This blog has been around for a long time. Really, it’s quite impressive. Our first post was back in 2008. A different age.
Invasive attacks have always been an issue with the internet. There is a forever cat and mouse game happening where attackers find a weakness in the system, some way to make money or some edge, and exploit it at scale. In my brief lifetime there were popup banners, terrible animated ads, spam emails, fake accounts, etc. But for each version through the 2000s and into the later on years it was very much a cat and mouse game.
New browsers prevented websites from popping up new browser windows, ad blockers slowed down the worst ad offenders, and spam email filters rolled out to stop the worst of the email spam. But we are entering an age where it strongly feels like the AI apocalypse is coming for “Web 2.0”, and it will simply not exist as it was.
The internet was founded somehow on strangers trusting each other. And for a while the exploits could be detected, and technological innovations created to stop the exploits.
AI is going to end this all. “Web 2.0” was a revolution where strangers could talk to each other in a new public town square, and sure, most of it became terrible and created our little “fabric of society ending” bubbles, and people are mean, etc. But as bad as it all is, at least it was mostly humans being mean to each other.
AI will soon be able to use the internet about as well as a slightly below average human user. It will become impossible to detect the difference between a server creating millions of lines of text all over the internet, and a real person.
For almost 20 years we have had a comment section on this blog, at one point people actually messaged in comment sections, then the spam got bad, so we subscribed to an anti-spam-comment-software service, that reviewed comments and removed all the spam ones.
Over the last week we have gotten 10x the normal number of comments on our blog, and they are clearly AI, but yet good enough that any human could possibly have written them. Explore this example from today:
“I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.”
This is posted on our site by an AI agent, somewhere in the world, for some reason. Maybe with the goal of demonstrating the “user” is human enough to bypass the anti-spam censors, so that when they actually post the nefarious link it isn’t removed? Maybe just to get a username or email associated with a “real” or valid online persona so that when the “AI” security program somewhere else looks over the internet to determine if an account is used by a “human” there is a digital remains trace out there to put it off the scent? I’m not sure.
But we simply can’t keep up. Very few people use comments sections these days, and they are mostly hot garbage if they do exist. And now, after almost 20 years, they’ll finally be run over by endless AI bot armies that are as good or better than real users.
So we will be turning comments off. We appreciate everyone who read this blog during its heyday, and those who have stuck around since. There really were some great comments as people tried to help one another find new and interesting ideas. But those days are over.
Really the days of being anonymous on the internet are over. Between government pressure and bad experiences because of the AI avalanche, the future of the internet will be verified, with your personal credentials, tracked everywhere you go, and validated by everything you do. Every motion being scraped by some code to put you into a huge dataset, where AI agents monitor every digital action you take. Welcome to our new future.
I will miss an earlier time when a comment at a website came from a human, and people were a lot nicer online. But those days are long behind us. As we cling to the past, we must let it go, and accept a different future. Maybe the end result will be safer and a more pleasant experience, but we certainly will have lost something. With a heavy heart, we turn our comment section off forever.
Thanks,
Guthrie Weinschenk
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