Category: ranting

This week saw the release of the long awaited final season of Stranger Things. My younger daughter and I are still working our way through the previous seasons. We should have started earlier but, c’est la vie, we won’t be ready to start the new season for at least another week (I’m traveling for work which makes it worse…)

Yesterday when we sat down to watch a couple of more episodes of season 3 my daughter mentioned she had seen a minor spoiler for season 5 on Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever. She’s a teenager and she spend too much time doom scrolling, especially during the school holiday, which for Singaporean kids started recently.

This got me thinking. This sort of spoiler filled social media has been a thing for a while. I think it hit its height during the release of Avengers: Endgame. People want to talk about the shows or things they like (to say nothing of people who will do anything to make a living via social media…) and the algorithm is going to push that into your feed if it’s popular and you have ever interacted with any content it thinks is similar. So if you have ever scrolled through Stranger Things memes you’re going to get Stranger Things season 5 spoilers.

AI should fix this. The social media companies should have a function where I can tell their AI “I don’t want any Stranger Things spoilers”. And the AI should then filter all that shit out of my feed until I tell it otherwise. The sort of fuzzy logic language and image processing that GenAI is lauded for should be able to handle this.

In fact, this would be a good feature to clean up your feed about anything. The algorithms are too damn aggressive. Someone sends you one funny clip about something you don’t care about for a laugh and your feed is polluted with that shit for weeks as the algorithm begs you to interact with more of the same.

I have not found the “generate a unique emoji” or search with AI features of AI in social media apps to be of any utility. I think the ability to craft my feed through instructions to the AI would be much more useful.

Maybe they don’t want us to filter things out, I’m not sure if there is anyway to properly filter your feed, I’m too lazy to find out, the more bullshit in my feed the less I use social media. Which is a good thing. But maybe the issue is the AI is not really so powerful?

I’ve been frustrated with the AI they shoved into search in the past. I have not been able to find specific posts that include images or language I describe to the search AI with any success so maybe the AI is not so good. Several times I’ve tried to use the Meta AI in search to find a reel in Instagram where a specific creator talked about a specific topic so I can share it. It always fails. It can find the creator but doesn’t seem to filter the feed at all. It prompts for follow up questions but can’t seem to filter the first set of results for the input I give it. I’ve tried a first search for a creator and check, got them. Then, when I ask it to find the specific post where said creator talked about topic X? Nope, I get random fucking results about X and never the one from the creator I just searched for.

So maybe the AIs are not as good as they want us to think. Or maybe they just need to tune them. But I think a spoiler blocker, or a more general topic blocker, feature using AI would be very useful.

Life has no plot. No meaningful plot.

Daniyal Mueennuddin, preface to A Sportsman’s Notebook: Stories by Ivan Turgenev

You haven’t lost the plot. There is no plot. There was never a plot.

I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.

My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:

I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.

And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:

As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.

[…]

Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.

The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]

I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).

On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.

I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.

I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.

This week I dropped my oldest daughter off in Melbourne to start her adventures in higher education. She’s just about to turn 17, and she is starting a Foundation Year program. An intensive year that replaces the final couple of years of high school or A-Levels or whatever your local final pre-college schooling is. Assuming she passes, she will go straight into the University next year.

I hope she has a great time. I believe, and have always told my daughters, that they should “get away from home” for college. Because, I saw what a difference distance made to the experience. When I was at George Mason I had a couple of friends who were local, in the sense that their family was a commute away not a trip away. They could go home any night for dinner, laundry or to fix their parent’s computer issues. And they did.

This created a situation where they never really left home. Parent want to see their kids, and free laundry (done for you!) and home cooking are a powerful sirens call for college kids. But, in the end, this created a situation where people struggled to cut the umbilical cord, where it was easy to put off adulting a little longer. In the end this was suffocating. I had one friend that realised this, and he transferred to another school several hours away. It made a world of difference for him. So we all came the conclusion that if you are going to go to college, go. Go far. Go far enough that you can’t run home on a whim or in an emergency, you can’t stop by for dinner or spend the weekend in your bedroom at home. You have to grow up and deal with it all yourself.

Now, I’m watching my daughter put into practice this oft repeated pearl of parental wisdom, and it’s hard. In addition to being my daughter, for the past few years she has been a great friend. Countless morning sitting at our local Starbucks during Covid lockdowns. Sitting at home and watching so many movies: sharing the classics —Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Thing, Alien, even 2001: A Space Odyssey— and discovering new classics. Hours of playing BotW and TotK, and Hollow Knight.

Being able to be a parent and also being a friend has been amazing.

So it’s with a little sadness —and a few tears— and a whole lot of excitement and joy that I said “bye for now” to her today. I wish her good luck, the best of luck. I hope she has a wonderful adventure, makes lifelong friends and some new core memories. But I can’t wait until she comes home on breaks to visit and we can sit at Starbucks or watch a new movie. I’m counting the days till her first break.