With DALL-E for pictures and this for video, I'm starting to wonder if Neal Stephenson was onto something when he wrote Fall, or Dodge in Hell.

I know it's not the most loved Stephenson book, but bear with me (spoilers warning). The book features a couple of major plot points that feel increasingly prophetic:

- A global hoax, carefully coordinated, convinces a good chunk of the world that Moab has been destroyed by an atomic bomb. This is managed via a flurry of confusion, thoughtfully deployed pre-recorded video footage, social media posts, and paid actors who don't realize the scope of the hoax at the time. Naturally, a massive chunk of the population refuses to believe that Moab still exists even after the hoax is exposed.

- A group of hackers deploy and open source a massive suite of spambots that inundate social media and news sources with nonstop AI-generated misinformation to drown out real-world conversations about a topic. This is used specifically to drown out real conversation about a single individual as a proof of concept, but soon after has repercussions for the entire net...

- Thanks to exactly this kind of spambot, the "raw" unfiltered internet becomes totally unusable. Those with means end up paying for filtering services to keep unwanted misinformation out of their perspective of the internet. Those without means... either don't use the internet, or work in factories where human eyes filter out content that can't be filtered by AI.

I worry that exactly these kinds of developments are speeding us faster and faster down the road to a dystopian world where the "raw" internet is totally unusable. Right now, stuff like captcha and simple filters can keep out a lot of low-effort bot content on sites like Hacker News and niche forums (I think of home barista, bike forums, atlas, etc). Sites like Reddit are losing the war against bots and corporate propaganda; comment sections across the rest of the internet lost that war long ago, and just didn't realize it.

But those filters and moderators can only keep up with the onslaught of content for so long. What happens when GPT is used to spew millions of comments and posts at a forum from millions of ephemeral cloud IPs? And when DALL-E creates memes and photographic content? And when Make-a-Video enables those same spambots to inundate YouTube and Vimeo? It's clear that captchas are not long for this world either.

Will we see websites force more and more users to authenticate as a "real human" using their passport and government-issued ID? Maybe a Turing or Voight-Kampff test? And what does it mean when there's no longer a way to participate on the internet anonymously? As far as I can tell, limiting a site to only real human users doesn't guarantee quality -- all you have to do is look at Facebook to understand that. And somehow, despite being an incredibly easy target for bots and spam, niches of 4chan retain (racist, insane, and confusing) traces of genuine thought and conversation.

The internet has been such a valuable tool in my life, and I still love browsing blogs, forums, etc. to learn about unique people doing unique things. What happens when human-generated content is hard to come by and near impossible to distinguish from promotional AI garbage? I fear for my ability to discover new content in that world.