Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.

We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:

https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1395152040389713922

Wikipedia is mostly going in the direction of just having very strict rules enforced via human review. If you get caught using LLMs and refuse to stop, you get banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_wit...

I think its working so far.

Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour instead of automated systems (so-called "soft security" https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ).

I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to just see an annotation, a sort of glow around the content that has verified human signatures. Or maybe we go full dark-forest and configure the browsers to only render content that has a trusted signature.

We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written

It needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.

I imagine with a fan wiki (or company docs in my experience) no one bothers to put the effort in. That's probably because the rewards are for writing the content, and there's absolutely no reward for checking it's correct.

I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.

I don't think there is a solution. The internet as we knew it is over, I give it 5 more years before it becomes borderline impossible to find new human-created content on it.

We can't reliably detect AI text, and they are getting better at producing plausible humanlike text (albeit still with flaws and mistakes). I do expect them to become impossible for humans to detect when the companies put effort into that (so far they've been focussed on other domains like dev or maths).

I'm afraid your dystopian future where the zone is flooded with shit and nobody can trust anything seems eminently plausible, partly because the internet was built without identity.

I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers. We'll probably need that anyway for other reasons.

It's not a trivial problem. Websites like this could require webauthn tied to a hardware identifier of their choice (like a fingerprint or faceid) - I'm not sure if webauthn provides that level of detail to providers (which method was used), and how secure that attestation is. Of course that's not going to be popular but it might be the lesser of two evils.

Make the use of AI expensive. This is the same problem we have with email

I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.

Case in point: the proliferation of furcons.

Scientific articles: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-m... (although this is an old one)

None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.

The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.

There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.

The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.

I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.

> So what's the solution?

There is no solution (though there will be plenty of grifters trying to sell one).

The open internet we currently know will be lost to mountains of slop just like usenet and email were even prior to the AI era.

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