The Internet is Changing

The internet was made to connect humanity. But it is slowly becoming optimized for machines.

This is evident in how spam is a difficult problem to solve. Bots have been around forever. Before, it was really obvious to tell whether an online comment came from a bot, as they would usually be exactly the same. You could tell whether you were dealing with a bot farm because of this.

Now, with the advent of LLMs, it is more difficult than ever to determine whether there’s a human behind a message. And the worst part? Some people are delegating their posts to LLMs, which further contributes to the confusion.

The sea of information is being polluted with artificial responses.

There are tools that claim to check whether content is AI-generated, but even these are faulty. The problem is this bad, and we’re not even talking about deepfakes. It looks like the dead internet theory might be more true than ever.

But there’s a flipside. It means being human will be that much more valuable. People are already creating online communities that you can’t get into without knowing someone. I recently joined one, and it was great to see absolutely no spam or LLM-generated content.

This brings a question to mind: if LLMs are all over the internet, who is our target audience?

Many people are turning to LLMs for recommendations. Though many people still use Google, Google summarizes its search results using… AI. Meaning that LLMs went through a handful of sites and decided to recommend content from a select few to you.

But how are these sites selected? It turns out that LLMs prioritize LLM-readable sites, similar to how humans prefer readable sites. Though people will continue to browse the internet as before, sites that aren’t optimized for LLMs are slowly going to fall off. This is also why there’s an LLM-readable version of every page on my site!

This means your network will matter more than ever. It’s going to be important to put yourself out there so you’re not excluded from private events or communities.

Why are they going to be private? To keep out spam. This won’t be a problem for anything that requires your physical presence, but your online presence will be a different story.

Public sites will still be around.

But bots won’t be in those spaces.

They will be free of pollution, allowing humans to connect as the creators of the internet intended.