this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Enshittification is a paradigm shift, but not one we associate with the birth of the internet.
On to your list. Why does misinformation appear after the birth of the internet? Was yellow journalism just a historical outlier?
What you're witnessing is the "Red Queen hypothesis". LLMs have revolutionized the scam industry and step 7 is an AI arms race against and with misinformation.
It certainly existed before. Physical encyclopedias and newspapers weren't perfect, as they frequently followed the propaganda line.
My point is that a lot of people seem to assume that "the internet" is somewhat trustworthy, which is a bit bizarre. I guess there's the fallacy that if something is untrustworthy, it won't get attention, but instead things are given attention if they're popular, by some definition of "popular" (i.e. what a lot of users want to see, what the platform wants users to see, etc).
Well yeah, every technological innovation will be used for good and ill. The Internet gave a lot of people a voice who didn't have it before, and sometimes that was good (really helpful communities) and sometimes that was bad (scam sites, misinformation, etc).
My point is that AI is a massive step. It can massively increase certain types of productivity, and it can also massively increase the effectiveness of scams and misinformation. Whichever way you look at it, it's immensely impactful.