Seems like the same logic to me. Isn't the Web where the information came from?
But here the mom is a robot taking produce for free. Not a good business for grocery stores.
Sadly, most of the stuff most people want to verify is "breaking news" and "gossip".
Did the pope really wear a puffy white coat? Does it really matter?
My local library is great. But they don't have all books, like reference information about a particular manufacturer's product. And they're not open at 2am. And you have to go there.
Behold, this is the future. We've improved computers so much going to the library is the answer for getting information. Correction: getting correct information.
Good. If there is one silver lining to generative AI, then it is that programmatic advertising will become less viable as a source of income.
If the internet were to overnight become a place where it is impossible to make money via advertising revenue, it could very well save the internet, if not the world.
Counter measures will need another LLM "AI" to filter out efforts to filter out ads from my prompts. However, when openai's adversary is their customer, my money is on me!
It would be really nice to get rid of one parasitic zero-sum "industry" without feeding all intellectual output into a slop machine which resells it without credit or compensation.
Marketing and Advertising is about communicating a product to someone that may be interested in purchasing it.
If Communications is jammed because AI slop has dominated the web, no marketing happens, no hiring happens, no purchases are made because no jobs. In short order (relatively speaking), you get deflationary collapse of all human organization.
Should that collapse, population levels will be forced to make a deep correction in ecological terms. The planet is in ecological overshoot. What happens when 2/3 of people can suddenly no longer feed themselves, and technology allows one person to destroy everyone on the planet. Quite bad.
Also, the money in surveillance capitalism is almost straight from the money-printer. It may be laundered a bit, but overall the reason old marketing/advertising failed is because it was outcompeted by money-printing, and when that fails (as it always does), you have a barren soil where nothing will grow. Corporate business today has a tendency to burn their house down with themselves in it to save a few pennies.
This is only what advertising is about for the advertisers.
For the other side of the coin, namely, the platforms that sell users to the advertisers, advertising is about capturing as much attention as possible in order to sell it. That means addiction, scams, sensationalism, lying, and preying on fear, greed, lust, and all the baser motives of a human being.
Lolol no, human organization would not collapse because web advertising went away.
Don't threaten ME with a good time!
Fundamentally, it breaks the social and generational contracts needed for societal organization to operate. While these structures won't vanish overnight, the consequences are cascading failures that will produce dire outcomes the longer they are allowed to fester.
You may want to start with Leviathan, then move on to John Locke, Hobbes and Descartes. No post I make will ever substitute for a reading of those authors.
Expectation: If you work hard and build skills, society will reward you with wages, stability, and opportunities for advancement.
AI Tension: If AI automates large swaths of work, the link between effort and reward can collapse. For example, truck drivers, radiologists, or call center workers may find that their decades of skill-building are instantly devalued.
2. The Generational Contract
Expectation: Each generation contributes (through taxes, labor, innovation) to support the current elderly, while expecting the next generation to do the same for them.
AI Tension: If AI concentrates wealth among a small group of owners, younger generations may not have the income base to sustain pensions, healthcare systems, or the tax base that supports aging populations.
3. The Education Contract
Expectation: If you spend years in school, investing time and money, you’ll get access to meaningful employment.
AI Tension: If AI can do much of the work fresh graduates are trained for (law, programming, design, etc.), then the implicit “return on education” may vanish, undermining trust in the education system itself.
4. The Knowledge–Authority Contract
Expectation: Experts and institutions (teachers, journalists, researchers) hold authority because of their training, discipline, and credibility.
AI Tension: If AI can generate convincing text, images, or even research papers, people may not know who or what to trust. This erodes the social contract where institutions act as reliable custodians of knowledge.
5. The Effort–Dignity Contract
Expectation: Work, even if menial, provides dignity and identity.
AI Tension: If AI replaces not only high-skilled jobs but also low-skilled ones, people may lose both economic security and the sense of contributing meaningfully to society.
6. The Civic Contract
Expectation: Citizens deliberate and vote based on human judgment and human-driven discourse.
AI Tension: AI-generated propaganda, deepfakes, or bot-driven political campaigns could undermine democratic trust and participation.
7. The Interpersonal/Creative Contract
Expectation: Human creativity and relationships are uniquely valuable.
AI Tension: If AI-generated art, music, or companionship substitutes for human creation or connection, people may feel dispossessed of their role in culture and community.
You want the ability to look at 4-5 sources, vet them, and draw your own conclusions.
We've reached a point where AI is not accountable for harms, while being capable of killing people through selective curation of information it provides.
But even more importantly, communities that created those wont form anymore.
there were a few months when a neighbor couldn't get the oil he needed to heat his home ...
another one fried a circuit and his solar cells were ... well ... powerless ... I mean they weren't, except they were, but you know what I mean.
I had a bicycle stolen once and a car got smashed on the rail tracks to my university ... it was horribly bloody and messy.
A friend broke his good arm once. His other arm was useless.
And we shouldn't touch the Gen part of your AI.
Most people consume Reddit through, specifically, the iOS version of the app. The same is true of TikTok and Instagram. This is how most people get their news.
Google destroyed web discoverability and search. Platforms sucked up all of the value and monopolized distribution.
The indie web is pretty much dead for normal people. It's only us developer / hacker / enthusiasts that have websites and play around with CSS.
The news and content gets consumed by most people through apps and the walled-gardens.
a nothing burger article with no real ideas.
Likewise, AI is biased, tries to be all things to all people, and is outright wrong in many cases. It is too easy to nudge in strange directions, and is NOT a nice companion. The lure of advertising is too big not to enshittify it.
However, in strict verticals, it can be helpful.
Since it is by structure non-social, it can’t be used to connect people.
It’s really a matter of choice, and people choose poorly.
“My Internet World” consists mainly of two aggregators, heavily moderated, sites that serve my interests directly, and communications with friends. The latter could be improved by “group forums” outside of the surveillance capitalism monster sites, but nobody seems to care, and should be part of operating systems, but Apple, Google and Microsoft, for example, will never agree on anything, so it’s left to third parties to crack a billion-device market. Fat chance.
As an example, I used to host Moodle on laptops and servers for docs, where people could comment, and it had built-in controls. Perhaps, some outside hosting? Small is beautiful.
People and information. They’ve been poisoned and probably always will as long as people use “big” sites.
Oh, and as for advertising. If I want information, I’ll just go get it. Anyone who pushes information on me is poisoning my cache. Out, damned slop.
