The internet that I knew and grew up with is dead and has been that way for a while. To me the downfall started when everything online became a financial pursuit in some shape or form. However, even then, it was possible to find pockets of genuine creativity and discussion. The advent of LLMs was the final blow, and the reason is exactly the fact that one can't assume authenticity in anything these days.

Yes proof-of-identity and authorship would help, however that comes with the extremely perverse side effect of invasive identity verification. Sadly zero knowledge proofs for that are still brittle and not well developed. Hopefully something like that is able to materialize without being the privacy nightmare that is the myriad identity verification mechanisms currently mandated by several governments.

Something even more sad to me: my digital conversations with coworkers are seeming to often be another interface layer with an LLM.

Me: “What’s your thoughts on [technical issue]”

Them: (response ellipses and disproportionate delay) followed by a very thorough response.

The problem is when I talk to them in real-time, that same person that gives the thorough response now only has a superficial understanding. It’s unnerving when their “real” conversations start using turns-of-phrase that are common in LLMs (I’ve heard them referred to as “Claude-isms”)

If you're having daily interactions with people who feel like LLMs, then find a new community to hang out in instead. There's plenty of communities out there that reject LLM content. They're not interested in taking over the world, so they're a little harder to find, but they're out there.

Mixed feelings. Prior to AI a lot of people were just proxies for opinions/information they heard on talk radio (or whatever media the consumed. AI definitely has the possibility of at least bringing up the average of accurate information out there. Also good that people are at least curious enough to ask AI.

I wonder what's next.

We had BBSes, usenet, email, IRC, webmail, ICQ, social media of all kinds, then private communities via commercial companies (Discord, Slack).

What does a person-to-person communication protocol that leans into LLMs (vs sees it as purely competitive or an impediment) look like?

What are we to do? What is there that we can even do? When the construct of a system dictates the actions and incentives of its constituents, what do you realistically expect to happen? Financial reward and ultimately the pursuit of power is the underlying and responsible component here. To me, this is all an inevitability and I see no end in sight.

> Nets in Ender's Game

It's been like twenty years since I read it but I recall a subplot where Peter and Valentine manipulate public opinion by exchanging inflammatory rhetoric on the Nets to suit their own political ends. Life imitates art.

While I agree a lot with this sentiment around the current slop fest that so much of the internet has become, I am oddly hopeful. I'm seeing across the internet, and especially in younger folks, a real push for a more organic, messy, human internet. The amount of "ugly", hand-coded vibes, basic sites I have come across in the last few months is 10x what was out there for a decade earlier. I think many people are nostalgic for the internet of the early 2000's. The random blog about whatever on tumblr or learning some HTML to build a rad geocities page. The internet has been getting fancier and more feature rich but also a shittier, less human experience for the last 10 years. My hope is that this slop mess pushes it over the edge and encourages the rise of a more messy, simple, human internet again.

Twitter tried to do this with the verification checkmark.

In such a system, you can no longer be anonymous, and everything you post is tied to you. It's also incentivized that this is possible due to surveillance capitalism.

I think that this will turn the net into a much more corporate-like entity as you need to mind your image. Like imagine LinkedIn but for everything

One truism of the Internet is that it always used to be better. LLMs are the latest wave in the Eternal September, changing the Internet forever, yet again.

I only want to interact with real people, building real connections or pissing off real people. Directly, without any LLM intermediary. Trolling an LLM is joyless. Tricking an LLM into a goatse link does not make the good lulz.

Maybe the places we do this have to change, but really, I'll shed zero tears if exploitative rent-extracting 2010s era Internet beasts like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. die under a mountain of LLM slop.

I've been noticing that some coworkers are pretty clearly having an LLM manage their Slack. They'll respond back in more or less "LLM speak", and then have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about during an IRL meeting when I mention that I sent them something through Slack.

It's maddening. These services stop being about "communicating" if information isn't actually being conveyed between two people. It's like the people attaching Claude to Slack and their email are cargo-culting the idea of communication itself.

> Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable

Unfortunately the LLMs are coming for meat-space too. It’s started with smart glasses and it will end with smart contact lenses, where an LLM feeds you lines so you seem like the most interesting person at the party and no-one knows you’re reading it all off a screen or filming it for social media likes.

In the last company, we had an "AI-believer", when Claude became more and more capable, he inserted EVERY request into Claude before thinking about an answer on his own :-X

Meat space works for now; until we need to administer a Voight-Kampff test whenever meeting someone new.

Or perhaps, one the AIs are smart enough, the meaning we will derive from AIs will be more than humans? The history of technology and especially HN comments is full of people judging the future through the lens of the past, extrapolating today's problems and assumptions onto a world that will look fundamentally different.

I’ve been accused of being an LLM. I can assure you I’ve handwritten every comment I’ve ever made.

But this is enlightening because this possibility of being LLM-generated enables cognitive dissonance. There’s a strong correlation (IME) between “you are an LLM” and “you said something I don’t like”.

I don’t think people are as good at identifying LLM content as they think they are so they just fall deeper into an echo chamber.

> Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM.

This will be one of those fun new things we all have to deal with. Verifying whether someone is human or not, people suffering mental breakdowns from thinking everyone they are talking to is a bot, &c. There will be mass shooters and new murders and conspiracy theories and all sorts of things coming out of the gradual adoption of AI tooling.

But I do hope this will help destroy the Internet in its current form. I don't think it's likely, but if it could get bad enough I hope that it destroys social media and forces people to realize even if the content is not created by a machine or an LLM, it's just as bad. T

The LLMs are just an interface through which we communicate. Much like how the language we use is also an interface. LLMs have certain properties that lead to convergent and low-information communication, but so do languages (and their accompanying cultures).

Change the word "LLM" to "Wikipedia", and then put most of your concerns to rest. Wikipedia didn't kill the internet or make online discourse pointless, an LLM wont either, the same way calculators didn't kill napkin-math.

The very term "meat space" or "meat proxy" were terms invented by the terminally online who needed to disconnect a decade ago. Nobody sane talks or thinks like this.