@futurebird

I've definitely seen far worse AI ants than that.

CONTENT WARNING: This entire website is full of AI slopicles with disturbing slop insect images. Pictures from this site (or from whatever site they may have taken them from) seem to come up when searching for anything to do with ants so you may have seen it before
https://bugbusterhq.com/do-ants-have-lungs/

@leadore

I should have listened to the damn warning.

That was very upsetting.

@futurebird
I'm sorry, I wasn't sure if I should post it, but the idea was to brace yourself before looking. I may delete it.

With it coming up in general image searches on ants, lots of people are seeing things like these without warning. I hate how this stuff is flooding the whole internet. :(

@leadore

nah. Don't it's just a lot.

@futurebird
I don't understand why whoever owns that website would even post them.

@leadore

It's an SEO trap. Just tons of pages designed to attract search so they can boost the links of other pages.

@apophis @futurebird

Yeah. I hate it so much. Someone recently calculated that over 50% of internet content is AI generated. At the rate it's expanding it will be well over 90% soon. All "real" content will be buried to oblivion by the sheer mass of it.

So not only is Chatbot usage causing the obscenely huge use of energy, a lot also comes from all the traffic from serving up of all those AI-generated sites.

There's ONE reason for all of it: ADs. Ads to make the broligarchs richer. Everything is about serving ads to people. That's what the slop sites are for, that's even what most of the non-AI sites are for--that and selling products through online shopping (edit: which is valid).

We could save the internet and massively reduce energy and water usage by simply banning online advertising (*gasp*!). The relief would be immediate and profound.

Birds would sing, flowers would bloom, pastel unicorns would prance among rainbows, and crowds of people would emerge from buildings smiling and blinking in the sunlight, if we would only ban online ads!

@apophis @futurebird

How about to start:
By definition advertising has to do with money and/or profit. A pays B to place the ad so that people see it. The ad is for something A sells for profit.

Non-profits and not-for-profits could be exempt from the ban; certain restrictions may apply to prevent cheating by for-profits.

We could allow a for-profit business to place ads only for its *own* company or products only on its *own* website. Not for its subsidiaries or parent company or "affiliates" or any third party, only itself. IOW they can show deals and what's on sale and stuff like that on their own website.

There would still be online directories like the yellow pages to find them, and they could continue advertising offline as usual.

We also have to consider smartphone apps. I would consider ads in those as "online ads" but others may not consider that to be "the internet".

@apophis @futurebird
Of course, since you're not a for-profit business that your buddy paid to say that and it's an individual site or account that you said it on. People should be able to talk about whatever they want, including asking and answering things like "I'm looking for a good plumber, anyone have a recommendation?"

They're not automated processes posting hundreds or thousands of ads for hundreds or thousands of people and no money is changing hands.

As an individual, you should also be able to show on your website businesses or products you like. Maybe even getting some of those companies to pay you to put their product on there wouldn't be that big a deal because it would be so limited.

But it does bring up one possible avenue of exploitation companies could take advantage of--disguising their ads as individual speech. And they'd likely find every possible way of exploiting the law, I doubt they could ever do anything as large-scale and profitable as the free reign they have now, with this pervasive, giant targeted ad machinery overshadowing the entire internet.

Just outlawing *targeted* ads alone (if that's possible) would probably improve things by an order of magnitude and stop most of the surveillance capitalism because that costs money to do and it would no longer be returning enough profit to continue it.

@apophis @futurebird

ha, I didn't really notice the instance name since it gets truncated by my column width.