Dead Internet At Scale
Notes From the Desk: No. 39 - 2025.02.25
Notes From the Desk are periodic informal posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary.
Dead Internet At Scale
I encourage you to watch the short assembled clips to just get a grasp of things currently happening at scale. There is very little that occurs across the internet that is truly organic anymore. We have become an algorithmic civilization, and AI is maximizing this to the fullest extent.
You are being sold on AI empowering the individual to compete against the giants, but you need to be aware of what the giants are doing, who have enormous resources to leverage AI as well.
Yes, you can use AI to help you create content, but those with massive resources are using AI to scale 1000x what you can do with AI. Hundreds to thousands of simulated accounts are now typical packages being offered to businesses to grow their brand or product.
“The internet in my mind is already dead.” — Cody Schneider
The original full podcast Jaume Ros and Cody Schneider.
The Current Scale of AI-Generated Music
It is the same story for essentially all genres of content. Some estimate that 10% of all new music is now fully AI-generated, and likely the majority of it all is coming from a few massive scaling farms.
Paris, January 24, 2025 – Deezer (Paris Euronext: DEEZR), the global music experiences platform has deployed a cutting-edge AI music detection tool, discovering that roughly 10,000 fully AI generated tracks are delivered to the platform every day, equating to around 10% of the daily content delivery.
The AI Bot Wars for Copyright
Another tactic, employed by companies at a large scale, is the abuse of copyright systems to destroy competition. Here, Venus Theory explains how easy the system is to exploit.
“You would probably hope and pray that siphoning money off of creators using a AI-generated content and copyright claiming them would be way more work than its really worth, but the truth is, it actually is really easy …” — Venus Theory
We are living in a period of time where technology built to help you becomes indistinguishable from technology built to destroy you. The challenge to maintain our sanity has been put before us.
AI is empowering vast content farms with enormous resources that are intent on making your existence irrelevant and undiscoverable, as you are buried under the noise of it all.
Being aware of how AI is being leveraged will be important for the decisions you make. Leveraging AI for discoverability is likely to become essential to compete. However, the difficult path will be how to use it in such a way as to not simply add more valueless noise to the mess already being created.
The last deep dive I did on this subject has a lot more information that is still relevant if you have not read it: “The Cartesian Crisis”.
No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …
"AI is empowering vast content farms with enormous resources that are intent on making your existence irrelevant and undiscoverable, as you are buried under the noise of it all." - I find the way you put this very insightful. The poetry world has been suffering from this phenomenon for several decades, but especially so since the advent of social media. With poetry it was an accident. Fascinating to witness it used as a strategy.