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For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been bots of one kind or another on the internet. Whether it’s WoW gold bots, email spammers, SmarterChild (remember SmarterChild?), or something else, this glorious world wide web has been home to rickety, virtual facsimiles of human beings trying to wheedle money out of you for decades.
But now it’s even worse. With the power of AI™ (not actually ™) we’ve successfully made the internet much worse for everyone, with social media, website comments sections, your email, various of your news outlets, even your YouTube videos now potentially being produced by a gaggle of hallucinating graphics cards. There’s even the dead internet theory, the suggestion that—at this point—the internet is for the most part just a load of bots regurgitating content at each other.
It’s probably not true, to be clear. At least not yet. But you’ll never guess who’s started taking the idea a little more seriously: none other than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who took to X this week to announce that he “never took the dead internet theory that seriously,” but that these days “it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts.” PC Gamer’s sources were unable to confirm if he was wearing a giant hot dog suit at the time.
Of course, Altman might not be quite as oblivious as he makes out. He might just be trolling all of us for kicks or, even more likely, continuing a campaign of trolling Elon Musk on his own social media network. Musk’s xAI recently sued Apple and OpenAI over ChatGPT exclusivity on iOS devices.
As the replies to Altman’s tweet were quick to note, the OpenAI boss musing on the degradation of internet communications by LLMs was more than a little ironic. “Yeah dummy it’s your fault,” admonished one replier. “‘I never took the dead internet theory seriously until I made it 150 times worse’,” wrote another.
As CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, Altman is one of leading figures of the so-called AI revolution, and one of the single people most responsible for the proliferation of LLMs online in the last several years, and all manner of AI agents rely on the corporation’s GPT models to work.
Indeed, cramming LLMs into every corner of our lives is the company’s raison d’etre, and the foundation on which its billions of dollars in revenue is built. For Altman to idly note that, gee, sure seems like the internet is more-and-more infested with LLMs is like an arsonist remarking that it sure is hot in here.
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