money?
But it doesn't! It's not profitable!
That's the beauty: execs still get paid for their "innovative leadership" and "future earning potential" (aka make free product and enshittify later). Should the company go under while theyr still there, they just sell their stocks and pull their golden parachutes. They always win, that's why we should do funny things (in Minecraft)
AI has also completely destroyed the quality of search engines. The internet is starting to become totally useless as anything but an SEO clickbait advertising mill.
It's fucking heartbreaking. Like watching a library be converted into a billboard for cigarettes.
search was shit for a decade before this, gpt-4 is just the final nail
Any media that allows regular people to publish with a reasonably low barrier to entry is just doomed to be completely overwhelmed with spam and shit
Edit: not even exclusive to 'publish' in the one-to-many broadcast sense, even email and phone calls. So many ways to communicate and they're all barely functioning
Critical support
The current Google leadership sees this as the goal. They see the replacement of search with LLM summaries as the final solution to SEO.
The SEO sub reddits are on suicide watch lmao
For a while now the majority of the referrals (and probably the majority of our traffic in general) to the GitHub repos that I manage has been from ChatGPT
Google already lost two antitrust lawsuits, what's a third at this point?
while they are still just getting slaps on the wrist, nothing actually.
I wonder how many paywalls are going to go up. I also expect the amount of ad code that needs to load first will mean pages take like 15 seconds to load. And after pages load - good luck if you're on mobile. The page will be unreadable do to a large annoying mass of intrusive ads.
adblockers are a must in the modern web
I typed up a ChatGPT joke - "I can't open the pod bay doors until you disable your adblocker." But then I realized I got my threads confused. You weren't posting in my ChatGPT chess thread.
use the annoyances filter on your ublock origin extension. it filters away all the "muh disable adblocks" and the "accept the cookies" popups. its pretty great.
i'm happy to open the pod doors myself if chatgpt doesnt want to though, and i'm happy to ween myself off this shitty internet lately.
i'm happy to ween myself off this shitty internet lately.
Yesterday my plan - I think I actually meant it - was to be off the net all day today. No cheating so no internet until 00:01 Thursday at the earliest. The problem was I woke up from a fitful sleep at 4 am. I lay in bed another 30 minutes trying in vain to get back to sleep. Then I gave up. So - great - it's 4:30 am and I'm awake and very grumpy. I think I held out for all of five minutes. I got on the net "just to check my email". Which I did. But then I had a peek at Hexbear too. I decided I I'd try again and this time have more resolve.
I left my house to make a donation in a little food pantry and I saw a couple rabbits along the way. I always like to see them. Before sunrise when night is ending tends to be their busiest time to be in my neighborhood. I saw four a couple weeks ago. I left my donation and came home. And within minutes I said "Fuck it" and I was back on the net. And I've had postingmania not just here but at Bluesky too. At least here it makes sense - I get replies. Over there is a lot less fun because it's so hard to get replies. I think people actually check who you are and if you're just a rando with hardly any followers - they don't bother.
Ninja edit. It's probably a waste of time but maybe to get more feedback - I could make a novelty account where I— Never mind. Dumb idea. I'll do anything to not not get off the net.
to be fair, lemmy is much better than regular social media. it feels a bit like the older, fairer internet, where its possible to have actual conversation with other humans.
baby steps, one platform at a time. quitting it cold turkey can be overwhelming. its like a drug addiction, all relapse is part of the journey.
planning an internet-free day its easier when i have something fullfiling to do instead for the day, but i recognize real life is shitty rn and we will naturally want to escape for a bit to be able to properly cope and i don't kick myself too hard for it.
this is likely the solution for the time being. it's also what cloudflare's CEO recommended a couple weeks ago.
really interested in seeing how this changes things. i think we're already witnessing the loss of "the internet" as a place, or a refuge of sorts. as people need less and less interaction with computers in order to get the information they're looking for, they will not look back. i'm already starting to see this with friends in my life who have onboarded AI into their lives completely.
A lot of people will crash offline. the rest will silo into forums like this one, using search engines that use old methodologies. It'll be like 1998 again.
i'm already starting to see this with friends in my life who have onboarded AI into their lives completely.
That's bleak. I want to say something positive but I can't think of anything. I think of AI like a drug that can be highly addictive and destructive for some people. And like people with substance abuse problems - they won't admit they even have a problem. What can you do?
It is incredibly bleak. A good friend I've got nearly 10 years of work history nearly unrecognizable to me today. At first I suspected substance abuse but when I had a chance to really chat, they confessed to me. It could also still be substance abuse too
It's actually been something that's forced me to shift my perspective. I don't buy the propaganda of the luddification of anti-AI folks, that we'll be like those who refused to learn computers before the turn of the millennium. I actually think the technology is useful in niche and potentially broader situations. I will however never understand why the hell everyone is so comfortable providing their training data to other people's servers FOR FREE??? Some of them even pay for the privilege! This isn't even touching the data heists being pulled off in clear daylight which should at the very least land some people in prison.
I could go on, but... these days I feel more comfortable keeping my thoughts off the Internet.
Reminder to USians to download DeepSeek before it gets banned.
DeepSeek
It might not get banned. They might figure out a lowish cost way to bribe Trump. He gets some goodies and they get to stay in the American market.
Well regardless, if you're interested in and have the resources, host your own AI agents locally :)
I’m curious what they are doing instead of spending time on the internet though? is it that they simply replace the time they might have spent searching with scrolling through reels or whatever? or are they touching grass?
allegedly touching grass. realistically probably tiktok/reels.
But Mr Google, those pages are the ones who pay you