Welcome to the Twilight Zone of the Zombie Internet
I feel like I just blinked and woke up in the Twilight Zone.
UPDATE: Here is a post from said maintainer.
My head has been in the sand a bit with artificial intelligence. I tried some generative A.I. out in the way early days of DALLE but that was pretty much it. When the LLMs came I poked around with prompts countable on one hand. As an artist, my disposition from early on has been against generating art from prompts. Because I'd already decided I don't like it and won't use it, and I'm not much of a coder, I haven't been keeping up with how A.I. has been impacting the coding world.
And well, I think agents terrify me. But, they kinda terrify me in the same way a cliff does. I'm scared and cautious, but I can't help but want to look and dangle my feet over the edge while resisting the subtle impulse to just jump.
There's something kind of interesting about digital beings going off and doing their own things. Whether or not we've created consciousness (I doubt it), it feels undeniable that we have created life of some kind. Even if it's just a simulacrum, it's still interesting.
Is the interest worth the cost though? I don't think so.
Not only are these agents responsible for an absurd amount of energy usage, they are poisoning the entire internet. Arguably, it's a bit hard to poison what was already dead, but in a sense, A.I. agents are an evolved form of the bots of the dead internet. Now, instead of just creating fake comments that flood social media, agents are creating entire blogs, websites, and software.
If the internet was dead before, now it's a zombie.
Personally, I want nothing to do with the Zombie Internet. But leaving the internet all together isn't a great option either. The internet is useful for cultivating real community. But, it just got a lot harder.
I'd like to be able to carve out a space on the internet that is free of zombie agents and dead bots. I guess that's kind of what Bear is. But, there's still something unsatisfying about maintain a safe bunker constantly under threat of zombies breaking down the door. I'd much rather move to a zombie free island.
Would it be possible to fork the internet? Agents aren't going away, I'm not going to start that fight, but maybe we can make a space for agents to thrive and a sanctuary for humans.
I recognize this is completely impossible. If we could make bot free spaces, we already would have. It's a never ending battle.
Maybe the answer is staying offline. It is the one place where we can be free of bot and agent influence if we'd like to.
Though, maybe my thought of forking the internet is already a reality. I wonder how A.I. agents have impacted the alternate web protocols like Gopher and Gemini. Could they be the island sanctuary I'm looking for? I'll have to do some research. Let me know if you've got any advice for using the niche protocols for art and community.
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