Are we just going to be chatting with bots now?

A few folks have been asking me where Spam Mail has been. It's here! And I want to chat about bots.

According to the dead internet theory, everyone on the internet but you is a bot. I never believed that everyone online is fake, but a lot of what I see can't be real people. LLMs now make it trivially easy for everything online to be a bot.

A recent 404 Media's investigation, Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet, shows just how many comments on Facebook are likely not real people:

I endlessly tried to talk to people who commented on these images, but I had no luck at all. Over the course of several months, I messaged 300 people who commented on bizarre AI-generated images, which I could only do 20 or so at a time before Facebook stopped letting me send messages for several hours. I also commented on dozens of images myself, asking for any human who had also commented on the image to respond to me. Across those hundreds of messages, I got four total responses. One person sent me a thumbs up emoji, then unsent the message. Another person said “your welcome,” one person said “ok” and another, who commented on the specific amputee Jesus Uncle Sam image above, said “Hi Jason. This is my account and this is not fake,” then didn’t answer any follow up questions.

And what about direct messages? An article by The Verge covers The teens making friends with AI chatbots. When we are facing an epidemic of loneliness, the solution of replacing humans with bots is sad.

For many Character.AI users, having a space to vent about their emotions or discuss psychological issues with someone outside of their social circle is a large part of what draws them to the chatbots. “I have a couple mental issues, which I don’t really feel like unloading on my friends, so I kind of use my bots like free therapy,” said Frankie, a 15-year-old Character.AI user from California who spends about one hour a day on the platform. For Frankie, chatbots provide the opportunity “to rant without actually talking to people, and without the worry of being judged,” he said.

It's unavoidable our experiences on the web will be increasingly with bots - from fake internet posts, customer support agents, deepfakes of dead loved ones, or something else.

Not all bots are bad, some are useful. But it's important we label a bot vs a real human. And it's important we don't replace necessary human-to-human connection with bots, like catching up with a friend or commiserating about your sports team losing again. Otherwise the web will become a lonely place.

💩 Cool shit

Prompt Library – Anthropic have an extensive library of LLM prompts. This has the feel of Google operators cheat sheets.

Your World of Text – Scroll through an infinite grid of editable text.

Do the Dishes – If you need to procrastinate work, why not do the dishes?

James Taylor-Foster's book-like site – This website is just delightful. It has the look and feel of a book while still feeling like a website.

AI Coordinate Plane – This is a fun little experiment to see how an LLM prompt changes on a 2x2 plot.

Reply Guy – Reddit has always felt like the last safe place for real opinions on the internet. That's simply untrue, especially when tools like this exist, which can promote your product on Reddit.

FlagWaver – It's a 3D flag.

Map of the web – I'm not sure how many websites this includes, but it's nonetheless an incredibly cool visualization of how the web is connected.

ChatGPT mind – This is a great experiment that visualizes the probabilistic aspect of LLMs.

Share this with a friend for Confirmation of Payment Transaction.