I am sure you have already heard about the AI Bubble we are in. The self-dealing between tech companies with nVidia at the center of it all. It’s clear that it is just a matter of time till it pops. Enough other people that are smarter about finance than me have already gone deep on just how much this is going to hit our economy as a whole. It will be bad, but that is not what I am here to discuss.
What I want to discuss is what comes after the bubble pops from a technical standpoint and the impacts that will have on society as I see it.
DOTCOM REDUX
Think back to the DotCom boom and bust. While the AI Bubble is on a much larger scale, it will be quite similar. It will destroy hundreds of companies. A least one Trillion dollar company will probably collapse badly enough they will get acquired by someone who remains. But being honest, AI will survive. Just lot web marketplaces and search engines didn’t die with the DotCom crash.
Sure, AI likely won’t be as free as it is today, but that won’t matter to my next point.
AI is destroying the internet. AI Bubble bursting will not stop this from happening. State actors and people with more money than sense will continue to utilize AI services or run their own instances of AI to produce endless streams of slop and continue to flood YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, every comment section, tons of fake new SEO’d websites, everything. They will do this to make money, to manipulate the gullible, to brainwash youth who don’t have pre-frontal cortexes strong enough to resist it yet. They won’t care that they are losing $5 on every failed video they make, because they will have billions or trillions in tax dollars behind them to spend.
And it will work. It will accomplish their goals, until it doesn’t anymore. Even when the payoff plummets. Even as the new manipulatable users dry up. They will keep pumping the money in until the services themselves die or finally clean house.
Some estimates have AI content generating over 70% of all new internet content already. I personally believe it’s closer to 90%. Within 2 years it will be nearly 100% of all new content. It will be all but impossible for actual human content creators to keep up with the output of AI even all humans collectively. Even if any of the big video or text platforms wanted to prevent AI Slop, the tools just don’t exist yet. When they do eventually exist, it will be an arms race that will make cleaning up email spam look easy.
But as it is, they are all happily embracing the AI Slop. They will happily let it destroy services currently making them billions just to make the next few quarters look a bit better. Then, a couple years from now, they will wonder where all the real users have gone and why ad spend on their services is dropping off a cliff.
THE UPSIDE
Right now, AI created content is new and interesting. it is getting a lot of views, people are amazed what it can do, but as it takes over people are going to get bored. Sure, there is a ton of people who are believing all the fake video clips today, but people have already lost trust in the truthfulness of media and AI is only going to make that worse. Within a couple years, when almost all content on major platforms is purely AI generated, will people still be tuning in? Will they continue believe anything and everything they see anymore?
I believe they won’t. Sure, 20% of people will always buy into everything. It’s like the old X-Files poster, they want to believe. But already, at least in my small circle of life, people are giving up on everything from Google search results to anything YouTube “recommends”. The AI Slop is burning people out.
My perspective is we are ripe for what I hope will be Web 4.0. The human web. A growth of sites like Nebula, Daily Kos, and other curated communities where people choose to visit so they can appreciate content that is only from real human beings. More private communities form where people share interesting content directly with each other like we already see on services on Discord and Line (in Japan). These sites and services will pride themselves in blocking AI content.
If we are truly lucky, as this eventual shift occurs to more trustworthy and strongly moderated human-driven content, we may also see a return to factual reporting and a destruction of some of the hateful and misinformation filled bubbles people are currently sucked into.
Let’s hope it’s not just the AI Bubble that pops. Let’s hope it takes done most of the “influencer” culture of crypto scammers and all the grifters with it.
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