An interesting and persuasive article from Lars Doucet who considers the ways in which AI spam might mean that people retreat from ‘open sea’ social networks (including gaming / dating ones) to more niche areas.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with interacting with AIs in ways that include emotion. But it’s a solipsistic existence, and perhaps not one that leads to human flourishing.

What happens when anyone can spin up a thousand social media accounts at the click of a button, where each account picks a consistent persona and sticks to it – happily posting away about one of their hobbies like knitting or trout fishing or whatever, while simultaneously building up a credible and inobtrusive post history in another plausible side hobby that all these accounts happen to share – geopolitics, let's say – all until it's time for the sock puppet master to light the bat signal and manufacture some consensus?

What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways?

What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, “every girl” on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it’s time to scam money out of him?

What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator’s rules?

I mean, to various degrees all this stuff is already happening. But what happens when it cranks up by an order of magnitude, seemingly overnight?

What happens when most “people” you interact with on the internet are fake?

I think people start logging off.

Source: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off | Fortress of Doors