In 1997 I wrote a crime novel in which villains exploited this thing called the Internet – it was science fiction, I was told, so was never published. In 2025 it would be old hat. I was an early user of the internet, having flirted with JANET at university in the 80s then using the web routinely from the mid-90s. When Facebook came along I was tagged by an old digging chum and joined up to see what it was about. It’s a platform I’ve really enjoyed, with about 1100 friends roughly split between writers, archaeologists, travellers and old friends.
This week Facebook showed its utility. I came across a refererence to a paper I needed to read for the Nunnery book that is almost finished. Within an hour of putting out an appeal, two friends had found the address of the author, one had found the actual article and another offered to hunt it down. I used to think that going on Facebook was a bit like walking into a very large and crowded pub. You bump into a few old friends, show them a photo of your new kitten and try to ignore the drunks yelling at the back.
Another evening this week I came across a page called ‘Yorkshire Humour’ and somehow an hour passed watching amusing and scatalogical joke videos about typically English problems. Intrigued by the complex overlays of the gag in the foreground and bizarre happenings in the background I investigated, and found it was produced by a creater called Artificial Idiot. The content was built using AI – I had fallen into the trap.
This was a road-to-a virtual Damascus moment. My feed was thereafter filled by AI created content – joke videos, offbeat music videos and what has been called AI slop. The internet is suddenly full of it. We can no longer trust ANY image or video or sound clip viewed on our PCs or phones, barring possibly those filtered by bona fide outfits such as the BBC. We can no longer share anything certain that it won’t be scooped up and used without our consent.
From the pandemic onwards, as a late night wind-down I scroll through my Google feed. The algorythm has worked out that I like stories about space, archaeology, SF, movies, gaming and country music, which means I’m generally fed the kind of stuff I’m likely to read. Except a strong filter is increasingly needed as there are a lot of para-archaeology out there (aliens built the pyramids) and a fair amount of para science (aliens built comet 3I/Atlas). A lot of the pieces are recycled from other sites. Local newspapers plead for my attention with headlines such as ‘Exact Date Snow Expected in UK’ but the articles are mostly unreadable due to the intrusion of averts mid-story, and buzzing away at the top and bottom of the screen. Increasingly it’s the BBC and a few trusted sites that get my attention – sorry Times and New Scientist but you have paywalls.
We are weary of spam and those incessant hacking and phishing attempts via email and texts – I’ve been getting ‘Nigerian Letters’ for 30 years now. Increasingly annoying is the number of scammers and fake accounts on the various writing forums I follow. Most of them don’t even try to hide that they’re operating from (sorry) Nigeria, displaying poor grammar and loose English nobody on a writing forum should use. It’s depressing to note that around half my new Instagram followers are Only Fans strippers and people pushing Bitcoin, plus the usual parade of illiterate scammers pretending to be editors, publishers etc. The stats screen shows this blog is followed all around the world, read avidly every week in China, but it’s a matter of debate how many of my followers are bots.
Twitter (okay, X) has become a bear pit of culture wars squabbling, and almost no ‘facts’ presented by left or right or anything related to Israel/Ukraine/Immigrants or this week’s hot potato can be trusted. A surprising number of my bright and thoughful friends are taken in by this and share it. Other than the hate and disinformation, my X-feed is full of other people’s crime book promotions generated auto-refreshed every couple of hours, often supported by AI images. Hundreds of my contacts switched to Bluesky which seems innocous but is almost as boring and pointless as LinkedIn. Empty caves in which to yell.
Google and other search engines now have AI search tools, which are mostly completely useless. They scrape the most obvious information, can give unbelievably dumb answers, and even make stuff up; ‘hallucinating’ as one observer commented today. Some tools such as Google Lens can be incredibly useful, for example identifying a plant or a butterfly. But I asked it to identify a porcelein mark the other week and it informed me the mark was probably on a piece of pottery that looked dirty. I asked what the crown and cypher was, and it explained what a crown is and what a cypher is. Then of course the internet is full of information that is incomplete, incorrect, out of date or deliberately false and AI can’t tell one from the other. Worse, errors become self-reinforcing so when you start to cross-check a fact you will find multiple sites confirming it, all of which have been fed from the same trough.
Sadly, Facebook has become a shadow of its original, lively, pub-on-a-Friday vibe. The feed is now full of adverts, clickbait, AI videos and groups the robot thinks I’ll like. Actual posts from flesh and blood friends are lost somewhere three or four screens down. There are 1100 of you, I think, surely some of you have done something interesting today. It’s a shame.
The internet is dying. If we cannot trust anything we see or read, then why bother looking at it? It becomes that free newspaper we used to have shoved through the door every Thursday packed with adverts and advertorial pap and only handy for next week’s telly or lining the gerbil cage. I used to work in museums, and what appeals to museum visitors is that the objects and images there are real, created by real people with stories to tell. We value voracity, but voracity is vanishing. Some say Twitter is already beyond redemption and Facebook will suffocate under the tsumami of AI created pigswill. Amazon is shifting from a useful online ordering platform to a corporate monster plaguing us with content we don’t want and encouraging us to buy sh*t we don’t need; which we do because we’re signed up to Prime and get free postage.
Tech companies are stealing the work of millions of authors, creatives and even everyday users such as you, gentle reader; your emails, your posts, your online photos (but please don’t copy and paste those verbose statements saying you deny permission for this to happen, because that’s another scam). The data will be used to create more slop – ‘novels’ that are pastiches of real writing, ‘news’ that is cut-and-paste from unreliable sources, AI ‘actors’ who are facsimiles, images produced by a programme that is unaware that pigs don’t have five legs.
I’m not a total luddite, AI has some fantastic potential to crunch data on the frontiers of science and medicine. It’s just wasted creating toilet jokes or faux Agatha Christie mysteries. And if you are invested in tech stocks, now is the time to quietly unload them; the AI bubble is about to burst. I do hope my pensions manager is reading this.
Many years ago now, a leading tech guy said the biggest mistake they made was allowing the internet to be free. If there had been a hefty subscription, equivalent say to the UK TV licence or the paywall cost of a digital version of the Times perhaps we would have had content moderation from the outset and been spared the invasion of five-legged pigs.
Now without any sense of irony, I’m going to share this on Facebook, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and ask you to sign up to my newsletter…
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