There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet

Varelion

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

N_A_T_E

Is there any solution? Can sites, apis or interfaces require AI agents to identify themselves as non-humans?

metalman

by ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast. the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster. I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.

avgDev

I use AI to produce code. Outside of code, and getting information I need to complete tasks IRL, I'm moving more and more away from the internet. The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing. I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more. I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.

eggplantemoji69

Soon enough agents will leverage IDs purchased from the dark web.

simonw

We need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.

delichon

It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money. It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.

jfewhfuehg

I honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.

lacoolj

emdashes everywhere in this article did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?

maxrev17

Good job people didn’t get there first

sporkland

Article brought to you by your local AI agent.

ks2048

We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.

piker

> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][ https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-... ], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason. Got 'em

cmiles8

As companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.

stephbook

Astute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate. So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents. Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.

Bombthecat

Yeah, but until that, we can make a ton of money!

dlcarrier

For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too. Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.

aogaili

Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit. The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs. In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..

catchnear4321

There’s a 100% chance humans are ruining the internet with AI agents.

nesqi

Risk, not chance.