alt Hacker NewsWhen I first started using the Internet there were 3 rules that were pounded into my head repeatedly.
1. Don't believe everything or anything you read or see on the Internet.
2. Never share personal information about yourself online.
3. Every man was a man, every woman was a man and every teenager is an FBI agent.
I have yet to find a problem with the Internet thats isn't because of breaking one of the above rules.
My point being you couldn't ever trust the Internet before anyways.
Replies
You forgot Fido's Corollary:
3a. ... and nobody knows if you're a dog.
Yeah when I was 10 someone told me not to believe everything I read too. But guess what, that's kinda useless advice because consulting reference material is a necessity and there are wide variations in the quality of reference material. This sort of 'don't trust anyone' heuristic can just as easily lead to conclusions that the earth is flat, the moon landing never happened, vaccinations are the leading cause of disease etc.
You've always needed skepticism, of course. But it used to be if you came across an article about a super obscure video game from the early 90s (referencing the blog post here) you could be reasonably sure that it wasn't completely made up. There just wasn't the incentive to publish nonsense about super niche things because it took time and effort to do so.
Now you can collate a list of thousands of titles and simply instruct an LLM to produce garbage for each one and publish it on the internet. This is a real change, IMO.