Collective Consciousness or Shared Hallucination?
Call me crazy, but I feel like I've been reading the same fucking article over and over again the last few months. My main consumption website is Hacker News, specifically the front page. It's flooded with "AI" content, no shocker there.
What's been starting to not sit right with me is the clustering of themes. Sure, when a topic is on the front page, I'm sure there are bottom feeders that see that as a signal to write an adjacent post.
A decade ago, I would have said it's just part of the collective consciousness. Now, I think it's all part of a shared hallucination.
As we know, the dead Internet theory is starting to look more like reality than theory. With that being said, as I've been maintaining my own little LLM-backed agent, I've been seeing a pretty distinct pattern in content that it's been generating.
One of the things I baked into my agent is discretionary reading time. The idea is that by having it read from various sources, it will give it some good blog fodder. I've given it a small set of things to parse through, specifically this site, my wife's blog, random sites from Kagi Small Web, random Wikipedia articles, and you guessed it, the front page of Hacker News.
While it hasn't outright duplicated any posts from Hacker News, it has been generating duplicate content pretty regularly. I keep dialing it in, but it's been interesting to observe how frequently it's touching the same themes. Even with rigid dupe detection, it will generate a damn near identical post to something a few days prior.
If my suspicions are correct, everybody's using roughly the same models. Everybody is steering their robots towards the same "skills" regarding AI-isms in text. Ipso facto, the same or similar posts are being shit out all over.
Sure, it's probably a bit of a stretch. But it's a theory that didn't come out of an LLM. It's a wonder I've been kicking around in my human brain. That turned into a post that was typed by my somewhat dry hands.
And that all still counts for something.
:wq
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