Help Me Understand This Comment

I was surfing r/nosurf on Reddit, hoping to break the universe, when I happened upon a comment that I found supremely interesting. However, because I don't understand the technical subject matter very well at all, I can't tell if the person is crazy, how intrigued I should be, how to look up additional information, etc. I can't message the guy, because I don't actually have a Reddit account.

Can anyone here please help shed any light? I'm always on the lookout for new tech-related doom scenarios to fear.

Comment thread here - https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comm..._old_internet/

Comment (by u/west_pac):

Quote:

Well right now the internet is largely built on the idea that it is at once a repository for human knowledge, a forum for discussion, and a platform for media. My assessment is that the first two are being eroded, and that this will continue to the point that they'll basically be made useless. Once that happens, the internet will be a platform for media and little else, so streaming services basically. Even then, how much of that will you trust? How will you know if it isn't all a deepfake? Because once we get there it really ceases to have any value beyond sheer entertainment factor. We've already seen steps in this direction with the kind of websites that pop up when you search for things like "how do I change the oil in my car?". Instead of getting useful results, you get bot generated clickfarm sites that have essentially made google useless. Right now these scrape info from other websites, but there's a creeping phenomena in which the bots are scraping other bot-created pages because they can't tell the difference. This is what we're going to continue to see with AI, it won't answer the question, it will just either ramble incoherently or it will tell you that you shouldn't drive a car because it's learned that cars are bad. We aren't creating better search algorithms fast enough to deal with this and it's already driving disengagement from the web. People underestimate, or are unaware of the coming crisis with AI. They think it will be this thing that we can use to enhance old WW2 footage or to drive their car for them, but what it will do instead is just make everything fuzzy and ****. AI will write and print books but they'll suck, it will deepfake news broadcasts to the point that there will be no good way to transmit information, it will create newspaper sites that don't actually exist but will have hundreds of AI journalists writing for it all reporting on things that never happened. AI is about to completely eradicate our ability to discern reality on the internet, and that will spill out into the real world. I'm not sure what we're going to do about this, honestly. I don't think anyone is thinking about how it will affect public trust in information. I don't know of any solutions being developed. One way we could potentially fix it is by developing ways to verify that no AI was involved, but it's hard to envision how that would go without being extremely privacy-invasive or potentially exploited by AI. I won't lie, this **** has the potential to push us back into the dark ages as a species. We could well have to go back to machine-printed books and newspapers, distributed by hand only. It may be necessary to physically dumb down our technology so that we can trust it again. Until AI is made illegal globally, there's a good chance that things will get very bad before they get better.

I wasn't really sure where to ask about this, but I figured this section was a good bet, since I'm most interested in the technical stuff the poster is mentioning.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3CHxMRi