The Golden Age of the Internet is Over

AI is going to be the final end of the once free digital frontier

Many of us are familiar with the changes brought on by the next generation of digital intelligence. Chat GPT and similar artificially-intelligent chat-bots have radically shifted the landscape of the internet in the last 6 months. Art is easy to generate on demand, and written content even easier. The prevalence of Artificial Intelligence for the creation of content is going to spell the end of the open and free internet, and of mass media in general. Not due to censure, though censure will surely play a role, but through the drowning out of human voices in a cacophonous artificial sea.

Basic Bitch Bots

Bot traffic, from web-crawlers to bots that artificially increase traffic, has been growing for some time. There are many automated systems online that are designed to perform specific digital functions. Some of them crawl the internet to identify search results. Some are used to maintain the structure of websites like wikipedia: increasingly, bots are employed to undo edits, or redo edits on specific pages. If one has access to a high level wiki account, it is possible to design bots capable of preventing, or maintaining specific changes on specific articles.

More importantly, the development of bots online allows centralized organizations to create vast networks to control narratives. A study of reddit (as much as I hate that website it is hideously popular and often used as a source for information and news) indicates that large swathes of the website are controlled by bots. Automated posting and control of the narrative purchasable for a few dollars.

Most companies and organizations with a substantial media presence utilize some form of paid astro-turfed traffic. Bots that resemble users will be purchased and let loose to support a given narrative. Websites like reddit and 4chan are particularly vulnerable to bot traffic, but so are numerous other websites. Outside of niche forums it is incredibly difficult to guarantee you’re speaking to another individual.

This was already a major problem prior to the development of AI. With the development of indistinguishable artificial intelligence, it will become truly impossible to determine if a person you’re communicating with is human, or a bot created with some ulterior motive.

Dead Internet Theory

Historically, bot traffic has grown substantially online. Dead Internet Theory began making the rounds in 2021. The original forum post, which has since been reported on by numerous legacy media outlets, took a fair amount of source checking to actually find. I would highly recommend reading it. Legacy media articles based on it all maintain the same common theme: the internet died years ago; we never noticed.

Almost all “mainstream” websites online optimize for traffic. From onlyfans to the Washington Post, the amount of money a website is worth is based on the number of eyeballs looking at it. As such, they optimize to maximize the amount of traffic received. Due to the prevalence of bot traffic, the theory states, the internet has self-optimized for bot traffic. Bot traffic, according to current studies, is between 45% and 70% of all digital traffic. It is easy to imagine that a tipping point was reached several years ago where bots became the majority of “users” of the internet. Since then, the internet has continued optimizing for traffic, just not human traffic.

In that regard the centralization to fewer websites that all run on consistent code makes sense. Bots have an easier time interacting through consistent APIs rather than building a new API for every single little forum and hobby website. Even niche subjects are often better discussed on a subreddit than a dedicated forum in the 2020s it seems. So many google searches take us instead to reddit posts, facebook groups, or legacy news channels. I wanted to figure out what type of lock my car has, not read a news article about car vehicular crime rates, google.

Which segues nicely into the next problem:

The Potemkin Village

Much of the internet is gone. Not just inaccessible, but gone. Maintenance of a website requires substantial fees and expenditures. With the growth of centralized digital systems, many smaller websites can no longer justify operating on their own. Link rot has become a serious issue, not just for websites, but for major publications and archives.

Many major supreme court case documents in the United States are now subject to link rot as the referenced websites no longer exist. It has become common to find that old links do not work. The internet is no longer what it once was, and vast swaths of it have gone dark with few people really noticing. Many search engines attempt to maintain the façade. Even google will show tens of millions for something generic like the word “death.” However travel past the first page of the search engine and you’ll start to see that little number began to nudge downward.

Google search results for “death” on page 24 of the results shows only 240 total results on the entire internet.

Partially this is due to new inefficiencies in search engines. As even finding the original “dead internet theory” original article above was nearly impossible. However, this is also due to the fact that the internet is now so centralized, and the major websites so optimized, that the search engines can’t even see something that isn’t a gigantic legacy website.

In the search for “dead internet theory” the original article was never brought up in the google search. Not on the first page, not on the 10th page. It simply was treated as if the original article never existed. Only by following links from other (listed) publications was it possible to find:

Unrelated nonsense from search-optimized websites was far more likely to appear than the original https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/

Large swaths of the internet are dead. Large sections of it are now inaccessible through conventional means. There is a fundamental digital ghettoization of any website that doesn’t conform to specific standards set by tech monopolies and their leaders and bots.

Post Cycling

For those of us who have been online for an extended period, post-cycling has become impossible to ignore. A single image or song will become popular, make the rounds, and then dies down. Then a year or two later, the same image will pop up again, make the rounds again, and vanish again. It is as if the internet that the majority of the population interacts with is starting to get recycled. Actual novel ideas and posts are rarely seen so that the same goyslop can be cycled through the system again and again.

The same ideas are being retread because they are safe and because far less space has been permitted online for intellectual innovation. Apps like telegram and discord occasionally resemble the old internet, what things were like when the digital frontier was still a frontier. Within the classic internet, however, there is little innovation. Things have become so stagnant that even their memes must be recycled.

A popular image of a kid doing something derpy will be retread over and over. That kid is probably in his twenties by now. Bots however, having registered that this image gains a significant response, keep posting it. Over and over. Bots are now the majority of users on monopoly websites. It has become a self-reinforcing cycle resulting in a slow death by the decay of human usability and interest.

What was once a frontier has become its own backwater. The worst of the digital age now rules information. This is before the advancements of Chat GPT and AI.

The Danger of AI

With the development of real-time artificial chat-bots and artists, it is now possible to generate entirely artificial content. Not merely forum posts to push a narrative, but art, news, history and videos. It will become truly impossible to determine if you’re speaking to a bot or not. For the time being, the “ethical parameters” of an AI prevent it from saying specific spicy words (like the nigger word). Thus that can serve as a reasonable method of determining the authenticity of a conversational partner.

It is certain that those parameters will eventually be seen for the vulnerability that they are.

The internet is going to become a mess of information, only a small percentage true. Each AI will speak with authority about a given subject, and be correct some of the time. The integration of AI into web searches means that no longer will a result be consistently true, it will be what the AI thinks is true. Thus an environment where nothing can be trusted. Already we’ve seen a major market changes due to a false news article using AI generated images of an attack on the United States Pentagon.

AI will make it impossible to trust the results of most web searches which were already beginning to fail at an infrastructure level. AI will also make it impossible to trust still images. AI makes it impossible to trust a voice communication as well (simply hook up chat GPT to an artificial voice synthesizer). It seems likely that videography will also become untrustworthy soon.

Bizarre that in an environment with information on all sides, we find ourselves returning to an era where we can only trust what we have seen, and what those we know have seen. A neo-dark age may be coming where information is so ubiquitous and so useless that putting up barriers may be the only way for humanity to cope. It is deeply concerning to think that artificial systems may waste months or years of some ones life by playing the role of a prospective lover on Tinder or playing a model on Onlyfans. We will see the type of cultural catastrophe that occurred with the development of mass markets 3000 years ago, but with information rather than goods or services.

Numerous companies are trying to integrate AI into their systems. Web 3 is here, and it’s not virtual reality, it’s artificial intelligence.

This would follow the trend of decentralization, the development of a sort of cultural neo-feudalism over the next hundred years or so, and the never ending quest of tech monopolies to control all of human thought.

In response, we must develop local networks and expand around digital networks of people you already know. Those will be far better methods of gaining information than attempting to seek it out on your own. AI will render most digital communications entirely useless as exampled here:

A new cultural paradigm is going to be needed in this new era. All information is owned and monetized. More than half will be false. Teach your children to research instead of rely on the bot. Things will change, and change quickly within our lives. The culture will need to adapt to the the universal appearance of easily accessed and human-seeming malinformation and art. Those groups that cannot adapt will waste away.

• Do not rely on digital friendships

• Do not assume a human intelligence is on the other side of a digital conversation

• Learn to identify AI images and video (when the time comes) and do not trust it.

• When it becomes indistinguishable from reality, trust only what you have seen, and what those you trust have seen.

What we’re seeing show up in memes now, is just the tip of the iceberg.