Dead Internet

A few years ago, I got a short freelance gig writing copy for an internet services company. My assignment was to write explanations of the company’s services that met the needs of two audiences. The first audience, of course, was the people who might buy the company’s services. The more important one, however, was search crawlers that would rank this company’s pages higher or lower than competing providers of identical services. My company’s unique selling proposition, in other words, was its search engine optimization, courtesy of yours truly. I think they paid me something like fifty bucks a page. I may have been the last American to do that job before it was offshored, but I’m sure that’s no longer the province of human workers. At least, not directly: whatever machine churning out replacement garbage was almost certainly trained by ingesting what I wrote, along with everything everyone else wrote everywhere.

Including, of course, AI-generated garbage. What happens when AI models train on the slop generated by other AI models? What happens when AI-generated copy is written to tickle the algorithms of AI-generated readers who then summarize it back to their human overlords?

We’re already seeing the impacts. If you’re in any way attuned to pop culture, you’ll have heard a few weeks ago that someone did a spectacularly bad job in the Olympic breakdancing competition.

Perhaps, like me, you tried to look up the video of the dance to see what the big deal was. When I did, I found dozens of videos featuring the same still photo of the dancer, each with slightly different AI-generated voices repeating slightly different AI-generated summaries of public reactions to the event.

None of them provided any insight, or novelty, and none of them showed me the actual dance in question. The story was ubiquitous but also simultaneously illegible. I knew the outline and there was no depth available. It was just AI-generated slop pitched to the algorithm in the hopes of being at the top of the list, garnering a click, and getting someone to watch just enough seconds of garbage to trigger a fractional ad payout.

Meanwhile, Amazon is full of AI-written books, including mushroom foraging guides that suggest poisonous mushrooms are safe to eat, while Spotify is failing to address AI fakes overtaking actual human musicians. (Yes, we all knew it would start with synthwave and smooth jazz, but it’s sliding into real music as well).

It’s bots all the way down.

On to the Links

• It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional: Cheap solar power could bring us to cheap mass desalination. One key factor: the waste brine is rich in valuable minerals.

• Infiltrating the Far Right: Is this good or bad news? I’m honestly not sure. It’s interesting, anyway.

• Police Are Killing More Americans than Ever: The Economist covers American policing, which remains unreformed and unrepentant.

• Why I Left the Network: Pro Publica covers the misery of being a therapist subject to in-network payment programs. TLDR: One way insurance companies reduce spending on mental health treatment is making it hard to access, and one way they make it hard to access is making it hard to provide, so providers drop out.

• Right on Red: Republicans in Congress are blocking traffic safety initiatives in Washington DC. Why? It’s not just that DC trends liberal and Republicans reflexively oppose its initiatives. It’s because street safety improvements often present minor inconveniences for people in cars, and Republicans in Congress regard the convenience of suburban commuters as more important than the lives of actual district residents.

• Quick summaries of books endorsed by JD Vance: Dawn’s Early Light, by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and Unhumans, by the truly vile Jack Posobiec. The upshot is he’s endorsing truly extreme proponents of right-wing political violence.

Joy

• Double catch