I always laugh heartily when folks reference this theory. I came from gen 0 Internet days. Long before the first LLM ever consumed a token, the Internet had already been killed. Geocities, tripod, DOZENS of search engines, web rings, communities, ALL self organized. E commerce did not exist. Perl via cgi-bin was how dynamic things happened. JavaScript was a clock.
AI did not kill it, WE DID. We monetized it all and now it feels cheap and artificial and bought, and not sincere and thoughtful and perfectly imperfect. Social media, and the artificial importance of “engagement” has done more damage to this part of our shared culture than any autocorrect-on-steroids has.
I always laugh heartily when folks reference this theory. I came from gen 0 Internet days. Long before the first LLM ever consumed a token, the Internet had already been killed. Geocities, tripod, DOZENS of search engines, web rings, communities, ALL self organized. E commerce did not exist. Perl via cgi-bin was how dynamic things happened. JavaScript was a clock.
AI did not kill it, WE DID. We monetized it all and now it feels cheap and artificial and bought, and not sincere and thoughtful and perfectly imperfect. Social media, and the artificial importance of “engagement” has done more damage to this part of our shared culture than any autocorrect-on-steroids has.