More than half a year has passed since my post about modern web, and things haven’t gotten any better, sadly. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a video called "Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer" on Freya Holmér’s YouTube channel. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time, but my thoughts tend to be really jagged and all over the place. This video, on the other hand, is so to the point that I really recommend finding a free hour to watch it and see the problem demonstrated for yourself. I really like the parasite analogy - you can find it around the 1:05:18 mark.

Here’s the problem: most people don’t understand how generative AI and LLMs work, and they think it’s actual "artificial intelligence," which drives me fucking crazy. This delusion creates a huge number of problems and miscommunication, making the web worse and worse. People think it’s magic, they embrace it, companies shove it into their products and workflows, and now we have what we have - a web bloated with nonsense "articles" and a completely fucked-up, unusable search.

The video I mentioned earlier demonstrates that around 90% of search results are AI-written (and usually incorrect) articles or ads for shitty services selling "AI solutions" to your problem. Want to convert a file? Try our AI-driven service for $19.99 a month! Fuck off, mate.

And I experience the same thing more and more. The number of times I’ve had to add "reddit" to the end of my searches just to get human answers is unbelievable. Even for basic problems, I need to search on fucking Reddit because every other page is a joke. (Is there any browser add-on to filter out these sites? Maybe our new reality is having both an ad blocker and an "AI-blocker" enabled at all times.)

I think a lot of people don’t understand why this is dangerous: LLMs are not intelligent. They won’t tell you when they "don’t know" something - they’ll just hallucinate and make stuff up on the fly, giving you more incorrect information the more specific your question is. But you can’t stop the hype. And I think what frustrates me even more is knowing that the tool itself is fine (once again, I’m not even talking about ethics or machine learning here), but the real problem is people. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Every tool has its pros and cons, but in this situation, a huge number of people simply don’t understand the core principles of how this tool works. Maybe it’s a marketing issue - I don’t know. Obviously, if companies told their customers that it’s not actually AI, just a fancy autocomplete, no one would buy it. But should we sacrifice the entire web for the sake of business, SEO, and marketing strategies? Sounds kind of sad and stupid, idk.

By the way, here’s a great video explaining the difference between actual AI and what we have right now: "AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway" by Angela Collier. I think this should be explained to everyone - maybe then we’ll be able to escape this tech-bro fever dream we’re stuck in.

As I already said, I don’t want to go deep into the ethics of it because I’d get incredibly pissed off. That side of the situation frustrates me the most. And to everyone who thinks "AI art" is cool and that it’s even art in the first place - please leave this planet immediately. If you don’t want to draw, or you don’t want to write a song, then don’t fucking do it! Using stolen art to generate garbage should be illegal and publicly condemned.

And to the people who say AI will destroy humanity - humans will do it better than anything else if they keep believing every word that corporations and billionaires feed them.

I want to believe this is just a temporary problem - some new thing appears, and no one knows how to deal with it for a while. I hope that’s the case, because otherwise, we’re fucked. I don’t see any real alternatives right now. I’ve tried different search engines, and everything looks the same - thousands of AI-generated bullshit pages, a few real ones, and things are only getting worse. I’m completely moving to the small web for now - otherwise, I’ll definitely go crazy.

Sorry for the rant, but this shit triggered me too much. We had such a beautiful thing in our hands, and now everyone’s just raping it, shitting on it, and thinking it’s cool. Fuck all these people.