If you are anywhere on the internet today, you know how much the internet is now filled with posts, comments and content just generated straight up by Large Language Models (or LLMs). While I am amazed by how much just random numbers and next word prediction has progressed, and I am just truly annoyed by how much they are being overused. I’m all in on technology, and strongly believe that we all should progress and adopt new technology. Adopting new technologies makes us a better version of ourselves and spend more time on the actual fun-stuff and less on the boring parts.
I see people around me using these tools like ChatGPT, Gemini for writing birthday wishes, LinkedIn posts about a project that was clearly not vibe coded entirely by AI. Heck people are even using AI to write their entirely of social media feed.
I started using the internet back when there was no ChatGPT or any other AI which you could use to write out essays for you. The most advanced AIs I used know of were Stockfish, AlphaZero which were the strongest chess engines of the time. And the chatbot type AIs used to be Akinator, which amazed me back then how it worked. The only way how I would come up with design of such an algorithm would be to use a combination of if-else statements, and looking now I know that this wouldn’t suffice. Now with ChatGPT, people can just ask it to correct the grammar or ask it to write a shiny text for their new posts on social media. People seem to have just lost the concept of what makes social media social, it’s the people. By just eliminating yourself from the equation, it’s just pushing towards Dead Internet Theory.
I don’t want to read your 1000 word essay made with ChatGPT or any other fancy AI that’s in the town right now. If it’s a 10-word thing, I wanna read that 10-word description which you came up with yourself.
The situation is very disheartening for me since I used to love reading blogs, articles and stuff online. In fact that’s how I learnt a lot of stuff about technology. This is also in fact the reason why Reddit as a social media platform is so popular. Most of the content is user generated and as a forum it’s pretty popular. Reddit combined the fragmented communities which used to be scattered around various forums (although Reddit also led to the extinction of a lot of those forums, but that’s a topic for some other day). I still to this day follow a lot of individual blogs about technology and stuff that interests me. This AI slop culture makes me very sceptical of new writings, I just don’t trust if I’m reading some genuine writings written by some human who is sharing words of wisdom learnt through experience or some guy who just decided to fill the internet with some AI generated bullshit. I have followed engineering blogs since a while now, and more I keep on reading nowadays, I feel less like reading them, it seems like the ChatGPT effect has kicked in everywhere. A lot of people are now poisoning their original train of thoughts by using LLMs for writing things for them to increase the wordcount or to make it more fancy.
This is also one of the reasons why I don’t feel like writing blogs more often. Although I do have some more blogs I wanted to write to share my thoughts. I don’t know how many of my visitors are going to be these AI crawlers just crawling this page continuously and how many of them actual humans. But if atleast one other person learns something interesting thing from my writing, I’ll consider that I helped another version of me who learnt a lot about tech from blogs and articles written by some another stranger on the internet…
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