TechTakes

It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.

The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.