The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it. Back then I called it the coming “semantic apocalypse.” Well, the semantic apocalypse is here, and you’re being affected by it, even if you don’t know it. (View Highlight)
Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response, cheery Wikipedia-style repeats of the original post, all just to farm engagement. AI models on Instagram accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers and people openly shill their services for creating them. AI musicians fill up YouTube and Spotify. Scientific papers are being AI-generated. AI images mix into historical research. This isn’t mentioning the personal impact too: from now on, every single woman who is a public figure will have to deal with the fact that deepfake porn of her is likely to be made. That’s insane. (View Highlight)
And rather than this being pure skullduggery, people and institutions are willing to embrace low-quality AI-generated content, trying to shift the Overton window to make things like this acceptable:
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That’s not hardball capitalism. That’s polluting our culture for your own minor profit. It’s not morally legitimate for the exact same reasons that polluting a river for a competitive edge is not legitimate. Yet name-brand media outlets are embracing generative AI just like SEO-spammers are, for the same reasons. (View Highlight)
This isn’t what everyone feared, which is AI replacing humans by being better—it’s replacing them because AI is so much cheaper. Sports Illustrated was not producing human-quality level content with these methods, but it was still profitable. (View Highlight)
Given that even prestigious outlets like The Guardianrefuse to put any clear limits on their use of AI, if you notice odd turns of phrase or low-quality articles, the likelihood that they’re written by an AI, or with AI-assistance, is now high. (View Highlight)
Sadly, the people affected the most by generative AI are the ones who can’t defend themselves. Because they don’t even know what AI is. Yet we’ve abandoned them to swim in polluted information currents. I’m talking, unfortunately, about toddlers. Because let me introduce you to… (View Highlight)
YouTube for kids is quickly becoming a stream of synthetic content. Much of it now consists of wooden digital characters interacting in short nonsensical clips without continuity or purpose. Toddlers are forced to sit and watch this runoff because no one is paying attention. And the toddlers themselves can’t discern that characters come and go and that the plots don’t make sense and that it’s all just incoherent dream-slop. The titles don’t match the actual content, and titles that are all the parents likely check, because they grew up in a culture where if a YouTube video said BABY LEARNING VIDEOS and had a million views it was likely okay. Now, some of the nonsense AI-generated videos aimed at toddlers have tens of millions of views. (View Highlight)
Here’s an example of the next frontier: completely start-to-finish AI-generated music videos for toddlers. Below is a how-to video for these new techniques. The result? Nightmarish parrots with twisted double-beaks and four mutated eyes singing artificial howls from beyond. Click and behold (or don’t, if you want to sleep tonight). (View Highlight)
All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care. Especially not the companies, because… (View Highlight)
Why blame them, specifically? Well, first of all, their massive impact—e.g., most of the kids videos are built from scripts generated by ChatGPT. And more generally, what AI capabilities are considered okay to deploy has long been a standard set by OpenAI. Despite their supposed safety focus, OpenAI failed to foresee that its creations would thoroughly pollute the internet across all platforms and services. You can see this failure in how they assessed potential negative outcomes in the announcement of GPT-2 on their blog, back in 2019. While they did warn that these models could have serious longterm consequences for the information ecosystem, the specifics they were concerned with were things like: (View Highlight)
These turned out to be only minor concerns compared to AI’s cultural pollution. OpenAI kept talking about “actors” when they should have been talking about “users.” Because it turns out, all AI-generated content is fake! Or it’s all kindoffake. AI-written websites, now sprouting up like an unstoppable invasive species, don’t necessarily have an intent to mislead; it’s just that AI content is low-effort banalities generated for pennies, so you can SEO spam and do all sorts of manipulative games around search to attract eyeballs and ad revenue. (View Highlight)
That is, the OpenAI team didn’t stop to think that regular users just generating mounds of AI-generated content on the internet would have very similar negative effects to as if there were a lot of malicious use by intentional bad actors. Because there’s no clear distinction! The fact that OpenAI was both honestly worried about negative effects, and at the same time didn’t predict the enshittification of the internet they spearheaded, should make us extremely worried they will continue to miss the negative downstream effects of their increasingly intelligent models. They failed to foresee the floating mounds of clickbait garbage, the synthetic info-trash cities, all to collect clicks and eyeballs—even from innocent children who don’t know any better. And they won’t do anything to stop it, because… (View Highlight)
This term, “tragedy of the commons,” originated in the rising environmentalism of the 20th century, and would lead to many of the regulations that keep our cities free of smog and our rivers clean. Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and biologist, coined it in an article in Science in 1968. The article is still instructively relevant. Hardin wrote: (View Highlight)
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. (View Highlight)
… the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in—sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of “fouling our own nest,” so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers. (View Highlight)
We are currently fouling our own nests. Since the internet economy runs on eyeballs and clicks the new ability of anyone, anywhere, to easily generate infinite low-quality content via AI is now remorselessly generating tragedy. (View Highlight)
The solution, as Hardin noted, isn’t technical. You can’t detect AI outputs reliably anyway (another initial promise that OpenAI abandoned). The companies won’t self regulate, given their massive financial incentives. We need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. We can’t just sit by and let human culture end up buried. (View Highlight)
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