Rich coming from the party of voter suppression…

Just wait until everyone is forced to wear screens on their faces 24/7, because that’s the way tech companies want us to live. I’m not being sarcastic, either.

There’s a reason why so many people consciously choose to “disconnect” when they want a mental break. If we are no longer able to, how healthy do you think our society will be?

On Android (and probably other systems), Death Road to Canada is fun, funny, challenging, and comes with no BS.

These are the tips that the Kleenex company doesn’t want you to know! LOL

If you feel a sneeze coming on, pinch the soft tissue at the bridge of your nose. For me, this stops a sneeze 99% of the time.

They will choose to stop if it doesn’t make them money. 😀

But yes, not allowing them to do this in the first place would be a very reasonable thing to fight for.

Everyone should enter these stores dressed up like it’s Payday (the video game) until they stop with this facial recognition nonsense.

CIBC, my dude 😉

Believe me, Google does enough a/b testing, and has enough experience in psychological manipulation to know where “the line” is for most people.

Sure, some will never use their product(s) again when pushed too far, but they don’t really need everyone to be using their products.

Only the users they can profit from the most are of value. If a terrible UI, awful UX, or even a paid subscription doesn’t scare them away from using a Google Product, then each of those users becomes a cash cow.

Those are mostly operating costs, offset by revenue, but are they actually losing 1.5 billion dollars a year? I mean, I hope so, but are they really?

Source? Where is that money going?

When did it get this bad?

Bad? Google just proved that they can get you to stay on their search page (or come back to get a different answer) for way longer than you need… this is a WIN for them.

The enshittification of the internet + the greed inherent in these mega corps have caused websites to be designed to grab steal your attention for as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on their site, the more money/data/attention/time they can get out of you.

If search was designed to benefit the user, a typical visit would result in maybe 5-10 seconds of someone’s time to enter a search and click on the relevant result. You proved that when you compared it to DDG 😀

But there is stilll enough helpful content that the whoe thing isn’t worthless and I doubt it ever will be.

The people creating that content will fade away.

They are going to be competing with a tireless algorithm that can out out 1000x the content they can, with next to no “staff”.

Those AI content creators will be making money for someone, and legitimate content creators won’t be able to keep up unless: they use AI content creation; or have a business model that will probably result in all legitimate websites being paywalled, filled with ads, or becoming a marketing platform for brands (worse than what modern day YouTube is like).

I agree with all of that. AI has it’s valid uses.

But the way we are seeing it being utilised is often simply to flood every corner of the internet with spam, bad information, low quality content, and loads of filler.

I’m personally amazed by what AI can do with photo generation, music creation, and other creative work.

But at the same time, I want to know that it’s AI generated and not passed off as human created content. Especially with written content.

AI-based tools can be amazing, but only if ethics are applied to their use.

The majority of the internet is porn.

Again, I’ll separate entertainment from informational, since entertainment can be garbage, and still be consumed.

Bad information doesn’t help anyone.

it’s not like LLMs you can chat with are completely useless.

The problem is, you wouldn’t know unless you know.

With a legitimate website that has human writers, editors, and fact-checkers, they can at least have creditability and a reputation to uphold.

Far too many randomly generated websites have a lot of information, but without any guardrails. If you know enough about a topic, you’ll realise that the information on these AI sites are pretty much useless. That is, you couldn’t use them as a source because enough of the info is bad/incorrect/incoherent, that it’s like asking a toddler who may or may not give you a valid question.

I’ve contacted a manufacturer of bike stuff, and their support is given by AI. While the answers you get sound like they could be right, it’s like getting an answer from someone who heard something about something from a friend. When you actually ask for a human, the answer is often different (and correct).

There is no accountability, or credibility, or responsibility, or integrity with AI. It has no reputation to lose if the information it provides is bad or not.

I know that AI isn’t going away. I’d personally be OK with some human verification system for websites, and would be more than willing to use a filtered version of the internet that blocks AI generated content. Call it curated or whitelisted, but I want my information to come from a human being.

But you know they are spam, so it’s something you can avoid. But what if the majority (over 80%) of the calls you receive can’t be identified as spam. At some point, you may be wasting far more time than it’s worth to keep using a phone without some major whitelist/blacklist system.

Also, what happens when the outbound calls you make are answered by AI, and you don’t know? If this AI is giving you replies that are word salad, how long are you willing to tolerate it?

I’ve been getting text messages now from companies that I actually do business with, but they are spam. Calls from companies that I have accounts with, and they are scams. At some point, SMS and phone calls will be more trouble than its worth.

And the thought of either having to go without it, the pain of replacing it, or the frustration of being strung along in a scam are not thoughts I want to have.

There will always be a large number of sites that are not capitalist hellholes that only exist to steal user’s data or scam users or do other malicious things. This may be down to things like credit unions, federated social media, and non-profits that exist to make the world better, but there will always be something that is out there that keeps it from being useless.

No doubt that there will be people who still have morals and will run sites and services that don’t completely screw people.

But at some point, you won’t be able to tell which are legit, and which aren’t. AI generated websites can make any scam site look completely legitimate, fake thousands of testimonials, have bots post about it on every major website (Reddit, YouTube, etc.) without being caught, etc.

The currency of the internet is no longer about what’s valuable to users, but what’s valuable to bad actors, data thieves, and marketers.

There will be a tipping point when the bad far, far outweighs the good, and I’m curious to know when society decides that the internet isn’t worth using anymore.

Let me ask you this: assuming you use the internet for information rather than entertainment, would the internet be useful if the majority of content ends up being AI generated (not fact checked, not accurate, and not original)?

What if the overwhelming content you come across could neither be verified as true, and the majority of comments (including here on Lemmy) were bots? Would you still use it?

For me, it would stop being useful. Almost like a library only carrying fiction, when I’m trying to research a topic.

For entertainment, sure, it’ll be great for sucking the attention from people without having to invest in skill to be good at something. Hell, if you currently find YouTube shorts and Tiktok to be “good content”, then it’ll be around forever. Corporations and advertisers love this technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of things, and where we are heading.

At what point do we consider the internet “useless”? It must be coming very soon (less than 2 years), since the majority of content will be AI generated and targeted, which drives down the value for users even further.

Once original ideas vanish, and you can’t trust any text/audio/video/photo you see, what will be the point? It’s like the internet will simply be a video game world with next to no value.

And I can’t see how society can possibly reverse this.

If that is what an easy to clean outer surface looks like… just imagine what the inside looks like.