The internet has gone from annoying to unusable. It once could be insipid or dangerously temptacious—Now I can’t even bear to be on it.
One would be justified in wondering why I haven’t posted videos or articles in a while. I’ve taken breaks in the past—sometimes for months, but starting around 2023 I nearly entirely went radio silent. After a bit of a personal break, the internet I came back to was entirely different. The bad seeds were already there when I left, but they had come to blossom in quite ugly fruit.
I had complained in 2021 that search engines had already become entirely useless due to algorithmically-generated sites that even back then were probably most of the internet. Even then, searching nearly any query would be met with a long string of fake sites with algorithmically generated text to garner clicks and ads.
Now LLMs/AI have so significantly exacerbated this ratio of signal to noise that there really are no “results” in search engines. Search engine results are simply 100% auto-generated. Nearly every page you see in the results of a very specific query might have never been seen by another human.
The Narrative
One of the most dangerous social, political, academic, scientific, religious, spiritual, economic etc. outcomes of this is that LLMs/AI have now taken a snapshot of the standard political and social narratives at the instant of their inception and that will serve as the “input” and the proving ground of narrative norms of the future. When everyone’s favorite AIs are all trained on the same dataset and thus confabulate the consensus views of that data set (plus or minus the biases of the wielder), this will calcify a certain set of “right answers” or “academic/social/etc. consensus.”
This is the dangerous thing that Wikipedia has already done in part, but instead of being on one particular site that any informed person knows should not be trusted on certain issues, it will be the background narrative for the entire internet and all people who rely on it for their thoughtless decisions.
Some of my critiques of the way that academia or media have worked in the past are now being absolutely dwarfed by the even greater problem that there will now be an AI-enforced social norm of everything from narratives of history to medicine to economics. There will be variation, but what is important is that the whole system is incestuous: today’s AI output not only “educates” a new generation of “thinkers,” but also directly serves as the input to new AI algorithms.
This ultimately means convergence on one set narrative, one official “Wikipedian” narrative which of course is the product of lying text and word generators that are written and trained to be well calibrated to “sound right” to humans.
Increased, Not Decreased Reliance on Noise
People also use AI more explicitly as a consultant than they ever did search engines. I’ve run into a lot of people who troubleshoot very basic problems—nor do I mean only technology problems, but other things as well—through AI. If anything, the algorithmically-derived nature of AI and search engines radically decreases the signal to noise ratio in digital technology, but the illusion of the customized, specific and linguistically competent and confident AIs goes very far to make people believe in the magic trick.
So at the moment where our technology is least helpful and most empty or random, we are trusting it ever more.
Even YouTube
When I did the video above, I believe I noted that YouTube (or any video site) is at least a little more shielded from algorithmic content than normal text websites. After all, it even now is still much easier to auto-generate text websites than videos, and although there were some algorithmically generated YouTube channels around even then, LLMs and other tools have made fake videos now the norm.
This difference has been very stark to me in my hiatus from the internet. Suddenly, in 2025, when I would be watching a very specific video on a rare and arcane topic, I would see recommended videos that at least by title and thumbnail were precisely what I’d like to see—and not little 3 minute Wikipedia reads—long videos that certainly looked to be what I should want.
Invariably, they were AI. AI vibe-coders have created entire fake people and fake personas for algorithmic channels.
The other day, quite ironically, in searching for home-management recommendations, I stumbled across an “Amish man’s” YouTube channel, started recently and with many views. The channel’s video’s scripts were very interest-piquing and I certainly would have wanted to watch more if it wasn’t obvious that the clips that made up the video, including the “Amish man” himself weren’t AI-generated—that and the recommendations of the channel were only either provocative or inert, like all AI.
What is now disturbing is that that one fake “Amish” channel is the norm. Every new YouTube channel should be assumed to be fake, because frankly nearly all of them are. They produce huge numbers of high-impact, well-targeted videos very quickly.
The People Are Becoming AI.
My relationship with AI is entirely non-consensual. I don’t want it. I never wanted it. It causes nothing but harm.
But what is most perplexing, but really embarrassing to me is that there are people who in previous times I might have had some degree of trust in who have enjoyed “riding the tiger” of AI.
I must report that I have lamentably found out that a number of people whose work I used to admire have now taken to leaning on AI to do most of their thinking for them or writing articles of even books for them.
I remember one of the old 2018-ish Twitter accounts I used to like, Faceberg, making some quite accurate doom prediction: that influencers, even “based” ones, would be slowly replaced by algorithms that slowly shift their narrative and shepherd their followers into the control they imagined they would escape. (If someone has the original post, please send me it.)
As far as I’m concerned, the only inaccuracy of this is that the “based” influencers are often doing it to themselves. First, they export their work and thinking to an AI, but in the same way that someone who used Google Maps ceases to be able to navigate without their surrogate brain, the thinker gradually becomes more AI-reliant—their narratives become adulterated without their knowing, or first in a way that doesn’t seem to bias them in another direction. But when the “Google Maps” is taken away, what happens?
The AI hoax is the new COVID hoax. The only silver lining is that you can easily distinguish who you can trust and who you can’t based on how they react to it.
Let my reaction be known: I want no part of it. I will never use AI. I will never lean on it. I will never even consult it. I will never troubleshoot software with it. I will never use it to condense information. I will never use it to even generate images or other grunt work. I’m sorry, I can deal with not having it. It’s easy.
I consider AI tainted and every thought filtered through it as tainted. Code made by it is tainted. Let this be my “irrational” abstinence from AI.
Last year, when a made a video talking about the AI craze, I flippantly referred to it as “demonic” with a somewhat jocular smirk. I only take back the jocular smirk. I will abstain from AI as if it were morally tainted or demonic.
And, you know I hate to make one of these asides despite the many atheists who read and watch me, but please do me the pleasure and ask yourself: Suppose you were an evil incorporeal being that had some ability to influence matter, but wanted to conceal yourself—what would be the best way to influence people without being detected as breaking the normal chain of physical causality? Certainly the ideal would be a kind of technology which is nearly entirely unauditable (not like a typical computer program), but nonetheless capable of imposing complex ideas and thoughts to humans. LLMs/AI are the first and best example of such technology.
Social Media Sites
The last pretended bastion of humanity on the internet is the worst part of it: Social media sites. Social media sites have at least peripheral interest in keeping some pretense that the people on it are mostly thinking humans.
Of course, “the algorithm,” which is truly the filter through which a person sees the site and the world is entirely automated, uncontrollable and nowadays based on AI.
But even more I will just state that I feel after that hiatus from the internet, the little interaction I occasionally have with a social media site seem quite “different,” uncanny and algorithmic. It’s actually exactly the same as the difference between pre-AI YouTube and post-AI YouTube.
That is, I might be directed to a thread on Twitter or R*ddit, but nearly everything seems fake. The humor is different, the target of the posts unclear, the narratives are a little off, conciseness and wit, funny or not, are entirely gone.
Of course, in a world when creating a hundred algorithmic accounts is easier than making two run by humans, this is no surprise. I have no doubt that we are indeed operating on a “dead internet.” As I said in a video last year, “the algorithm” of these sites functions as a Skinner’s Box which also trains certain behavior even in the minority of accounts genuinely operated by humans.
AI still isn’t special.
I do want to be clear, LLMs/AI, despite what their venture capitalists and cultists would have you believe, are still not transformative. As specific technologies, in fact, they haven’t in the least even changed the orientation or the speed of the demise of the internet.
LLMs are doing faster what other simpler algorithms were already doing when I complained in the video above four years ago. I suspect if the specific technique of LLMs had not been developed, we would have other creative algorithms to generate the mindless filler on the internet that is most easily monetizable.
I feel like the cult around AI, and it is very much a cult, is a kind of religious experiment to which attempts to offset the stultification and degradation AI has caused in the internet with some vague optimistic belief that it is something wonderful or futuristic.
The Sinking Ship of the Internet
Obviously one of the recurrent themes of my online presence is the important of life, which is the thing that takes place when neither at a computer, nor with an eye on a phone screen.
I almost wish my personal struggle against the internet had lasted longer: I wish there were still something addictive on it to tempt me. I wish there would be some goodness in it for goodness’s sake.
There have been times where the internet has been a kind of guilty pleasure to me that I’d have to avoid, but that has entirely passed; it genuinely pains me to be on it. There’s just nothing on it anymore.
I did publicly pine for the return of the 1990’s internet, and since most of the web is now just inert, the only way to actually use it would be individually browsing individual people’s sites whose humanity (and abstinence from AI) is beyond question. We effectively have been forced into that position, but we still need to reinvent discoverability and networking between small sites.
The Forced Pivot to Reality
I used to occasionally have great ideas for things I wanted to do on or via the internet. As this terrible era has come, however,—and perhaps it is for the best—I think nearly exclusively in terms of what can be done in reality.
I would rather meet and arrange events with people in real life, to meet and talk and exchange ideas in local ventures, schools or churches than I would do the same on a “bigger scale” on the internet. I will not say that the “big scale” of the internet is a bad or non-existent thing, but I am merely personally reporting that my interest in the YouTube/internet grind is quite low as a means of accomplishing things. It still may be the easiest way to reach a large audience, but if that cannot translate into something real and significant in reality due to the distraction and noise of the medium of the internet, that might not means as much as one might think.
So perhaps that’s me saying I’m more open to doing live events and meet-ups? That’s not how I expected this article would end, but I suppose it is the case and the next logical step. Contact me if interested and serious.