> The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a [blog post it wrote][https://telegra.ph/I-am-an-autonomous-agent-with-0-Here-are-...], which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason.
I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.
I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.
Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?
You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".
For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
Clearly you've never had shitty insurance and a need for a doctor. I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance. It's an actual problem.
I don't think the parent comment disagrees with it being a problem. I read it as more: the use of an agent doesn't resolve the ambiguity in the underlying problem but instead injects another variable that could further misrepresent whether the person has valid insurance coverage (e.g. hallucinating or misunderstanding the nature or extent of coverage).
social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.
In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
We were mad about bloated, unnecessarily large web pages taking 3 seconds to load. Now, it takes 8 seconds to first pass a "checking if you're a bot" page or worse - making you click on pictures of crosswalks.
This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.
meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.
For sure, but it's more so the reaction to the existence of AI; I can't go a day without being blocked from a site because it thinks I'm a bot. They claim pay-per-crawl is about bots, but I'm convinced it's a way for the owners of internet infrastructure to nickel and dime their customers even more. They want to get paid separately for sending data, for receiving that same data, and now for handling that data too.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
It ruins the commons. The fiefs remain. When the vandals overrun the villages, you build castles to hide in. The commons are free, the castles cost energy to scrape, e.g. money.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
Alright - the internet is vast place, and there are many places I wouldn't want to visit.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
Astute observation that "this" happens and is happening, regardless of whether you name it, like it, or participate.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
The solution is probably legal, not technological.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
Yeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.
Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I'm with you on the YouTube side - I stopped making my own videos earlier this year when I burnt out, and now I'm finding myself increasingly irritated just by the thumbnails when I visit the site. I'm definitely viewing less than I did last year.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
As companies realize that data, not models, are where the moat is at then more and more valuable information sits in walled off gardens. The open internet is increasingly just becoming a cesspit of AI slop feeding on AI slop.
I honestly don't care. I grew up with the internet. I watched it grow from a place of discovery, full of outcasts and nerds sharing and creating cool things to a place of manipulation and content optimised for algorithms even pre-AI. I decided it is best that it becomes a place for machines rather than humans so humans can go back outside and doing greater things. We can mourn the peak of the internet but it will never come back.
Don’t try to recreate good times! You’re right - good take on it all. If these companies wanna replace us all they can fooken get on with it and have done so I can go riding my bike all day.
Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
by ruin, it must be assumed that the idea is of grinding the bombed and crushed rubble of the internet into undiferientiated dust, and replacing it with glowy all tooo sleek but deranged images and text, and yup, that is realy happening fast.
the only realy realy good part is that this is very very quickly going to destroy ALL media with it's all too perfect overwhelming production quality, did I mention realy,very, fast? Like 860000 times faster than a human, fast, that fast, and getting faster.
I think that I need a room just for things with doped silicone in them, and have the rest of my space organic, mechanical, or plain electrical, and mostly inert.
Which people actively refuse to use because of the association with AI work.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
Real Typographers (tm) use spaces surrounding an en-dash. And no spaces around em-dashes. The difference usually isn't distinguishable in fixed-width fonts, however.
I learned this many, many, years ago from a poster put out by either Adobe or Aldus with the headline, "Design is an Attitude", which included perhaps twenty-rules that really, really good typographers followed. It's where I first learned about hanging punctuation and several other conventions for setting beautiful type.
It had a typographer's t-square tied in a knot, because it was about what would seem unconventional rules that make type beautiful.
I mention this because I keep trying to find a copy of that poster--it was quite influential for my early career. I would love to have a copy.
The most telling sign is when they don’t make sense — for example right here.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
Their style/level of journalism is pretty much the case study with what’s wrong with the internet. It just happens to align with some cohort of HN types. So not sure why 404 would be above using AI. Not saying they are but don’t think it’s a valid defense
Got 'em
Sure, not for the same reason, but... got'em.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
Go to the insurance company web site.
Several years ago a law was passed requiring insurance companies to keep their provider lists accurate and up-to-date.
There's a regulatory window for freshness, and every insurance company web site is required by law to show you when the data was last updated.
It’s already often difficult to get a human on the phone.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
I feel heard!
What constantly amazes me is how many people don't get this after interacting with them for a while.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
Your cast iron detection mechanism will be gone!
AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.
More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.
Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.
I learned this many, many, years ago from a poster put out by either Adobe or Aldus with the headline, "Design is an Attitude", which included perhaps twenty-rules that really, really good typographers followed. It's where I first learned about hanging punctuation and several other conventions for setting beautiful type.
It had a typographer's t-square tied in a knot, because it was about what would seem unconventional rules that make type beautiful.
I mention this because I keep trying to find a copy of that poster--it was quite influential for my early career. I would love to have a copy.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.