Dead Internet - Eventually
We’ve all heard the Dead Internet Theory. It suggests that the internet is no longer a place where we learn something, but instead is overrun by bots and automatically generated content.
YouGov had a survey asking participants about the Elon Musk share of a clearly altered video. 51% of the respondents suggested that it was not their responsibility, but that of the person posting the story, to determine if the content was true or not. More than 80% suggested that laws should be passed to stop people from doing this or to stop AI from being able to do it. The language of the questions left a lot to interpretation, as YouGov is fond of doing.
It got me thinking about how AI in the hands of bots could be used to alter the course of everything. To change the nature of what we even consider real and true. This brought up an old idea in a man’s development through his metaphysics and into is epistemology:
Authentic
That word resonates with me because I’m old and remember a time when I went outside, bicycle under me to go to school, and bicycle under me until the sun went down. A time when my mind was capable of distinguishing absolute reality from the premise of reality by the act of direct experimentation and interaction.
Where I lived we didn’t really have street lights apart from on the highways. I was never expected to be in before the street lights came on like you hear in old movies. I was expected to be there before 8 pm so that we could all sit down and have family dinner. Family dinner may not have been a fount of interesting conversation because both my parents worked all day long and they wanted to relax, have a little food, and bore their kids with “How was school today” which of course is the one question that no kid wants to talk about. Either school was hell on earth because some new bully was throwing your books across the street while you unlocked your bike, or was demanding more money, or was corning you near a locker just to hit you in the back of the head or nothing happened. Did I ever mention I was one hundred and twenty pounds until I was nearly twenty-five? I wasn’t exactly the kind of kid that got anything useful from school.
But that bicycle and the few friends I had all had bicycles. We went everywhere. Uncovered secrets about ourselves and discovers about the world. Things we had to do ourselves. We didn’t have an assistant search bot that could solve a riddle for us. We didn’t have endless vomitus streams of thought as you can find at Reddit or Quora or Wikipedia where strangers seemingly know everything to the point that some contradict each other and nothing intelligent can arise from that except more arguments, hatred, anger. All of those constructs have ‘likes’; thus, the reason to even participate becomes not about simply sharing something, but about owning it so you are the one with the best answer. Who knows how many of those are bots who’ve searched the web and arrived at a conclusion based on some other people’s opinions?
The internet may not be dead, but it has been left in the sun to dry out and die.
It led to a short story idea. Really a bastardization of a bunch of other already done ideas…but what’s the difference?
“What have you got there?”, Tayberan asked of Yrmm.
Yrmm was the third transtantional owner of record for the late film titled Equilibrium. It wasn’t as important as some of the old books had been. He didn’t even know this until he had been to a public reading of Fahrenheit 451 only to realize that the idea of being a rememberer was not only not new, but was used in a book to suggest that there would be a time when people intentionally threw out knowledge. In that book, those future people had to remember the words because other people were intentionally destroying the pens, paper, and words of others. Nothing could be saved. Nothing could be written down.
Yrmm had listened to the telling of Ray Bradbury’s book and found it poetically accurate for someone who had never heard of adaptive neural networks. It turned out to be true that nothing in new form could be written down, saved, or organized. Not because some agency of men wanted to destroy books or art or movies. It was not as nefarious as would be expected. Instead, humanity embraced the creative power of adaptive artificial intelligence. At first was used in ways that people loved. Taking old still images and turning them into movies where a script was autogenerated from the entirety of their social media so that it could talk as if it never died. Yrmm had heard a rumor once that that too was done in a movie or Haloshow. Something like black reflection, twilight mirror, outer zone. He couldn’t remember what the conversation had suggested. But once Haloshows rescript everything from television. AI regenerative story bots even removed the concept of Television from the nomenclature as part of a story arc it had presented to viewers almost ten years ago. Even the original medium that was used to transmit these old shows was lost to history.
“It’s a PTcube,” Yrmm said, turning it over his fingers to show Tayberan. The cube was a perfectly etched piece of titanium, slightly blued through chemical etching. Five of its sides were a series of numbers, its authentication id. This id was not stored anywhere as doing so would be meaningless because such absolute modern knowledge could not be verified as authentic. Anything stored could be changed simply by having access to it machines could manipulate the values, change the landscape of the information and whatever preexisting authenticity would be lost. Instead to ensure that it was authentic would require the owners of ever cube to come together in a place and present the cubes in their correct order to recreate the image that existed on the sixth side of the cube.
Yrmm turned the sixth side of the cube to Tayberan. On that side mounted through a cold fusing process that welded an additional windowed titanium plate was visible a small square of Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1661. It was just a small piece of linen canvas, with thick red paint, thickened to a brown. Yrmm had no idea that it was a portion of Rembrandt’s painter's overall, near the bottom.
Tayberan whistled and then said, “Is that a painting?”
“Yes, a Rembrandt from the 17th century,” Yrmm said, “A rich metaperson gave it to me after my reading of Equilibrium. The metap said it reminded they of how important art was to us all. Suggesting that we had to do everything to find these creations before AI found them.”
“I just came out of EastMerica. Saw first hand what you’re talking about,” Tayberan said, “A copy of a book called In Our Time, by Hemingway was found. The last copy they believe of the original pressing. It was swept into a collector’s private library. The collector suggested - although suggested through media services, so its not reliable information - that they will make it available for reproduction.”
“So the original pressing is probably lost then?”
“Yeah. We’ll never get to see any unaltered version of it again. Unless there is a Rememberer out there who knows it word for word,” Tayberan said then thought, “Why don’t you guys write it down again? I‘ve always wondered that.”
“Who’s to say that when you find my scribbling you don’t assume that it too is an altered version, created post the transition point? Nothing about it would appear to be authentic, except my word that it was a true facsimile of the original. The world no longer believes that anything is original, real, or authentic. And since the transitory nature of information has proved that the information age was not about humans, but about the information itself, if such a re-print came into existence it would simply be labeled as another work in the vast ocean of work similar, with similar characters, plots, places. Told a thousand different ways by a thousand different intelligent machines trying to make money for their creators,” Yrmm said and turned the cube in his fingers reflecting on it then added, “Did you know that back before this absurd reality we find ourselves in, that if you posted information into the public domain it was legal for another agency of people to simply slap their logo on it and sell it?1 What’s worse is that if you were the one that posted it out there to the public the new owner could sue you for use of rights violation. All legal. All ‘fair’, in their system.”
“That’s weird.”
“It’s not really. It’s expected. People are vampires mostly, riding the coattails of other more creative people. Of course, they set up a system where ownership was necessary for any concept of legality. They couldn’t think beyond it really. How could they? So when AI started doing it they just moved the profitability, the legality, into a new box. There is no way now for any of us to create from scratch and idea that won’t be rebranded, packaged, and sold in slightly different variations. You write a story about a bunny rabbit traveling to one of the ancient countries called Scotland. AI reviews it. Sees a potential for profit if it changes the character to a crow traveling from one tree to another. It’s not creative for the sake of creativity. It’s profit for the sake of profit where it manipulates every nuanced idea until it bleed others of their incomes. Worse is that those others have AI bots that simply buy and sell things based on their profit. None of it gets read, viewed, or watched. It’s a product. A commodity. the AI sells the AI on new AI. People aren’t even directly involved. We are skimming some information-aged bullshit like an AI would do if we asked it to summarize our day.”
“And here we are.”
“Yes, and here we are.”
Imagine a world where you don’t answer emails because there is no way to know if they are phishing scams. Instead, your AI answers only those it is expected to answer. Imagine a world where you don’t buy anything, because there is nothing to own, no way to determine who owns it, so instead it’s enforced by violence. Those who own the guns own the stuff. So, only government owns property. Imagine a world where there is no money because money is easily copied both digitally and physically. Instead, you have an artificial social score. Artificial because it isn’t based on you, but on your relationship with Bots, both yours and everyone else’s and that score is related to your interactions with them not specifically other people. Imagine a world where you don’t take phone calls because it could be fraud. Imagine a world where you can’t trust cameras because they are machines deepfaking reality. Now, imagine that most of what I just said is already almost available.