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+title: One Author
+date: February 10, 2023 11:51
+---
+
+<p>
+Microsoft just <a href='https://news.microsoft.com/the-new-Bing/'>announced</a>
+their ChatGPT-powered Bing experience. While Google is worried and scrambling to
+catch up on the new space race, we as humans have even more important things to
+worry about than our bottom line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From a purely technological perspective, these AI developments look incredible.
+We're getting to the point where computer assistants we know from sci-fi films
+are becoming an every day reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what are the wider implications of this?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There's tons of potential societal outcomes this could lead to, starting with
+kids a few years from now wondering why Tony Stark is the only character with an
+all-knowing AI assistant in Iron Man, all the way to a full singularity event.
+For this article, I'll focus on just one aspect: Internet content.
+</p>
+
+<h3>AI content on the web</h3>
+
+<p>
+For some time already, there's been a ton of AI-composed or -aided "content" on
+the web. You may have heard others (e.g.
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8P6MTOQlyk">
+ Luke Smith</a>, <a href="https://jacobwsmith.xyz/stories/human_writing.html">
+ Jacob Smith</a>; no relation between the two as far as I'm aware) complaining
+about the generic SEO garbage sites that just produce tons of generic,
+search-engine friendly articles on commonly searched topics, just to farm clicks
+and ad views.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More recently, as various advanced language models started being published,
+people started speculating that eventually AI will start replacing even the
+higher-class content. YouTuber penguinz0
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iQ8RXhkNwQ"> claims </a> that, in his
+opinion, a bit of playing around with ChatGPT produced a better game review than
+a popular game journalism website. BuzzFeed
+<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/our-way-forward">
+ openly stated
+</a> that they will start publishing AI generated articles.
+</p>
+
+<h3>One author</h3>
+
+<p>
+While people have been suspecting that <i>eventually</i> more and more content will
+be generated, Microsoft is now straight up recommending you do it <i>now</i> (see
+minute 37:30 of the press conference, linked above).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Composing individual social media posts might not seem like that big of a
+deal. But it is if you take into account how media builds upon itself. Much
+content is created by citing, commenting on, being inspired by other content.
+And AI is itself specifically suited to quickly generating this sort of
+derivative material. As the density of AI generated content increases, its
+<i>rate of increase</i> will start to grow non-linearly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just imagine. A Wikipedia article cites that so-and-so said something on
+Twitter. That The Guardian reported that this or that happened. A leaked email
+from so-and-so revealed that... But all those sources were written by AI. And
+maybe the article itself was composed with the help of Bing's compose
+functionality?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then you search for something relevant and the Bing bot reads the article and
+provides you an answer based on it. Maybe you're smart enough to double check
+there are "real" sources to corroborate the bot's answers and it's not something
+it made up, so you find the Wikipedia article yourself, full of external
+citations, and are satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But fool you are, the internet has one author.
+</p>