alt Hacker NewsI really do this that we are in the last years of the Internet as we know it. I daily have interactions online with people who just seem like a frontend for an LLM. 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. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I mean, to an extent, even tech businesses and competition (e.g. SaaS) have become LLM vs LLM in many respects. It's disheartening to witness, especially as a creative. Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable, or the internet fundamentally changes to use some sort of proof-of-identity and proof-of-authorship. Ideally both. But tbqh, even something like the Nets in Ender's Game won't really work in the age of AI. Either way, the internet I grew up on seems further and further away, and folks seem okay with proliferating fake realities and fake conversations and fake thoughts. It's all fake. What are we doing?
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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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.