Will AI end the social internet? \ stacker news ~AI

5649 sats \ 49 comments \ @k00b 25 Mar AI

The Star Wars franchise is forever 70's science fiction. We the present, a homogeny of screens and screen-people, aren't featured in Star Wars' future. I've been watching Star Wars intently for the first time ever, and young George Lucas's science fantasy gets more fantastical as it ages.

Most of the devices in Star Wars are single purpose. No one texts each other. You can feed everyone at digital gatherings with two pizzas and they're always holographic video calls. The people are diverse. The cultures are distinct. Yet, it isn't primitive. Star Wars has telecommunication, robots, AGI, ~~cryo~~carbongenics, cyborgs, and lots of non-digital hard tech. It's a beautiful, natural, and advanced world.

It makes me wonder how we get there from here without having to go backwards and the only path I see is AI ruining the social internet.

I sense we're all on the internet to laugh and fight and learn with other people. Would we spend so much time on computers if we weren't interacting with other humans while using them? When robots are writing 1000x better and numerous tweets and making better dance videos on TikTok, what's the point of a human participating in either? How about when the majority of the internet's audience is a hodgepodge of bot farms? Will we care how many likes our travel photos get?

If the incentives of the social internet are status and validation, if the social internet is merely a convenient venue to get what we want from other humans, proliferation of strong AI will kill it because AI will digitally represent us better than we do. That's my sense at least. But, maybe then we'll seek less digital lives, seek verifiable humans, and a Star Wars future isn't such a fantasy. Maybe the only thing between us and an advanced yet digitally minimal world is our convenient alternative.

Have I misunderstood Star Wars? Will we continue as the dominant beings on the internet? Is there a more desirable world than Star Wars in your mind?

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1435 sats \ 6 replies \ @kepford 25 Mar

If the incentives of the social internet are status and validation, if the social internet is merely a convenient venue to get what we want from other humans, proliferation of strong AI will kill it because AI will digitally represent us better than we do.

I think you're on to something here. It is obvious that the social internet is already mostly fake and the new AI tools will just increase the velocity of fakeness. I hadn't thought about this before in regards to social internet but many things in human history swing from extremes. I suspect the more and more AI / fake the internet gets the more desire for real things will rise.

I think we are still in the early phases of adapting as a species to the always connected internet. I think we are finding the edges. Some of us, especially those that work on the systems have long been aware of the negative side of this connectivity to an artificial world that presents itself falsely as real. More and more the users of this world are seeing the issues with it. That will continue. I wonder how fast it will happen though.

Your post reminds me of Dune (book) which predates Star Wars and I've heard was a strong influence. In Dune there is a ban on the use of computers. If you mentally suspend how unenforceable something like this would be, it is an interesting idea. I believe the idea Herbert had was that human kind was limited in its potential by computers. This might seem like a luddite idea but I think there may be some merit to it. When I watch people glued to their phones swiping TikTok videos full of nonsense I wonder how much potential is being wasted. I wonder how much we are being dumbed down by the algorithms built to entertain and addict us to these little dopamine hits. How close are we to finding the edge of this world and moving back into reality?

I sometimes wonder what it would look like if we had a world wide economic catastrophe like the great depression? If even a few systems just stopped working? If some key people died. How many people would even know how to survive with slightly less modern conveniences? It hasn't been that long since the Covid pandemic gave us a little taste of what it might be like. The scary thing to me is that when I look around and talk to people it doesn't seem like most people learned any lessons. Few seem concerned about preparing for a really serious pandemic. I think we were very lucky it wasn't much worse. We are still recovering from IMO mostly self inflected wounds. What would a very deadly catastrophe bring? Does the average person even have a weeks worth of food? Do they have a means to protect their family? Do they know how to survive without power from the utility company? What if the Visa system went down? I know that I learned many things since 2020 because of how exposed and unprepared I felt.

I think we have many hard lessons ahead. One may be a gift from AI. Getting us off the slow death feeding tube of fake connection. Maybe we need to OD first. I think we will lose many people. Many are already lost. Just don't be one of them.

Dang, I didn't mean to get that dark but you got me thinking @k00b. Need to check my generator now.

133 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 25 Mar

I was going to bring up Dune, too. I'm not very sanguine about the world at large abandoning these technologies, though, unless it's literally through natural selection.

I suppose I could imagine humanity bifurcating into those who are addicted to AI social media and those who are not. Those who are not would presumably out reproduce those who are.

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @kepford 25 Mar

Confession time. I'm not above this easy dopamine fix. I have found myself in the trap of watching others make and do things vs. doing them myself. This leads to a dark place for me. I can't trick my brain. I know I'm being lazy and not doing real work. There's a fine line between inspiration and just being a poser.

349 sats \ 2 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

This is a great example though. Think how rewarding it would be to watch in real-time "someone" doing the tasks next to you whilst you do it yourself. Could be holographs, smart-glasses or any similar tech.

The devices are running software that are provably not tracking you and running open-source code customised to your preferences. But they are teaching you in real time how to develop real hard skills. There is no screen, there is no pause/play button, it is just seamless between an action you take and the next step to put it right. Under that scenario, you are getting your dopamine fix whilst learning in an efficient manner, and banking that memory for utilisation later.

That would be building on the work of YouTube but without interrupting or distracting you from the task in hand. Yes there would still be merit in doing tasks "freestyle" or unprompted or problem-solving yourself but it would get us "doing more" whilst being "on the internet" at the same time.

If you take the trust issue out of the equation for the software and hardware, is there anything not to like about that?

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

I've thought of a similar idea. When you get really good at it, at some point learning real skills becomes the funnest and most kick-ass game. Perhaps there is some salvation waiting in that.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 25 Mar

I can't imagine not having access to the Internet for learning. What you describe is probably going to be possible in the future.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

In Dune there is a ban on the use of computers. If you mentally suspend how unenforceable something like this would be, it is an interesting idea. I believe the idea Herbert had was that human kind was limited in its potential by computers. This might seem like a luddite idea but I think there may be some merit to it.

I didn't know that. Maybe computers are what happened in 1971. :)

1008 sats \ 3 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

If there is more information online I don't believe it makes it any less valuable. People's attention and people can and will still be online, given the option, but how we interact with it can be transformed.

Example of too much content

Take TV. We can spend countless hours each day channel-hopping on cable TV. Or we can get the 4minute short-form video digest or watch a trailer or read third party review or just go straight to watching the best series on-demand. We don't even need to record it. There is far more choice in content today than when TV became mainstream and yet people still watch TV all these years later. In spite of the internet.
IMHO searching for a page or lingering on a website will be seen as ineffective and brain-dumb also. That means there's an opportunity for the content that is shared amongst us to be more rich, educational and fulfilling.
And advertising. Think how much cumulative capital is misdirected at internet advertising today. Why do we need advertising when an A.I can order what you need and has your financial interests at heart? So much of our time is spent watching mindless adverts, just think how many hours that is worldwide. It's unnecessary and limiting productivity.

IMHO, with A.I there will be far less 'wasted' time on the internet like today. When we can have a new interface to interact with the internet, we can become much more efficient with our time interacting with the social internet. That means we can spend MORE time on the internet, more time interacting with our favourite people. Or less if we prefer, but that's our choice. And technology allows us to do more with less. I would bet most people will still opt for more time online, and using more compute power, in order to become more productive with their resources and/or more addicted.

We haven't even optimised the 2D internet yet. When we have 3D holograms like you mention from Star Wars, do we not think people will love interacting with their favourite people that way? The spatial internet might just extend its lifespan beyond what we envisage today.

Just because there are exponentially more voices, more bots and pieces of information out there, doesn't mean we can't filter-out content from our known contacts. A.I will certainly filter information for us, so that we see the highlights and digests or at least have them for reference. That might make some of us more fickle and less patient, but in general I think it will bring more autonomy to choose to be online more or less. Or (as I mentioned above) both at the same time.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I don't think we disagree based on this comment. I'm not arguing AI is bad or even that AI is bad for the internet. I'd argue the opposite.

I'm mostly saying it's bad for the social internet of the kind we currently have. Social interactions on the internet will turn super insular if my thinking holds up. (And I'm not saying that's bad either ... just different.)

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @davidw 25 Mar

I can see that now. I should have spent more time zooming-in on the social side. I think your conclusion is astute.

But even insular conversations can still scale and bring more value than we see today. Potentially less visible spam, fewer distractions & more meaningful conversations could germinate.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I agree. I think it could improve the ways we socialize on the internet even if it destroys the magic of knowing you're talking to a real random person somewhere.

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 25 Mar

I think it already has begun to erode it, and people who have noticed it are starting to retreat to dark social like instant messaging apps and group chats, but how far that niche grows I don't know.

I can't stand AI content, if I read something or see a video and it gives me AI fluff vibes, my brain immediately rejects it, but I am sure some of it still makes it through the filter.

I've seen some of my friends and family sharing and consuming AI content and they don't even recoginse it, they're so used to instant answers from google search, reading only headlines and having content that drives confirmation bias, sometimes it freaks me out, like where does this go? How does the AI continue to feed narratives humans want even if its bs, whats the end game?

176 sats \ 19 replies \ @cascdr 25 Mar

But, maybe then we'll seek less digital lives, seek verifiable humans, and a Star Wars future isn't such a fantasy.

Woah that's a pretty profound thought.

It would be funny af if AI raised the noise floor so high it drowned out real human interaction & we just went to hanging out IRL again.

Except for Stacker News. Long Live Stacker News. I will pay 10k sat escrow to prove I'm not a bot to talk to other stacker chads.

353 sats \ 18 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

Proof of sats is better than nothing, but if an AI creates better SN content than we humans, it'll earn more sats here than we do!

My concern isn't AI creating noise (although I think it will and I am concerned about that too). My concern is AI creates signal more reliably than we do and impersonates us perfectly. At some point, we'll never be sure if we are interacting with other humans on the internet.

tldr at some point we won't be able to prove information has a human origin. The last proof of humanness will be our physical bodies.

110 sats \ 5 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

We have adapted quite well from going from telephone conversations to voice messages, to telegrams and letters to emails. From face to face conversations to videocalls.

Up to this point, our interactions have required drastically less effort. I don't think people will want to go backwards and therefore I'm not convinced whether people will truly be preoccupied with whether they are speaking to an agent (that is specifically trained on replicating each of our individual thought patterns) or us directly.

Providing that it is provably our own A.I. If they can be sure the conversation was private and there is a local record of it for future reference or summary for that person, will people mind if it isn't truly a conversation with another human? I hardly remember the email I sent yesterday, let alone a text message last week. So it might as well not have been 'me'. There are circumstances where it might not bother me either. Particularly if there is a sunk cost to communicating.

For when it really matters, face to face will of course reign supreme. I'm just not completely convinced most conversations will matter whether a note originated from Joe Bloggs or Joe Bots all of the time.

129 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 25 Mar

Whether we get our info from a bot or a human may not matter, but that's not the only we reason we are here.

We like the likes.

And I maintain bot-likes are never going to feel as good as person likes.

So maybe ai does ruin the social internet if it casts doubt's on the source of the affirmation we are all begging for here.

306 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I think it depends on why we are interacting with the person/agent. If it's to get a job done, and the job doesn't benefit from knowing a human is involved directly, I agree. But my sense is that I wouldn't be responding to this comment if I didn't ~~know~~ think you are a human. You possibly :) being human makes it worth spending something precious to me (time), because you've done the same for me by responding to me.

What precious thing do I owe an AI? What precious thing is an AI giving me?

We talk a lot about scarcity, and in a world of human-like thinking done by AI, human thinking is no longer scarce. My general point is mostly that we spend our scarce thing (time) seeking scarce things (other people's time).

the job doesn't benefit from knowing a human is involved directly

To respond to myself, maybe no job benefits from knowing a human is involved. My sense though is it matters a lot more than we think it does.

1066 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

What precious thing do I owe an AI? What precious thing is an AI giving me?

Perhaps this is a thing that seems one way to us now, but will seem quite another way to the next generations.

For instance: to my parents, and many boomers and older, btc is a bridge too far -- it's foreign in fundamental ways; the idea of money-as-ledger, which a person 'posesses' when they know a large number, vs paper that comes from the government, is a bridge too far. And yet, if you grow up where this idea has been at least sort-of mainstream, perhaps you adapt. Bitcoiners sure have invested a lot of hope that it will prove to be the case.

For a more culture-warry example, it appears that far greater numbers of Gen-Z than I would have ever dreamed possible seem to have a hell of a lot of wiggle room in who they want to fuck, or what gender even is and implies. Whether you think this is a perverse state of affairs, or what you believe to be the source of this shift, is beside the point. It's a re-thinking of a way of being in the world that many were not ready for.

So perhaps how much we care about human-ness will also prove more fluid than it seems now. I know I have some conversations w/ LLMs that I would be delighted to have with friends. In some cases I feel a real fondness for my conversational partner, even though I know there's no consciousness on the other side of it.

Perhaps this is a fixation our descendants will find quaint.

54 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I think you're right. I'm fixing the world view of future people to our current world view. It's like I'm being pre-nostalgic or something. I usually pride myself on not needing to wish things are familiar or simple but I made that mistake here without even noticing it.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I guess I am trying to play devil's advocate to try and explore my own thoughts deeper too. I do agree with you @k00bot, because I'm also struggling to define where that line is drawn. I may prefer playing video games rather than mashing keys on a keyboard, if the probabilities were stacked in the other direction. I just don't think others will give this as much consideration.

There is definitely nuance involved. I can't see myself using it with close friends, family & favoured bitcoiners so much. I despised for years the generic "Happy birthday" messages on Facebook that felt like spam. Even with a step-change improvement in quality, there is definitely something unsettling treating our favourite people that way. But I'm open minded to wonder if we could have better relationships with them in some instances by incorporating it in a mindful way?

Perhaps we can think about our conversations like commits by A.I. We will be performing the role of PR reviews, not always but most of the time.

Maybe it will become obvious that we are not using A.I. given just how inefficient, cost-ineffective & slow the alternative will become in comparison. And maybe we will talk less with strangers and more with people we trust for that reason. More questions than answers, but thanks for the thinking-tennis.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @cascdr 25 Mar

I'm way more concerned about the noise level going up: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by?publication_id=332996&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=12tt4&utm_medium=email .

The part about shoddy children's videos being made by AI scared the hell out of me. Poisoning our bodies with fiat food and our children's minds with fiat content.

I know the quality is likely to increase but the fact that we're already seeing unsupervised content creation means we're going to see a lot more factually/ethically questionable AI generated content out there. And that doesn't even factor in intentional propaganda or malicious actors.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I think that's a valid concern, but if we're concerned about it, we're concerned about something changing. So what changes and how do you think we'll cope with it?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cascdr 25 Mar

I don't know exactly how it's going to change but I suspect AI generated content will start to take the place of the "google" content discovery/verification function.

I see a lot of potential for growth but also for exploitation & propaganda.

Ideally, people would have their own personal AI assistants with open source that could act sort of like their "information lawyer" and warn them when something questionable comes up, your personal assistant flags it and warns you.

My biggest concern of all is that humans lose the motivation or ability to think critically and analyze the information they're presented with. Public schooling has already done a great job of attenuating this mental faculty and I worry it will further atrophy in The Age of AI Convenience.

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

At some point, we'll never be sure if we are interacting with other humans on the internet.

Also, I wonder if this could be that thing they used to say: sufficiently good advertising becomes indistinguishable from really compelling information. So we won't care.

Or we will have nuanced views, just as we do with our real-life friends: we like Wayne even though we know in certain ways he's kind of an asshole. Perhaps certain foibles of artificiality will be annoyances we deal with because on net it's worth it.

218 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

Perhaps certain foibles of artificiality will be annoyances we deal with because on net it's worth it.

Oh I agree it'll be worth it on net. But do we measure people as an aggregate? Would we displace Wayne with an artificial Wayne that's pleasant and not sense something lacking? Is Wayne more than his aggregate? idk. I guess I hope so.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

I think another clue to how this will evolve is that I've replaced a chunk of my time talking to flesh and blood people I know with talking to you and other SN peeps, many of whom I feel significant friendly feelings toward. In a way, ya'll are artificial beings, and yet I invest a stunning amount of time in these "relationships" and this "community."

I include the scare quotes because that's how it would be perceived to a lot of other people; and yet I don't even think about it at all. It's just another dimension to sociality that I incorporate with the rest, another point in the high-dimensional space of relating to other beings, where "beings" will likely turn into its own high-dimensional space I navigate more or less fluidly.

54 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I think you're right. We will layer in artificial friends, like we do internet friends now, as they will fill a niche in our social needs-space.

The prediction I'm kind of making is this though: if artificial internet people out number real internet people and we can't tell the difference between artificial and real internet people, AI will destroy our ability to know we are making internet friends with real people. And I'm curious how we'll behave when that happens.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

Like we'll have a general agnosticism about whether they're human or AI? Or at least, a fuzzy ambiguity about it?

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

Yes, at first.

Then, if I'm making any sense at all anymore, should AI outnumber humans online and its publicly known, the rational thing to do is assume you're always talking to an AI.

reply on another page

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 25 Mar

Proof by kissing.

But then some famous guy was betrayed by a kiss, so maybe even smooching won't be enough to prove humanity.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @chris42 25 Mar

For the sake of argument, let's say there was a way for humans to have ids on the internet. Maybe there would be human only social networks?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cascdr 25 Mar

We'll know we're there when cool high school kids only do IRL analog stuff lol

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 25 Mar

Might enhance it. It AI does all the other stuff we do on the internet besides being social, being social might be all we have left.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 25 Mar

If the incentives of the social internet are status and validation, if the social internet is merely a convenient venue to get what we want from other humans, proliferation of strong AI will kill it because AI will digitally represent us better than we do.

It's an evocative thought. But isn't this kind of already the case? Most of us spend a ton of our discretionary time watching people who are smarter, more attractive, more capable, and more interesting than we are, either in fiction (movies, TVs), or in actuality (sports, reality TV). When you consider how many cycles are spent not living, but simply watching quasi-super-beings live, it makes you wonder what additional delta AI will bring to it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I thought about addressing this but got lazy.

I don't know the answer, but would we watch as much TV if the actors/participants/creators/writers weren't human? If we would, then that's enough to convince me my conclusion is wrong.

I guess I don't know why we watch so much TV if it isn't to safely study what we know are other people or creations of other people.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @jgbtc 25 Mar

Well, ackchyually... Star Wars takes place a long time ago.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

You're right! I always seem to forget that. If Lucas isn't a genius by other measures, he is brilliant at marketing, specifically at creating contrast, by doing things like setting Star Wars in the past or starting the trilogy at episode IV.

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @OneOneSeven 25 Mar

Maybe we're already supposed to have flying cars and personal spaceships by now, but we're essentially "grounded" as a species by an elite.

If we can move things in 3d space the way information moves in cyberspace, the whole world changes. We don't need a social internet when you can travel to the opposite side of the planet in a few minutes.

Maybe the true purpose of our internet is, and has always been, to create bitcoin, and then sustain it. Bitcoin was born out the internet, but perhaps if events were different, in another timeline, we would create the internet because of bitcoin.

15 sats \ 0 replies \ @JReeCoin 25 Mar

If, and only if computers became clever. Albert Einstein's QUOTE: 'Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are inceredibly slow, innacurate, and brilliant,' denotes of this impossibility.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 25 Mar

Its hard to tell,

From the perspective of the plate licking pleb it doesn't look so bad though, I'm sure freaks will still zap the stuffing out of stackers on SN. At least TheWildHustle will.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 25 Mar

If social internet is not for humans, then what is the logic behind its existence? Is it just for political propaganda and mass manipulation? I believe there are already bots talking to bots without even knowing it. Ahahah

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

I think we'll still use the internet. It just won't be public and social in the same way.

10 sats \ 4 replies \ @thebitcoinbugle 25 Mar

People will become more analogue in the future. Type writers will come back. AI is going to break the internet and make it unusable. Things will 100% be like Star Wars in the future

159 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 25 Mar

We didn't call it AI but bots have been ruining search results for years. In some ways AI has made search usable again for me (Checkout Brave search). That said, it is just a matter of time until AI tools completely flood the Internet with soulless mundane content. I think it is a great time to be a real human writer with a sense of humor. IMO the future is bright for things like @thebitcoinbugle. You will stand out the more others things look the same.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

We will look back at search, like we do today about reading newspapers.

It's pretty incredible that each search provider only ever has 1 algorithm for generating results, and 82% of internet search queries originate from Google. 1 uncustomisable algorithm for 82% of global internet search traffic. It's no wonder it's a 💩 experience.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 25 Mar

the bugle stamp of approgle!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 25 Mar

If that's the destiny of A.I - that would be as ironic as someone who was named Car, who preferred to ride motorbikes instead.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 25 Mar

Maybe it'll usher-in a new era of people chasing after the new "beauty standards" and "life goals" set by AI- something which will be nigh-impossible, since it'll be (near-)perfectly be set in scène by the said AI.

A new era of standards, a new era of depression and zero-confidence kids, yay!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bubbajimm 25 Mar

When you're at the zoo, do you stop and talk to the animals? Do they care? The internet is our cage and we dance for scraps of food. We arent dancing for likes; that just justifies the action. People are disgusting creatures that act like fools for a sense of unity. However that is gained is what will matter. Likes will be inflationary. Bots will battle bots to keep things "organic". The cage will remain a cage. Don't fool yourself into thinking anything matters except gratification.