This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
AI is ruining the internet
Because YouTube’s algorithm is pretty good, I got served a Drew Gooden video the other day called “AI is ruining the internet,” and watched it all the way through.
Highly recommended. Drew’s a talented writer, editor, and performer — a great YouTuber, in other words. He’s been doing it for eight years and it shows.
Anyway, what he had to say was not necessarily fresh or unexpected, but it was immensely compelling. So much so that, with righteous fingers burning, I took to the keyboard.
First things first, he’s completely right. The version of the Internet most of us have become familiar with, the version that spawned social media and content farming and news streams and e-commerce — that version is being flooded and destroyed by AI. I won’t try to make the case better than he did, so if you’re not convinced, go watch the video.
The more interesting question, in light of this roiling disaster, is: What are we going to do about it?
The answer is human curation, and we already see it happening.
Here’s how it goes.
Either you’re satisfied with the unending tidal wave of AI garbage, or you’re not, and if you’re not, you’re going to look for alternatives. In other words, you will become part of the market’s appetite for solutions to the problem of AI pollution.
Some solutions already exist. Platforms like Substack, for instance, are reasonably immune. If anyone tries to generate a successful Substack publication with AI, that AI is going to have to be good enough to convince people to actually subscribe to it, and pay for it. And if the AI content is good enough to convince people to do that, then great! That means it’s actually valuable. But I doubt, very much, whether there will be a lot of that going on.
Substack, and platforms like it, are islands in a sea of algorithmically generated and curated content. As it becomes increasingly horrible to swim in the sea, more people will escape to the islands, and build bridges between them to completely avoid the toxic waters below.
I mentioned that some AI content might be good enough to convince people to pay for it, but there will also be an increasingly large percentage of people who refuse to engage with or pay for any AI generated content at all, no matter the quality. Let’s call them, oh, I don’t know, humanists? And these radical humanists are already building and relying on networks of trust. In those networks, if someone is caught pumping AI generated content into the system, no matter how good it is, they’ll get kicked off the island, so to speak.
The curation Internet is the true “Web3,” and it only has anything to do with blockchains insofar as they are useful tools for the humanists who make and manage the trust networks.
By polluting the ocean, AI is simply accelerating the ascendency of these networks, sort of the way a body’s immune system doesn’t kick online until an infection reaches a critical threshold.
We’ve known for a long time that the Internet was sick with the proliferation of garbage content relentlessly incentivized by the attention economy. Who would have thought that all we needed to start healing was to get sicker?
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