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Just some quick thoughts on the future of the internet. In short, I expect the way we use the web and social media to change quite dramatically over the next 3-5 years as a result of the growing sophistication of AI assistants combined with a new deluge of AI spam, agitprop, and clickbait content hitting the big socials. Specifically, I’d guess most people will have an AI assistant fielding user queries via API calls to Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and creating a personalised stream of content that filters out ads, spam, phishing, and (depending on users’ tastes) clickbait and AI generated lust-provoking images. The result will be a little bit like an old RSS feed but mostly selected on their behalf rather than by them directly, and obviously packed with multimedia and social content. As the big social networks start to make progressively more of their money from API charges from AI assistant apps and have fewer high-value native users, they’ll have less incentive to control for spambots locally, which will create a feedback loop that makes the sites basically uninhabitable without AI curation.
One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed, because these days people use it mainly for navigation rather than exploratory search (eg you use it to search Reddit, Twitter, or Wikipedia, or find your way to previously-visited articles or websites when you can’t remember the exact URL). But AI assistants will handle navigation and site-specific queries, and even exploratory search will be behind the scenes, meaning Google Ads will get progressively less and less exposure to human eyeballs. This is why they urgently need to make Gemini a success, because their current business model won’t exist in the medium-term.
All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.
I doubt there will be widespread adoption in the next 3-5 years. People galactically overhyped chatbots as the effective advent of AGI, but it was more of an iterative step like any other. A useful one, to be sure, but not immediately transformative to all aspects of human existence that some have claimed.
Search results were already sort of an issue from SEO slop-factories gaming the system so aggressively. Chatbots will lower the price of that stuff a bit so we'll probably see a bit more, but I doubt it's going to be that much more of an issue compared to what could be done a few years ago by paying some ESL third-worlder rock bottom prices to produce the stuff. I doubt that AI-powered RSS feeds are going to be the wave of the future as well. Search results aren't great, but you can usually find what you're looking for if you enter the right query (for most things, that means appending "reddit" to the end).
The replies to a lot of tweets with over 10k likes are filled with LLM-generated "helpful" spam replies, and those spam replies, as far as I can tell, get hundreds of likes from actual users. A few years ago the replies to top posts were much better than today. Yes, LLMs can't do most things, but they can write low-context tweets, they can write SEO spam slop at 0 marginal cost, and that's all you need for it to be a big problem.
I think you're right that people will either just ignore it, and just read the tweets / watch the videos of the popular users they currently follow (say what you will about MrBeast, he's clearly intelligent and very good at optimizing for his targets) and ignore the LLM spam replies / comments like they already do though. Or they'll eat up the slop and love it.
Soon AI will likely be much smarter, but we'll have bigger issues than higher quality internet spam
In case you think this problem is more intractable than it is. If you just block/mute these accounts when you see them after maybe 5 rounds the flood slows to a trickle. It's really not a lot of accounts doing it.
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