My recent essay on the state of the Internet got sucked into the AI slop machine

A week ago, I published a short essay on the state of the Internet entitled “The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet”. Because it did moderately well on Hacker News, I was curious if it had been linked to anywhere else. That led me to this YouTube Short from a Japanese AI slop channel for technology news. A robotic English narration over Japanese text and AI images begins with a garbled version of the essay’s thesis. The next few sentences render the substance of the essay more faithfully (as faithful as you can be when pronouncing “Numa Numa” as “New Mama”), but it quickly veers off course when attempt a direct quote:

The author of this article says: “AI didn’t destroy the Internet; AI has already optimized the fun out of the Internet.”

This precisely inverts the actual quote:

AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it.

But at least the video does link to the original article in the description (which is how I found it), not that anyone but a search engine is likely to see the description of a YouTube short.

A bit surreal!