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Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

> I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up

I've been starting to think this way as well. It feels like we're seeing something similar to the way that mass spam calls drastically changed the way people use the phones to the point where people don't recognize a phone number, they just don't pick up anymore. As the ratio of garbage goes up, people will just slowly stop using the medium.

My semi-crazy prediction is that AI like GPT are going to be the death of large social media sites. I don't think the internet will die, but I think we're going to return to a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s, but for a completely different reason.

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Trust-less information was the norm for most of history.

The past century has really been an anomaly when it came to trusting news, with photos and videos seeming to be reliable proof. Before that, societies had to be structured very differently to account for the lack of proof. You'd hear people from out of town talking about what they saw in a neighboring city.

You'd need to judge how trustworthy the person was.

People would expect a chain of narration, to understand how _that_ person came to learn a bit of information (or if they claimed to witness it first hand).

As AI generated content becomes more popular, I predict we as a society are going to go back to relying more and more on the reputation of the speakers in question.

Who might you consider reputable? People you've met personally, people who your community respects, and of course, influencers who you follow who's persuasive words match your pre-existing world views. Perhaps something else will emerge

But how do you know the tiktok you're watching of your favorite opinion affirmer hasn't been AI generated to impersonate them?

This is the path I've been going down as well and frankly, I think that's pretty exciting.

This might be wishful thinking, but I'm coming to believe that AI like ChatGPT are capable of bringing out the absolutely worst qualities of massive social media sites and in that way might end up saving us from ourselves.

> a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s

I don't recognize this description of the Internet from any time after 1985 onward.

This might just be a way of aging ourselves. I do feel that Facebook blatantly flipped the norm that you used a pseudonym and kept personal information private when communicating (much less publishing) online - that's the norm I grew up with in the 90s and even the early 00s.

Back on usenet in the 80s and 90s, your ID was essentially your email address (but likely using bang path notation). There no pseudonyms, and everyone was a real person with identifiable features and a real world location.

I was a heavy usenet user in the 1996-2000 era and this wasn't true for me or most of the groups i hung out on (and even less so for IRC chans).

Earlier (pre-eternal september) usenet was definitely different though and I think much more like you say - sadly that was before I was old enough to get on-line, so I never saw it.

Yeah, once AOL came aboard and the green card lawyers showed the future of spam, things took a turn.

And it was only so they could target you with ads or so your friends could find and add you so they could target them with ads

"More local" may not be the perfect description. When I wrote it I was thinking of things like AIM where, for the most part, you knew everyone you were interacting with. The more I think about it, there were plenty of chatrooms and forums at that time though, so yeah, probably not a good word to use.

I think "trust-less" is more what I'm getting at though. In the 90s and early 00s the whole, "don't reveal anything personal, assume anyone you don't have a history with as if they might have malicious intent" was still very prevalent. That only changed when the early versions of social media really started to catch on. My mental mile marker for that switch happening has always been when Facebook no longer required an edu email to sign up (2005), but I'm sure you could argue it happened a few years earlier.

There are plenty of reasons we should go back to that mindset and AI bots making it incredibly hard to verify that you are talking to an actual human maybe the thing that pushes us back toward that mindset.

Having been online since about 1983, I never had this "trust-less" experience. I can understand what you're saying though, because by the time my kids started to be online in the 00s, I was generally trying to convey to them the same point that you're making.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I've had many conversations with many people my age (mid 30s) about how we went from "don't post anything about yourself" to "post your entire life online" around when Facebook got big, so I don't think it's something that only I experienced. There's another commenter on this post saying something similar and I remember being taught about "internet safety" in middle school, so maybe it's a generational thing.

I'm from the same cohort as you and can corroborate this. I definitely remember how strange it felt to me when social media became a thing and the taboo of attaching personally identifiable info to your web presence suddenly disappeared.

Yes I remember when a local direct connect hub had a LAN party and many people met IRL for the first time. I continued to meet these people in later years in normal life even after the hub was shutdown. That was semi closed and people were generally trustworthy.

Time to restart the private book club.

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