this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I think the advancement of LLMs, which culminated in the creation of ChatGPT, is this generation's Eternal September. In a couple of decades, we'll talk about how the internet "used to be" before free, public websites were abandoned because our CAPTCHAs could no longer filter out bots and device attestation and continuous mictopayments became the only way to keep platforms spam free.
Even when Microsoft and OpenAI stop hemorrhaging money by giving away stuff like ChatGPT for basically free, the spam farms will run this stuff on their own soon. I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services "enshittification", because people don't realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I think this will also start the transition of not only AI being sold like Netflix or like mobile data caps, but also to an "every company that doesn't get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind" economy. After all, AI only needs to cost a little less than the manpower it's replacing. Any internet facing company needs good AI to outwit the AI trying to abuse cheap or free services (like trials) that they may offer.
We're probably lucky that AI spammers haven't discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we'll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they're single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.
The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that -- particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it's a big network of a large number of small sites -- it's relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren't keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.
A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren't looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.
If it really ramps up, we could share block lists too, like with ad blockers. So if a friend (or nth-degree friend) blocks someone, then you would block them automatically.
That work has already started with Fediseer. It's not automatic, but it's really easy, which is probably the best we'll get for a while.