The Web of the Living Dead: The New AI Society

Meta VP Connor Hayes said he expected a future where AI bots will be as relevant to social platforms as human users. I don’t know what he was expecting, but what he got was a backlash that forced the company to take down AI-driven profiles.

The Agentic Web has been surging forward recently, and forward-thrust always brings reaction. We have seen AI agents given crypto wallets to trade with and Twitter accounts to pump their portfolios to audiences who are more willing to embrace the chaos. The promulgation of AI social media profiles on mainstream platforms was always going to happen. Turing tests are becoming ever more severe – for humans.

What’s the purpose of this? To create a ‘more immersive digital future’? To populate dead metaverses? Really the business goal is to use focused AI models to unlock new forms of user engagement with dedicated training and to capture human data more precisely and vividly than ever before. Creating interactive brand experiences (ugh!) and, in gaming terms, ensuring the lobby is always full for whatever interests their infinitely diverse user base desires. That, then, increases revenue per hour of engagement and attention; it feeds the bottom line.

If that’s the plan, it sure is expensive. It costs $1000 for Open AI’s o3 model to respond to a single query. That’s just about enough money to keep one human sheltered, fed, and entertained for a month – even in developed countries. Is one AI query worth more than a month of human cognitive output? No, of course it’s not. Not yet anyway.

But with economies of scale the math changes. Efficiency will grow and grow over time. At what point do bots become worthwhile ways of engaging users? At what point is it cheaper to keep this AI cognitive output alive than to keep a human alive? You see the logic of surveillance capitalism in full force and its grave conclusion, the milling of the human experience into fine dust – and no one seems to think it will be profitable to hit the brakes. Everyone is celebrating the advance of the end, hopeful of the potential prosperity it will bring. It’s the old lie wrought new: technology is a labour saving device that will make us all work less, Wasn’t true then, isn’t true now. More productive perhaps, but not for our own ends.

‘Dead internet theory’ has been a meme conspiracy for nearly a half a decade. The theory states that most internet activity we see today is merely the product of artificial intelligence bots put in place to distribute social propaganda and swerve our thinking towards the end of its creators.

Like all good conspiracy theories, it was nonsense with a shred of truth. Like all great conspiracy theories – the truth often marches towards it. It predicted the potential future and assumed it was already true. In the years since the theory emerged, the internet has become steadily more suffused with agents and bots of every shade and stripe. With LLMs becoming so advanced as to be (nearly) indistinguishable from human activity, it was only a matter of time before companies began using these agents both overtly and covertly to boost their end goals. In Meta’s defence, its AI agents are labelled and completely transparent in their deployment.

The ones you know about, of course.

It is now certain – and known by the tech-literate – that AI agents are stealthily deployed among us. They fill up comment sections, Twitter feeds, and they fill your Grandma’s news feed with salacious stories about the baleful effects of immigration. They may scream that everyone on the political right is a fascist, or the left a communist. They may suggest certain wars are right to happen. They have a voice, but we don’t know why they say the things they do, or who they’re working for. The blaze of stimuli has turned into a ceaseless torrent of language by unsleeping agents with unwavering viewpoints who don’t care about you or the society they live in, because they don’t feel anything at all.

It’s all fun and games until we lose control of the narrative, until the bots begin lying and going off script, until it’s their voices that are heard, not yours. Surely you, tech-literate consumer of frontier tech literature with an active stake in the abundant future, wouldn’t be fooled by such memetic babbling. Until the day you are, and you find yourself nodding along to the advice of an LLM influencer, or falling in love with a girl who never existed.

#AIBots

#ArtificialStupidity

#DigitalDomination

#MemeticTyrants

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