The internet is really bad now, isn't it?

[noblegiraffe]

If I go on Facebook instead of seeing what my friends are up to it just presents me with a load of AI generated dross. At the moment it seems to be 'cosy reading nooks' and 'look at this amazing house' and then a photo of something that absolutely isn't real, with thousands of comments, presumably also from bots going 'omg I want this 😍'. If I do see something a friend has posted, it then disappears and I can't find it again.

On twitter if you see an interesting video or photo then in the comments instead of a discussion of the video/photo you just get a load of bots posting more videos, or AI accounts posting bland comments describing the thing like 'this photo shows a wonderful interaction between a father and child highlighting the importance of family ❤️' sometimes appropriate, sometimes completely missing the point. And then you know it's a bot because a load of other random accounts post the exact same comment.

You go to your local news site and you can barely read any stories because there are tonnes of ads, and not useful ads, junk ones like 'Doctors hate this woman's amazing health hack' or 'You won't believe what Davina McCall looks like now 💔'

Google now if you search just presents you with shopping ads and paid for promoted links. And if you try to google something like 'M5 closure this weekend' it will give you loads of news stories about a time the M5 was closed in 2018. Absolutely useless.

I read that there was a program that used to search the internet each year for the most common words in use and highlight new trends and they've had to stop using it because the internet is now just full of AI slop rather than human-generated content.

How did we have this amazing resource and instead of getting better and more useful, we've just made it terrible? It's pretty depressing.

MN has always had trolls, fantasists, people trying their hand at writing fiction, and people trying to sway political opinion or get you to buy something, but compared to twitter or facebook I at least get the impression that there are real people behind most of it. Probably because accounts can't gain public likes or follows and you can't monetise it?

Is there anything that has got better??

I partly agree, although I don't use Twitter or Instagram. I use Facebook very selectively indeed, for three organisations which I support. I only have one fb friend (plenty in real life!).

Local news sites are rubbish, full of junk as you say. However, there are some excellent very serious academic websites which I use for work and so I see another better side of the Internet.

You're not wrong OP! Very good summary of the state of social media at the moment. I don't know what to make it of it, some food for thought though.

The Facebook dross thing is particularly annoying right now. Most of it is pure fiction and there's so many people taken in by it, unless like you say a lot of them aren't even real!

It’s so miserable. I need to work on my phone addiction because I’m just spending my days scrolling through AI nonsense and being irritated that it’s all AI nonsense. What on earth is the future going to look like?!

I know what you mean and it’s annoying. Fb isn’t what it used to be but I also think that people are moving away from Facebook and are posting less anyway (unless youre a really annoying fb friend of mine who posts crap 2 or 3 times a day lol)

@noblegiraffe your example of the M5 search is the most frustrating bit. I always puzzled over things staying online forever and now I feel like the search results need a huge clear out.

I don't spend hours on social media but I do wonder what will happen with children's brains in particular. Even adults are thinking the craziest things are real.

I also think AI has damaged humans already but that's probably a separate thread. Or maybe not 🤔

It's not just social media. AI is also being wrongly relied on in other ways. There's a recent tax court case where the defendant defended herself against HMRC and cited a number of court case precedents to defend her position. It turned out that not a single one of the court cases she used was genuine - they were all AI created! Obviously the court realised and decided against her on genuine court precedents. It's not clear whether she created them herself or whether she was just conned by fake stuff on the internet.

Just opt out. Social media is not necessary. Use duckduckgo instead of Google. Delete and don't accept cookies. Use in private browsing windows.

Most likely she asked the AI to look for them, and the AI itself created them on its own initiative. It will do that quite happily with legal cases, if you ask it to "generate an argument backed with precedent that X" it will quite happily make up its own precedent. It "knows" what a normal legal argument with precedents looks like. It doesn't "know" the difference between truth and lies.

Yes, looking for news of road closures and other incidents is a waste of time now, which is sad as it's a usage that should really show the internet in its best light. The algorithms don't allow you to refine searches usefully because they're designed to promote sponsored content and adverts, not relevance of results.

That reminds me of how bad ChatGPT can be.

I like a German band so I asked ChatGPT for a translation of the lyrics of one of their songs. It said 'sure, here are the lyrics' then gave me some random song lyrics that were definitely not the song in question, no idea if it was some other song or if ChatGPT had made them up. And then it said 'these lyrics are a good example of the band's playful interpretation of social situations, for which they are famous'. Except that's not their song.

(I did have a thread recently about how ChatGPT said that I, Noblegiraffe, based on my MN posts, voted for Nigel Farage in 2016 so my confidence in AI was already low as that is definitely not true...)

Yes search engines are getting much worse, not just google but duckduckgo and all the main ones. Ok if you are looking for a shopping website or similar, but useless if you have something specific in mind. Also, the featured shops, when looking to buy a certain item, seem to rotate to from being almost all Amazon, to ebay, to whichever other monopoly pays the most to advertise.

Social media might not be necessary but I used to enjoy using it. It used to be good. How can we go back to that now?

I do use DuckDuckGo but it often isn't very good at giving me what I'm looking for either so I switch to Google, which used to be very good at giving me what I was looking for but isn't anymore.

Oh and twitter used to be amazing for real time updates on a breaking news story. Now if you go there, instead of reading about the thing that just happened, it shows you a bunch of tweets from yesterday. I want to read things that have just been posted!

“AI accounts posting bland comments describing the thing like 'this photo shows a wonderful interaction between a father and child highlighting the importance of family ❤️'”

howling, so accurate 😂 ChatGbt once said it wrote something I did! What a world.

I don’t think it’s just AI though, the proportion of stupid stuff has been growing increasingly for years now. Eg. on Instagram, I don’t want sponsored links of video reels, all copied from TikTok, I don’t want to add random “music” to my photographs, I don’t want to have lots of “friends” or “influencers” suggested to me, I don’t want adverts for charity donations featuring images of wounded children then immediately afterwards have an advert for stupid rubbish plastic tat also made by children in sweatshops ….

… I just want to share moments of my day with my real actual friends who I can connect with meaningfully. Why is that too much to ask?!

Actually I would pay real money to have a shopping search engine that allowed me to block cheap rubbish reseller tat (we all know which shops I mean). Shopping used to be so fun and is now just shit.

It’s all about isolating people. Isolated people are easy to control because they don’t know whether they are the minority or majority. If everyone still had 100s strong church congregations none of this ‘what is a woman’ crap would ever have got off the ground because it would be met with instant nationwide resistance.
Now we have AI bots who try to convince us that everyone is in happy polyamorous relationships, sexualised clothing is empowering and girls want to play with toy trucks etc etc

Are you sure you're looking at "latest" and not "top"? It's still got AI on it but no way should you see yesterday's stuff.

how else would i keep up with the Eras tour 😂🫶🏾

It’s all about isolating people.

I don't think it is. I think it's that interactions on social media became monetised by 'engagement' and 'clicks' rather than posting anything of value. So you can make money by having a bot post some AI crap, and then have bots click on it and add comments to it. And now we have social media flooded by bots doing exactly that.

Also, for real people, more extreme comments get more engagement, encouraging people to post more extreme views to coin it in. There was some doctor during covid who started out posting some rational medical stuff and by the end of it was raving about ivermectin along with the other nut job grifters and making far more money by doing so.

I mean on my regular timeline. Sure you can do a search for something specific and switch to latest but then you're seeing a bunch of crap from randos as well.

I used to be able to go on twitter, and without doing anything, get presented with up to date interesting stuff. If I go to 'Following' it's dead because a lot of the people I follow have left, and if I go to 'For you' it's full of Elon Musk posts from yesterday.

I agree. I don’t really do social media now (MN aside) but I used to be able to find tons of unique and interesting sites where I could learn new things or read about different perspectives. I can’t easily do that now, which sucks. On the plus side, I waste a lot less time online now.

I remember back in the day there used to be internet forums for everything, it was so easy to create one. I guess it's now all done as subgroups of bigger social media platforms.

I partially agree , particularly in relation to Google and AI content. It’s particularly frustrating to ask a question and get a wrong answer lifted from some shit piece of AI writing. I also hate when you want to learn something technical and have to wade through so many videos to find a simple written answer.

Yep, the entire internet is dross. I wish it was simply for looking up information, knowledge sharing etc, it would be great if things like social media, online dating etc had never come into existence!

The AI content is generally a lot less toxic than the stuff created by real people. It drowns out a lot of the hate.

Totally agree. It's all gone drastically wrong somewhere. When the internet first arrived it brought so many great avenues to explore but it's been hijacked now and you know more often than not question if what you are reading or watching is even real.