The AI Doom Cycle

Since the release of ChatGPT about one and a half years ago, it was clear that the textual Internet will be broken beyond repair. If there’s an automated way to create textual content on which you can slap advertisements, some people will do it at large scale and SEO the heck out of it.

The problem starts with how the AGI LLM are trained: with the content of the same textual Internet. Which means AI bots will eventually “train” AI bots.

This is like playing telephone, the children’s game, where the conveyed information will get distorted a little with each step until the end result is not legible anymore.

While the output of AI bots will likely stay legible, the substance will diminish until the utmost stereotypes will remain.

People from the IndieWeb and SmallWeb try to counter this with the reintroduction of blogrolls and weekly or even daily link posts. But I doubt that this will make a difference, because it doesn’t scale in numbers and variety, and because it is for older people like me.

People who grew up with text as a means of expression, because it can easily be reproduced and passed on. Books, webpages, blogs. While there was radio and TV, this was not a thing ordinary people could use themselves to create, only to consume.

But younger generations grew up with smartphones and the Internet in their pockets, available 24/7, with only little data constraints. And they naturally chose video as their means of expression, like any unencumbered person would do. Why using impersonal text if you can be heard and seen. They literally want to show off. And because the video Internet can make you wealthy on the side, like text a decade or two before.

If the coming generations don’t go back to text somehow, then not only will it be impossible to use search engines to find non-AI created texts, nobody is going to create new texts in the first place. Because older people don’t have the same need of expression like younger ones, who have to find out who they are, they are also caught up being busy with work and family obligations. They lack the time to create.

If there’s not going to be a way to filter out the noise and to find genuine writings by real people, even the text generation will stop looking for it and just use some AI assistant to get what they want and stop bothering. Until they die and only the video generation is left and being busy to fight the death of online video, because AI bots create all the video (not) fit to upload, because you can make money with video ads.

Money ruins everything.