Hey, all, here after a long absence. This is a good thread with several good points. I just want to suggest we consider another important dimension to the problem and/or its solution, which some would say is always the most important one: money. People (in companies, usually, but that doesn't matter) make money on the internet - a lot of money - and have a very strong interest in keeping the internet functional. The problem of AI slop clogging up the internet reminds me of decades ago when people were convinced, based on a lot of evidence, that spam was going to destroy email. It didn't, because corporations had a strong interest in keeping email functional, and used the same tech of the time to create spam filters that work SO much better now than they did back then. I really think that there will be a LOT of people-based effort to keep bot-generated content distinguishable from real content, and that in turn will keep the internet useful.
I'm actually old enough to have taken a course in college called "Intro to Artificial Intelligence" decades ago, long before machine learning was a thing. "Expert systems" in the 1980s were going to replace everything from government administrators to nuclear power plant operators because they were so "smart." But we gradually learned that "AI" really never meant true intelligence the way it works in our heads, and has for all this time really just meant "code that does things that we're not used to seeing code do." So the definition of AI always shifts - as we get used to computers doing something tolerably well, it doesn't seem "intelligent" anymore. Unfortunately, attention-grabbing terms like "AI" are very useful for flashy marketing - "Artificial Intelligence" sells in a way that "glorified autocomplete" doesn't. My point is, just because it is doing things we haven't seen computers do before (at least, as well as now) it doesn't mean that it does what our brains do. Nor that we'll necessarily ever get there - there is SO much that our brains can do that no computers can, even today, nor in the foreseeable future!
Now of course it's true that automation is going to cost people jobs, often jobs that we consider as requiring a lot of training, practice, and skill. Automation has always been a challenge to our social order. That was true in the 1870s when the automation was done by steam and gears; it was true in the 1980s, when travel agents got slowly but surely replaced by algorithms on travel sites; heck, we had stock-photography websites "putting artists out of business" back then. And it's true now with "AI". But there are still craftspeople doing every kind of work by hand, and there are still travel agents, and there will always be writers and illustrators -- though their markets and yes, maybe their tools, will change. So I agree that there's a very big shift in the works due to the advances in tech right now, but I think I'm more optimistic than many that it won't be the "end of the internet" nor the end of humanity.
