In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users’ data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs, without the user ever seeing what is being scraped or having any real, lasting ability to shut Recall off and keep it shut down.

While I am aware that MS insists none of that is true, it is fact that 1) the snapshotted and OCR’d Recall data is now stored in an encrypted database that takes higher than average user skill to get into; 2) even users who turned off Recall saw it turned on again at the next Windows Update; and 3) even after MS said they were backing off Recall, MS continued to partner with hardware makers to create computers bundled with Windows 11 on top of the extra GPU necessary for processing all these Recall snapshots without making that sluggish Windows bloat even more sluggishly bloated than it already was.

So why all that money and effort, even as they claimed to be backing away from it, just to help a hypothetically forgetful user here and there? Data harvesting was always part of the payoff, why they were and are very willing to piss off a huge part of their own consumer base around the world by ending Windows 10 unnecessarily, and why even now they keep ramming Recall shit down the pipe when literally NO ONE wants it.

They get your data. At will. And as much of it as they like, without you ever having the opportunity to oversee what they’re getting, much less curate it. And after feeding it to their LLMs, they get to aggregate and broker it to their “partners” as well. Never forget what MS did in Palestine and the partners they can and will gladly work with, all based on massive collections of quietly gathered user data that either should not legally exist, or is not known outside of MS and its partners to exist at all.

Explains why my personal blog, wiki, and git repo keep getting hammered by hordes of AI company scrapers. If AI was intelligent, they’d download a single snapshot every month or so and share. But no, eight different scrapers using thousands of different IP addresses (to evade my fail2ban measures) each have to follow every single blame and diff link when a simple git clone operation would get them the hundreds of megabytes of content in one go.

They are getting better, though. More hits are to RecentChanges on my wiki, so there seem to be some optimizations going on. But I refuse to increase my operating costs beyond a few USD/month to serve AI bots when I know barely anyone human visits.

The open internet will become divided into verified websites, and the rest will be left for bots to fight on forever.

It will be used as an excuse by our governments to force a ID verification system tied to your real life person, refuse it and fight it in every possible way.

How is it a crisis? I’m expecting/hoping LLMs will just get increasingly worse as they are fed on their own slop, until they collapse into unusability and the world finally returns to sanity.

So at this point we’re gonna have to go back to reading books…

The Hapsburg chin of the digital age

Its almost like its predictable outcome of prediction algorithms being used to generate content

On top of this, the scrapers that feed the AIs are creating more and more traffic, and therefor load on sites that did not have them before.

the percentage chart gives a timeline but not much else. makes it look like humans are writing less, I wonder what those numbers actually look like, if people are actually writing less or not

Ah, so the technological singularity is here but it’s in the opposite direction from what was expected as the technology takes over its own enshitification in an ever-accelerating manner.

I gotta wonder where do we go from here?

AI articles cost <$0.01. Human writers cost $10-$100.

Buying a (human) slave for $100 sounds way more profitable than renting an AI if you ask me.

It is exactly a mirror, since all the percentages add up to 1 at any time

How could they have ever known about the possibility of the thing that literally everyone everywhere told them almost immediately a couple of years ago when this fad really started charting (or perhaps sharting is more appropriate)?

There’s no way an AI generated article costs less than a cent.

So humans writing articles cost more than the billions they’re pumping in to AI? I very much doubt it.