AIShittification: How AI Shits Over Online Communities
I Can't Wait for AI to Go Beyond the "Polly Wants a Cracker!" Level of Intelligence
Here is how AI kills online communities. First, AI floods platforms with mimicry: bullshit with just enough coating of fake expertise that our alarm bells don’t immediately go off.
Suddenly readers are confronted by having to wade through bullshit that, on initial inspection, seems sensible. The content is ideally situated in the uncanny valley of appearing to be of substance through imitating the style of substance.
It's "Polly wants a cracker!" on steroids. Except we have infinite parrots, and they can pop up everywhere. And they don't sound or look like parrots but more like Frank Abagnale.
You might remember Frank Abagnale from the Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can. If you don't, he was a con artist who pretended to be a pilot, doctor, and lawyer, skating through life with charisma and confidence—until he was apprehended.
Frank fooled those around him temporarily by replacing his lack of expertise with a lovely charismatic bullshit coating to produce the illusion of expertise.
The Frank Abagnale energy is strong in online communities today. As a result of all the Frank Abagnaleing, writers begin leaving the platform because they grow tired of being drowned out by bullshit parrots. And hence the bullshit to relevant content ratio is increasing.
Welcome to the age of AIShittification*, where AI deteriorates the quality of most online experiences. It's an outright cacophony of bullshit birds until people can’t take it anymore.
It's the perfect parallel with Frank Abagnale: he actually made all that shit up that he pretended to be a lawyer, pilot and doctor. There never was a Frank Abagnale as depicted in the movie Catch Me If You Can. To make it meta: even his bullshitting was bullshit.
The biggest lie of Frank Abignale was to claim the con artist Frank Abignale even existed.
AI companies are making us experience Frank Abagnale all over again: welcome to the age of bullshit, where the experts claim Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is close at the same time as we got parrots screaming "Polly wants a cracker!" until it’s ringing in our ears.
Let's hope AGI kicks in sooner than expected because I can't wait to listen to beautiful birdsong instead of wading through AIshittified nonsense to find the things I care about.
Scrolling through LinkedIn feels like rummaging through the video store's discount bin for a good movie. Except most of the movies are cheap knockoffs that pretend to be the real thing.
The irony of AIShittification is that I find myself more frequently asking questions to AI rather than reading content online because at least I know I’m directly dealing with the bullshitter and cutting out the unnecessary middleman.
*AIShittification is a homage to the concept of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow