Why do you, or most people, want non-dead internet?
This is meant as a genuine question, not a claim that a dead internet is fine, but below I will try to explore some reasons that seem odd or dubious to me. (dead internet means heavily botted)
- You want to have in impact on society and voters. Given the tiny fraction of posts that attempt this, let alone achieve this, is this really consistent with most of your online activity? What if "bots" obtained rights or agency? (CEO bots, government policy bots, etc)
- You want "high quality" conversation. While this community especially is focused on this, most other online activity does not follow this pattern. Laugh emojis get upvotes. Reaction videos on youtube get views. Vast majority of online discussion seems automatable. Frankly, SOTA LLMs have passed 95% of humans in conversation quality.
- You want to have an impact on conscious experience. So what if "bots", or LLMs even, were found to be conscious?
- You want to share a "connection" with a human. This explains the #2 objections the most, and feels the most correct to me. It is also odd and poorly defined. What is a connection? When you play an online game with _almost zero_ discussion or human element (eg Starcraft 2), I'm there to share a connection?
My take: Most situations you want a human, it's for a reaction. The internet is mostly high and low level reaction content (see youtube reaction videos of movies, songs etc) This is why laugh emojis get upvotes.
Which would feel better for you? For 1 million people to see but not respond to your reddit post, or to get 1000 upvotes and a even a merely mixed bag of +/- comments? In StarCraft 2, when I build marines in response to his zerglings, this is a SC2 players equivalent of a conversation. I want to see them react and respond to my actions. A "good" starcraft 2 game, as ranked by the players of that match, pretty much always has lots of back and forth action that lasts a while. Merely winning early is not as fun for either player. You see the same thing in conversations, debates, etc. So why #4 and not #3? I guess it's probably innate that we prefer reaction from humans rather than animals (which i believe to be conscious). When I think about it, LLMs feel a lot more like intelligent animals than humans. I will use them to get a job done, and maybe jiggle a tokenized laser pointer to see if they'll chase it, but I don't care about them much, even if they are conscious. (assuming they aren't in pain). Even if my cat/dog could talk, I don't think we'd talk for long.
Why would humans have evolved this way? No doubt to form bonds as hunter gatherers. But we form no lasting bonds with the vast majority of online interaction. This would suggest social media is bad (highly original conclusion, i know). Maybe killing it with bots will be a net positive.