Comment by smcg

17 hours ago

This seems naive. As long as people are "enjoying" the AI-infested social networks, or at least not annoyed enough to leave, they will stay on them, and become further disconnected from reality. We have half of EU teenagers talking to chatbots regularly. Alienated people flock to them.

Reminds me when reality TV came a long. Many folks were convinced that it would be a passing fad and that within 12-18 months TV would return to the way it had been before hand. That because the quality was so low people would eventually bore of it, still waiting for that moment...

For one point, I was a daily active user of Reddit for 10 years, I deleted my account and left the platform in January over LLM content.

  • Same, but recently I discussed the LLM flood on Reddit with some friends IRL and they were surprised I had left Reddit, as they simply hadn't noticed significant bot activity. Mind you, these are very AI-aware people. I have little hope that normies will catch on and actually mind enough to leave.

  • Yes. I did not left but visit the site less often and kind of worry about its future. The engagement over what I post is just much lower, while the number of reported visitors seems to increase. I don't mind some good quality AI comment, sometimes one see it, but overall it is slowly becoming ghost town.

Social media that caters to what the user wants/interacts with can become infinitely more so. This is already applied to entertainment content across tv and the internet.

At some point an instagram/tiktok/etc user could see nothing by real people and not even know what is promoted vs ad vs post.

Actively seeking out a chatbot is different than wanting to talk to humans.

  • > Actively seeking out a chatbot is different

    A lot of them aren't actively seeking them out. They are pushed at them and they just try it.

    Go on, just this once, you can stop if you don't like it…

    > than wanting to talk to humans.

    The disaffected just want to talk. I'm sure they'd prefer humans but once the chatbots seem to be good enough in their absence they get a bit trapped there because the bots are too sycophantic and they get conditioned to want that from humans too which will not happen.