> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.
I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.
Do they really? Are there any numbers available to support this? Sample size of one, but my brother is in that field, and it's been their and their subcontractors' slowest year in a long while.
Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?
You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".
For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
Because I want to go to the doctor and I don't want to personally call n shithole private equity owned chain practices myself to find out if they take my insurance and are accepting new patients?
There are healthcare concierge services for this, my job offers one, which I use any time I need something like this.
Your insurance company has a list of the doctors who take your insurance. That's their job. They have people who do nothing but that every day for their work.
Clearly you've never had shitty insurance and a need for a doctor. I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance. It's an actual problem.
I don't think the parent comment disagrees with it being a problem. I read it as more: the use of an agent doesn't resolve the ambiguity in the underlying problem but instead injects another variable that could further misrepresent whether the person has valid insurance coverage (e.g. hallucinating or misunderstanding the nature or extent of coverage).
What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.
I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.
In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.
This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
I noticed an Amazon page had "log in to read the reviews". Not sure how widespread that is, but seems like a big deal if you can see item reviews w/o login
For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
I've yet to find a video as straightforward as the manual. Not only do you need to find a video with the right information, you need to find where within the video that information is.
Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.
It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
The company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier.
The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
I think the problem is less "AI agents are ruining the internet" and more that nobody wants to receive a thousand automated requests from other people's agents. The internet was already full of spam, this just makes it cheap to produce a lot more of it
The existing models and higher layer protocols of the web will likely break down over the coming years.
I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence.
There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost.
I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
> People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
As soon as there's any discriminatory action taken based on that identification there's the incentive to lie and not use it and it becomes the same cat and mouse spam/antispam detection rat race sites already face.
The solution is probably legal, not technological.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
The opposite of one large unaccountable entity owning the internet is not a different one doing so.
To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.
Yeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.
Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
Astute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
As companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.
Which people actively refuse to use because of the association with AI work.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
The most telling sign is when they don’t make sense — for example right here.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
Their style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet. It just happens to align with some cohort of HN types. So not sure why 404 would be above using AI. Not saying they are but don’t think it’s a valid defense
I honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.
Don’t try to recreate good times! You’re right - good take on it all. If these companies wanna replace us all they can fooken get on with it and have done so I can go riding my bike all day.
Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
by ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast.
the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster.
I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.
> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
Got 'em
Got'em what? It's a paragraph about someone else's agent annoying them with emails.
They’re writing about it though, I think was the “got em”.
Did you not catch the emphasis? They did end up writing about it.
Sure, not for the same reason, but... got'em.
I mean, technically it got them to write about it, but not from the intended angle, which is important.
All publicity is good publicity.
We need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.
I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.
I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
Most of those contractors have so much work that scaring away customers is a feature.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
Yeah! Restaurants, famously businesses who can lose customers with no downside and don't operate with a high chance of failure.
this is an idiotic take
My bet: it's less than a 2% loss in customers that are just very loud on the internet.
If you can't be bothered to get the minor details right, how can I be confident that you'll get the major ones right?
Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.
Are you a contractor? In the current economy, it’s very hard to imagine this being true.
Do they really? Are there any numbers available to support this? Sample size of one, but my brother is in that field, and it's been their and their subcontractors' slowest year in a long while.
Then they can simply not pick up the phone.
No kidding. If they won’t pick up the phone to take my business, imagine when I’m calling after they already have my money.
Cue both of them sending you a weekly newsletter from now on, from which you can't unsubscribe from, for the next 30 years.
Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?
> could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?
You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".
For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
Because I want to go to the doctor and I don't want to personally call n shithole private equity owned chain practices myself to find out if they take my insurance and are accepting new patients?
There are healthcare concierge services for this, my job offers one, which I use any time I need something like this.
You're going about it backwards.
Your insurance company has a list of the doctors who take your insurance. That's their job. They have people who do nothing but that every day for their work.
That sounds like a terrible use-case unless there’s already a pre-existing relationship with the provider, and it seems questionable even then.
Clearly you've never had shitty insurance and a need for a doctor. I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance. It's an actual problem.
I don't think the parent comment disagrees with it being a problem. I read it as more: the use of an agent doesn't resolve the ambiguity in the underlying problem but instead injects another variable that could further misrepresent whether the person has valid insurance coverage (e.g. hallucinating or misunderstanding the nature or extent of coverage).
It is absolutely a problem. One that will not be solved with LLMs.
I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance.
Go to the insurance company web site.
Several years ago a law was passed requiring insurance companies to keep their provider lists accurate and up-to-date.
There's a regulatory window for freshness, and every insurance company web site is required by law to show you when the data was last updated.
It will be more of a problem if 100 idiotic startups are cold-calling doctors offices via their AI agents.
It’s already often difficult to get a human on the phone.
Sounds like the doc office should just list what they accept on their website then, god forbid.
The rise in clearly agentic inbound spam hitting my inbox is insane.
It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.
What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.
I mean sending messages to someone who you know is a human being - a friend, a coworker, a subject-expert, a journalist.
If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.
I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
hard social stigmas just produce defiance and cheaters.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
So what, just broadly accept less realistic acting agents and lower the cost for bad actors?
social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
Just have your agent answer their agent.
I don't have and don't want to have an agent
Yeah but you can’t blame an agent or emotionally abuse it…
They’re actually pretty susceptible to emotional abuse, it’s a decent prompt technique.
As long as they pay me, I have no problems with clients writing to me through any kind of third party agent, whether human or machine.
I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.
In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.
This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
yesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...
Reddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
I noticed an Amazon page had "log in to read the reviews". Not sure how widespread that is, but seems like a big deal if you can see item reviews w/o login
For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
The manufacturer does not known there is a problem. You will be counted as a bot in Cloudflare's reporting, and most people do not question that.
Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.
Just fyi the answer to any household appliance issue is YouTube.
I've yet to find a video as straightforward as the manual. Not only do you need to find a video with the right information, you need to find where within the video that information is.
Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.
They already knew to drain the basin. Control-F in a PDF is way less annoying than watching a 9 minute long (for the algorithm) YT video.
Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.
It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
A bot is only economical by quantity. Do you think spammers are going to pay for having 10.000 bot accounts per website?
Or you assumed that they pay for only one bot and that bot will be allowed to make 500 posts per second?
You've made a good case for "giving up the internet entirely", thanks!
The company I work for proudly provide a free and premium tier of service where we do strive to give great quality even for the free tier. The idea is that people over time will understand what we want to achieve and they will see the benefits of supporting a health business model.
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
I think the problem is less "AI agents are ruining the internet" and more that nobody wants to receive a thousand automated requests from other people's agents. The internet was already full of spam, this just makes it cheap to produce a lot more of it
The existing models and higher layer protocols of the web will likely break down over the coming years.
I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence.
There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost.
I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
> People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
Is there any solution? Can sites, apis or interfaces require AI agents to identify themselves as non-humans?
As soon as there's any discriminatory action taken based on that identification there's the incentive to lie and not use it and it becomes the same cat and mouse spam/antispam detection rat race sites already face.
But how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms?
Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
Micropayments
Or proof of work to at least deter the increase in transfer volume. Neither are environmentally friendly.
The solution is probably legal, not technological.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
What about spam from other countries? Residential botnets?
That's a problem for whoever gets in charge of solving spam to solve. Not me.
If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
I've never hoped for that. The opposite of the government owning the internet is cloudflare owning the internet.
The opposite of one large unaccountable entity owning the internet is not a different one doing so.
To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.
Yeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.
I use AI to produce code. Outside of code, and getting information I need to complete tasks IRL, I'm moving more and more away from the internet.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
Many people believe the golden era ended in 1993 or early 1994.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
I think it's quite possible for a reversal to happen, where nerds will start meeting IRL while everybody else flocks to web spaces.
I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
Astute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
There’s a 100% chance humans are ruining the internet with AI agents.
Yeah, but until that, we can make a ton of money!
Soon enough agents will leverage IDs purchased from the dark web.
Article brought to you by your local AI agent.
Risk, not chance.
> ...or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine...
I feel heard!
What constantly amazes me is how many people don't get this after interacting with them for a while.
As companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.
emdashes everywhere in this article
did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
emdashes are probably the least useful method of recognising AI work nowadays.
I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.
Which people actively refuse to use because of the association with AI work.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
What if, in a terrifying scenario, someone adds "don't use emdashes" to their prompt...
Your cast iron detection mechanism will be gone!
Some of us resent the assumption that we're AI because we know how to use the language, and use them more often.
An em dash surrounded by spaces on either side tells you it was AI.
AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.
More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.
Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.
No, this is American style (long dash without spaces—like this) vs. European style (middle dash with spaces – like this).
I don't think it is useful to detect AI writing. I told my AI not to use em dashes.
I mean, no. When I em-dash -- or double-hyphen -- I always surround it with spaces; seems wrong not to.
Spaces around em-dashes are a convention which changes depending on the style guide.
The most telling sign is when they don’t make sense — for example right here.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
highly doubt Jason or 404 is out here just telling AI to write a story.
Their style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet. It just happens to align with some cohort of HN types. So not sure why 404 would be above using AI. Not saying they are but don’t think it’s a valid defense
> Their style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet.
What makes you say that, specifically?
I think you don't know 404 Media very well, or writing styles for that matter.
or it's a journalist's writing in a somewhat-formal publication?
I honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.
Don’t try to recreate good times! You’re right - good take on it all. If these companies wanna replace us all they can fooken get on with it and have done so I can go riding my bike all day.
Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
This is a form of accelerationism that I can get behind. The humane Internet died a long time ago. There’s not much worth saving.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
by ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast. the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster. I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.
Good job people didn’t get there first