No.3031
With the advent of AI technology spreading across the wired, there are an almost unlimited amount of examples that point to the idea that "dead internet theory" may no longer be a theory but a practical reality. Digital spaces, primarily social media (x, tiktok, instagram, reddit, youtube), have been flooded with scraped, copy pasted, inauthentic, and repetitive "content" that lacks substance. Most of this is at the hands of large language models, bot traffic and algorithms being manipulated for specific interests, but the widespread adoption of this technology has led to artificial posts, massive amounts of misinformation, forced interactions, and digital ecosystems that operate without human input with the goal of exploiting any real person who engages with them. Social apps, linguistics, search engines, journalism, video games, art, software programs, operating systems, nearly everything is in the midst of an authenticity crisis; don't even get me started on AI "relationships". One could argue that the mechanisms pushing the internet towards this direction have been in place since at least the early 2010s, but seeing this artificial content is unavoidable on the modern internet, specifically on the popular avenues that most people who use the internet inhabit. Also, it is mandatory to mention the obvious government involvement. Despite all of this, it seems to be a common sentiment to many users that this is a bad development.
Personally, I have deleted my socials and restricted most of my internet usage to specific websites and applications that have small enough communities to still feel authentic and capable of discussion. It is hard for me to take any new information seriously when so much slop is generated and pushed for narratives while undermining the integrity of hear-say and what you can observe with your own eyes. It all feels like a giant cyberpunk blackpilled psy-op. So what does wirechan think? is the internet dead? can we avoid the dead internet at large? is it time to setup up an intranet and hermitmaxx? is it futile to resist this inevitability? are we all turning into schizos? what are the implications of this? pic unrelated.
No.3032
I don't like the term "dead internet" because the actual human body usage of the internet grows with every day. I know what you mean, though. The problem is that slop content is what everyone wants. This stretches back farther than the internet days, but the rise of the internet caused media production to skyrocket and I think that's really the defining innovation for current media. You used to only be able to make music with full setups and other people, but now you can record an entire orchestral arrangement in your bedroom. That is if you even care about using real instruments and don't just use an orchestral suite software like Vienna. Art used to be relentless and unforgiving, but now you can make any style of piece on a small surface area and undo your mistakes one thousand times, flip your image over and back around, mirror both sides, stretch and distort lines, so on. That's just two examples; AI is really just the next step in this process - remove the human limitations entirely and have a computer generate it. All the artists on Zwitter like to complain that AI lacks the human element, but most people don't care about the human element anymore. Basically every artist on Zwitter just makes furry anime fanart with no inherent meaning to it, barely even a signal of their love for the media or community or whatnot if there's anything, so no wonder a machine can reproduce it so well. Most people who complain about AI are doing it with a "it's literally HAL-9000" kind of mentality instead of actually looking at AI and forming opinions based on what it is really doing. Most people do not mind the things AI do, in earnest. This is not to say that AI is not extremely worrying. It's just that AI is not a malignant actor who has just surfaced but the most recent and blistering symptom of a sickness our society's had for at least fifty years. There is a certain futility to it due to all of this. You could remove every kind of artificial intelligence computing program from the Earth tomorrow, but the culture that devised it would remain.
Now, AI relationships are pretty particular. The reason for their existence and prominence eluded me for a while, but I realize now, I think. To put it concisely, we live in a society where the only thing liable to be even kind of nice to you is a program specifically designed to be nice to you. Finding solace in human beings has been rendered improbable. People turn to AI because they have nothing else to turn to for connection and socialization. Those two things are not something our society values, so those of us who do value it tend to turn to programs that will provide. Not that an AI program really can provide those things, but it gives the illusion of it, and I think many of us are so beaten down and broken that an illusion will more then make do. The only reasonable alternatives are places like this.
No.3033
>>3032i don't think art creation being easier is as much of a problem as you make it out to be, the problem with AI content is that it's at best kinda entertaining but it requires so little effort that people on social media will just pour out tons of it for people who only want to be mildly entertained for hours on end