RitaMcGrath
RitaMcGrath
DIGITALSLIME,THEDEAD INTERNET,ANDCORY
DOCTOROW’SGREATPHRASE
Thought Sparks
Introduction
Much of the user excitement in the early years of the Internet came from the medium’s powerful way in which it eliminated constraints on human communication. You could find your friend from high school, let the world know about an irritating customer experience, become well-known, and even learn skills from experts you didn’t know – and best of all, it was all for free! Those magical experiences have disappeared – to be replaced with what?
Theastonishing prevalenceof machine-trained garbage
Researchers at Amazon Web Services examined the consequences of free or lowcost AI tools, such as machine learning for translation, and came to an astonishing conclusion. Over half the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages, with sentences aimed at consumers in much of Africa and the Global South being machine-translated into clickbait garbage, presumably to garner advertising revenue.
TheDeadInternet
It’s partly conspiracy theory, partly science fiction, and today reflective of an increasingly disorienting internet experience. It refers to an Internet in which most of the interactions are not between human users but between AIenabled bots of varying degrees of skill. In its more conspiratorial incarnations, the dead Internet idea holds that governments have formed a giant mind-control cabal and used the power of the Internet to supply only the information that they want us to have.
Areadvertisers gettingwhatthey arepayingfor?
In 2018, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against 8 people accused of siphoning off $36 million in ad spending that essentially fooled the advertisers into thinking that their ads were both attracting views and appearing on the pages of high-quality, legitimate publications such as Vogue or The Economist. The indictment revealed a truly toxic mix of abusive practices from the point of view of the advertisers. Spoof websites intended to fool advertisers into thinking their ads were on legitimate sites. .
TheCory DoctorowMaxim
From a user’s point of view, relentless automated ad proliferation is also causing major problems. A 2022 article with the provocative title “Is Google Getting Worse? Why critics say ads, spam sites are killing search,” concluded that the answer for many users is “yes.” An influential blog post by Dmitri Brereton concludes that “Google search results are clearly dying…. most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.”
Bots talking to bots. A degraded user experience. A growing lack of trust in what the Internet is offering us. More and more valuable content behind paywalls. Where is this likely to lead?
Whithertheweb?
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