 This past year or so has really been the year of the, I guess, Ascendant AI. So AI generators are taking over a lot of the internet and people are using them mostly for their own entertainment right now. But you can input text and it will generate an image based on that and they're actually, sometimes they're really bad, sometimes they're incredibly good. And I know there's this recent one. What is it? Like the GPT thing which will create very complicated stories and all this kind of stuff, very impressive stuff. Like AI looks pretty impressive. Now I want to go ahead and make a prediction and that is firstly, well I will say this, maybe I'll touch on this later in the video, but I think that AI and its ability to solve problems or be useful is definitely way over exaggerated. AI does well things that people are impressed by, like generating art. But that art is not necessarily always something coherent or something, you know, you couldn't necessarily use an AI to make a concise decision like landing planes in like highly complex domains or something like that, right? So it's impressive stuff, but it's not necessarily, you can't build your word old on it. So last year, let me just say this, I made kind of a prescient video where I said something like search engines are basically dead now, they're basically useless. And the reason I said that, and this is like 100% true, is all search engine results that you now get are basically AI generated. Now, of course, these AIs, they're not like hyper intelligent creatures that are answering your every question. They're actually hyper non intelligent creatures that are really just trying to get your clicks, right? So this is something you've probably seen, you might not have even noticed it. But let me just randomly a couple weeks ago, I was at the store, right hardware store, and I wanted to figure out, okay, what kind of nails, like what length of nails, what, you know, what, what number nail do I need? Or screws, excuse me, what number screw and what type of screw do I need to screw into this kind of wood? Right? Or what's the best kind to get long term? So I remember looking that up on my phone, I didn't do it before I left, but I ended up doing it at the location. And, you know, of course, every single result I get, what is it? It's all AI generated results, right? It's all stuff like screws are very important for doing woodworking. And you can use many types of screws, there are different lengths and blah, blah, blah. And that is like every single result, right? So it's nothing, you can put questions into search engines nowadays. And the results that you're going to get are basically these AI results that are just kind of word association games. Even if like the title of the article is a specific question, it will not answer that question in the article. That's how these articles work, right? And more than that, like usually they just, they're just putting words out there, right? So the thing is, there's this theory out there that people often quote, and it's very true, and it's called the dead internet theory, okay? People have been talking about this for years, but it's definitely becoming true now. And that is the internet, I mean, the internet really is dead. Like back, you know, I've talked often about like back in the 90s, when you went to a site, that was like a personal site, you know what I mean? Run by a person. Nowadays, there's very little interaction with other people online, weirdly enough, right? Any interaction you have with another person is actually through a social media site. Everything else, all the other sites you go to at this point, are basically AI generated, right? Or algorithmically generated. I mean an algorithm is a super simple AI, right? So this is something that's now become like, like this is our new normal, right? It used to be you could actually use a search engine and get specific results to things. Like that was not a difficult thing to do. But now, now it is. So like there's more stuff on the internet, but it's been so crowded out by like random gibberish that you actually can't get anything from it. So the irony is, and the irony I talked about in that video last year is like people are getting herded to social media sites just because AIs are taking over the rest of the things, right? Now the irony, there are of course some AIs that are like so good, like I think the chat GPT thing. Allegedly is like so good that there are some questions you can actually just ask it and it will give you specific answers. But the issue is more often than not, it's confabulating answers, right? So it's just kind of making things up to respond to your question, not necessarily, you know, it's still making assessments based on word association, not whether or not they're true or not. And frankly, you wouldn't want it making assessments based on what it's true because then, you know, it's just going to tell you to get like the COVID Vax and all this kind of stuff that like, you know, whoever programming it says, oh, we need to bias it in this direction or the other, right? So either way, like looking at a AI for answering questions when it's confabulating answers just to give you an answer, right? That's basically the equivalent of like killing a bird and looking at its entrails for what to do. It quite literally is the equivalent because, you know, there might be some basis in truth, but really you're just getting some kind of answer just to make you more certain about what you're doing. That's about it. Like it's not like, it's not like a real thing. So I think like people are very impressed by AIs because like, because they falsely assume a lot of the times that AIs like have some kind of, they actually are intelligences. They actually are like consciousnesses that like no things. The reality about like programming AIs over exposed, the reality about programming AIs is like the software that goes into it is actually very simple. The reason, you know, people in AI will often say this and this is true, like the programming in AI is actually relatively simple compared to, you know, more complicated programs we've had for years. The reason we're only getting AIs now is because we didn't have the computing power for it before because you have to train it on data and do all this kind of crazy stuff that you need a lot of programming or, excuse me, a processing power for. So really they're just like kind of dumb algorithms that are just looking at massive sets of data and drawing these kind of conclusions. And again, like they do these things, like they're great at, they're great at like giving kind of impressionistic answers or impressionistic art, frankly, frankly. You know, you could get it drawing a, actually, I'll probably do that in the thumbnail, draw a picture of Luke Smith walking in the woods, right? And it won't give anything too precise. It might, you know, muddle up my face or like, it might not know who I am. Some AIs know who I am, some don't. But like, it's one of those things, you know, it depends on what data it's been trained on, right? Anyway, so what I'm getting at is like AIs, they're going to create a boring and mediocre future on the internet. In fact, they've already created it because most of the stuff that you were interacting with on the internet now is just total nonsense. Like you're not talking to another person. You're talking to this like system that is like this self-propelling unconscious system that is kind of programmed itself, but it's also programming you with just like seeing the same kind of stuff over and over again, and it can be nudged in one direction or the other. So it's just kind of this like solid, the internet is becoming like really the solipsistic place. At this point, you know, as I mentioned, like search engines are search engines are basically useless for trying to get any kind of information from at this point. So I find myself there was a period of like the past two years or so where I basically didn't use search engines to look for questions. And I would like look if I wanted to know like, oh, I don't know what kind of oil do I need to change the oil on my car or something like that. I would end up just searching on YouTube because even though that's something that could literally be answered by like one sentence of text, that sentence of text is impossible to find on these auto generated sites. So I would search on YouTube for something like that. But the problem with that is twofold. Well, threefold because one, YouTube videos are freaking long. Two, frankly, a lot of YouTube videos now their algorithmic content now like a lot of them are auto generated more than you expect. You've probably seen if you look for specific questions, a lot of times you'll get these these like voiceover clips that, you know, or they'll have like a robot voice or something. And with just like random pictures in the back, that's a common thing now. And I've actually even seen a couple channels that are just like people like people like look who look like me talking at a screen for a second. And then they go to some like PowerPoint looking thing that talks about something totally different that is like auto generated. Right. So it makes you think it's a real person doing it, but it's actually not, you know. So what was I going to say, so like those are all kind of annoying. And of course, just in general, the other third reason is like, like getting information on YouTube is basically just annoying, not because of the AI, but just because like of YouTubers. Because here every YouTuber, they have to let's say they you have one question you want to ask them and they will do three minutes at the beginning of the video. Hey guys, welcome to the channel. You all know it like they can't just like, I don't know if they have a single thing they want to say they can't just say it. They have to like put or put like their sponsors all over the place. I mean, that's the annoying thing about it. So anyway, all of this is to say all of this is to voice my frustration with how difficult it is to find like simple information online. And you know, I've said said before like I really think that artisanal sites are needed on the Internet. And we need to get we also need to get away from like search engines and crap like that. Because, you know, back back before search engines, how people found information is on sites that were indexed with like indexed content, right? So, you know, they would have a bunch of different cooking sites or, you know, other informational. Oh, here's a site to tell you how to fix your car and stuff like that. There was no search engine involved. And all of these sites were maintained by individual people. And I think if the Internet is, well, I don't necessarily expect this is going to happen like it should happen on the Internet now. But that's really the only way of getting out of this kind of like AI hell where everything you're never interacting with a person. It's all just like kind of nonsense. And you're just getting these random like bird in trail answers to everything you're doing. That I think is the inevitable future on the Internet unless like at least the small bit of us can carve out this little area where we can still be humans on the Internet. And I think the scariest thing of all, right, is if AI becomes too good, right? And like some conspiracy people have talked about this and, you know, conspiracy people basically they have 100% track record. So I'm going to trust them on this. But, you know, what's happening is the AIs are getting so good at like extrapolating video. So let's say like an AI is trained against me, right? So it becomes very, oh, auto generate a Luke Smith video, right? And then like you could have it video or not just the text, but also like the video content, you could have it auto generate that. Well, then you can start this is the conspiracy theory point. Well, you could have like AIs that actually just replace real people. Like let's say, oh, we, you know, we ban some, I don't know, someone who's based off of the Internet and then replace them with an AI that's like just giving, giving like takes that sound like them, but they're kind of like Lamer or like they're kind of more mainstream. You know what I mean? So that's what I'm talking about like this. That's the thing that's worrisome. Like AI, if it ever becomes really good, which I definitely don't think it's really good now. I mean, it does like parlor tricks, basically. But if it ever becomes really impressive, that's definitely the kind of thing that it could do. So it's also something to think about like, is your behavior on the Internet algorithmic? Like is your behavior is your behavior like something that could be easily reproduced by an AI? I don't know. That's something to think about because I don't know. I don't know. Alright, so that's it. That's all about all I gotta say. It's actually cold today. I have nothing to say at the end of this video. Bye.