It was all fun and games two years ago when most AI videos were obvious (6 fingers, 7 fingers, etc.).
But things are getting out of hand. I am at a point I’m questioning if Lemmy, Reddit, Youtube comments etc. are even real. I wouldn’t even be suprised if I was playing Overwatch 5v5 with 9 AIs while three of them are programmed to act like kids, 4 being non toxic etc…
This whole place could just be an illusion.
I can’t prove it. Its really less fun now.
The upside is I go to the gym more frequently and just hang out with people I know are 100% real. Nothing worse than having a conversation with AI person. It was just an average 7/10 like I am an average 5/10 so I thought it could be a real thing but turned out I was chatting with AI. A 7/10 AI. The creator made the person less perfect looking to make it more realistic.
Nice. What is the point of internet when everything is fake but can’t even or only be identified as fake with deep research.
I’m 32 and I know many young people who also hate it. To be fair I only know people who hate on AI nowadays. This has to end.
To be honest, it’s already there. We have the small web, people keep blogging, writing into forums. We have Gemini if you want an entirely different protocol… You have to stay away from commercial websites and social media. But other than that, I don’t think we have to wait for anything to happen. It’s there. But with that said, people might need to re-learn how to use the internet. Since usage really has changed. You can’t expect to find it on social media while doomscrolling. The “back to the basics” is: You put in some effort to find nice blogs of interesting people. Install an RSS reader. Find a forum or a place like this one where you fit, and that’s filled with humans. That’s some effort. But that’s how people did it back in the days.
There are steps in this direction, like the kitten application. But what we have now is still not a “new” internet; it’s a bunch of fragments, scattered across the old, commercially-driven and corporation-controlled, internet.
For example. The old style forums are still there, I use a few of them… hosted by CloudFlare, sending data to Google, with a “follow us in Facebook” link. Remove CloudFlare from the equation and LLM training bots will DDoS them into oblivion; remove Google and they get no ad bucks; remove Facebook and they get even less exposure than before.
I got a Substack blog nobody reads. I’m considering to close it down given that Substack is nowadays full of Nazi. Substack is built over that corporate internet, that has no protection against bad faith actors whatsoever.
The first time I started Kristall (Gemini browser), I found a blank screen. Without websearch engines like DuckDuckGo (most people would use Google), I would never find an aggregator like gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
I guess that there’s NeoCities? Considerably less commercial than modern sites; but it’s no internet 2.0, it’s an attempt to relive a past long gone.
In a sense the Fediverse is part of a new internet. It allows you to self-host, and it’s all about users banding together to control their social media. Sharing links of the new web under HTTPS, buying domain names from corporations, with admins in a constant struggle to keep spammers at bay.
What I think that we need is something more unified than that. It’s like kitten and Gemini and the Fediverse at the same time. It’s hard to explain, but it’s direct connections in a corporate-hostile environment, where you can simply isolate bad faith actors and they won’t haunt you again. Self-hosted by amateurs, for amateurs.
Sorry if this sounds like rambling. It is, a bit. But it’s one of those things that I still dream about. It’s how I used to believe that the internet would evolve, back in the 90s. And it didn’t.
First of all: what’s “Kitten”?
And my own take is, it’s constantly evolving. And there are a lot if different use-cases out there. We might not have one specific, hypothetical solution. But similar things might exist. And it’s always also a question of supply and demand.
I’m always fine with niche solutions. Since I’m not even sure if my interests align with what’s popular with the masses.
But I think this is likely more a societal issue than a technical one. People want convenience, consume content passively. They want to be inside of filter bubbles and golden cages, with the occasional tickle of disagreeing on emotional things in the comments and siding with other users. What they don’t value is freedom, or privacy, or doing something productive that requires more than 30s of attention. So naturally, we get platforms that cater for that.
I also think the Fesiverse is a very nice attempt at laying a groundworks for more a more ethical and sustainable communications platform. But it’s far from perfect. And it struggles with a few of the same dynamics that are inevitable with social media.
I think the internet as is, is a solid choice. It’s been made to connect people (and their computers). And it’s initially been used for that. People put their stuff online because they had something to say, it required effort, so it was more quality content where the effort was justified somehow. Oftentimes it wasn’t with commercial interest, but for fun. And you could tell if something mattered to someone.
Subsequently, the internet got commercialized, the general public was onboarded. And now we have something that’s just about attention, manipulation, advertising and making money.
But the technical infrastructure is still basically the same. And we kind of still have net neutrality in a lot of places. Hosting got cheaper, the software and tools are abundant these days…
But yeah, demand is low, media literacy is low. People have become lazy and careless. And I don’t think there is a good way to change this with regular people, at least not in a grassroots way. I’d be easier to impose that from the top down, with regulation and education. But that’s where large and powerful companies are, and their motivation is in diametrical opposition to that. Plus we’re combatting human psychology here and the way our society works. It’s just a hard problem, so it comes to no surprise to me that we can’t solve it, all we can do is take small steps in the right direction.
And I just don’t understand some things. Like the Cloudflare thing. I’ve never used Cloudflare. My servers are completely fine without it. And I don’t even get a lot of load by the crawlers, and neither am I paying for the traffic or electricity used by that. All I ever have to do is pay attention to security, since I get a lot of brute-forcing attempts, spam etc. But that’s always been bombarding my servers. And there are lots of better ways to deal with it than tunnelling everything via one large and unappealing company…
Kitten is a new devkit to create self-hosted, peer-to-peer web applications, using HTML/CSS and Javascript. I can’t attest how well it works but it’s a step in that “small web” direction.
Because, like, Gemini is cool. But sometimes you want something more than just a capsule.
It’s both, in a vicious cycle. At the same time that big tech herds passive people into walled gardens, it also passivises the people inside them even further. And those walls are not just between different feuds - they’re also between customers and developers, making sure that each knows their place as serfs and vassals of big tech respectively.
The main problem with the current internet is that it has no mechanism against a commercial/hostile/corporate takeover, like the one that we saw. As you said it was made to connect people and computers; it is not like this any more.
(Sorry for not deepening the subject further. I’d need to get into political matters to do so, and doing it in this comm leaves me a sour taste in my mouth - as if distorting an environment supposed to be refreshing into the same stuff we see in 90% of Lemmy. )