The Imminent Enshittification of the Internet
We recorded 6 claims from this post. 3 were checked against evidence. 3 can’t be checked. 4 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (6)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“And it’s on: the LLM-driven enshittification of the internet.”
Our reading: LLM-driven degradation (enshittification) of the internet is already under way.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: AI attribution was generally based on content evidence rather than access to generation records.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“But things have actually gotten worse than I anticipated.”
Our reading: Pollution of the internet by LLM-generated content became worse between February and August 2023 than Marcus had expected.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“And even worse, Amazon is starting to be a receptacle for inaccurate and exploitative quickie histories of recent events:”
Our reading: Amazon is starting to be a receptacle for inaccurate and exploitative quickie histories of recent events.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The retained dated evidence does not complete verification of specific material errors in the book.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“And of course LLMs are fully capable of make up truly terrible advice, too, like this disconcerting recipe from last week:”
Our reading: LLMs are fully capable of making up truly terrible advice, such as a disconcerting recipe from the previous week.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The example used deliberately hazardous ingredients; it does not establish how often harmful advice occurs in ordinary use [e1].
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“Cesspools of automatically-generated fake websites, rather than ChatGPT search, may ultimately come to be the single biggest threat that Google ever faces.”
Our reading: Automatically generated fake websites, rather than ChatGPT search, may eventually become the biggest threat Google ever faces.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“After all, if users are left sifting through sewers full of useless misinformation, the value of search would go to zero—potentially killing the company.”
Our reading: If users are left sifting through floods of useless misinformation, the value of search would fall to zero, which could kill Google.
No horizon
Only if: if users are left sifting through sewers full of useless misinformation
Held from this post (4)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Once LLMs make stuff up like that, that garbage will circulate from one LLM (stochastic parrot) to the next.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Not just the internet but Amazon too has been infested, as people are using GPT to create low-quality books.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: AI-powered search engines are taking in each other's errors (an echo chamber effect), as when Bard repeated a blunder copied from ChatGPT.