Me, Myself and AI: The State of Autonomy on The Internet
Commentary — Markus Tonholt Hovland
The glorious predictions of the Internet’s possibilities are slowly withering away. With creative user-generated content being substituted for machine learning and algorithmically optimized content, what was once a thriving interactive space is now starting to resemble a capitalist dystopia of endlessly generated tripe. AI as a third wheel is hardly necessary, but it may be inevitable.
Our journey from the advent of Web 2.0 and the user-generated content of the aughts in the new millennium to our contemporary paradigm of rampant use of AI and interpassivity is a contentious one. With a plethora of social media platforms seemingly bustling with interaction and creativity, I can’t help but wonder if we have strayed from the path of endless imagination and free play to becoming boxed into the ever consuming the dark squares of our smart devices.
What once felt like an expansive digital universe filled with creative minds now feels like a dystopian wasteland of slot machines of dopamine, a feeling many can recognize. The overwhelming banality of getting caught in a web of poorly made short form videos that are either devoid of any creativity from its user, or maybe even not even made by a real user at all. Well, not a human user, anyway. In this article I wish to look closer at our paradoxical shift from broadcasting ourselves to consuming what could by all accounts be considered generic slop.
Is Dystopia starting to seem more like a science fact than science fiction? Illustration: Generated in DeepAI by Markus Tonholt Hovland.
You and AI
Today, almost everyone with Internet access will have had some experience with AI and will probably know of the many possibilities of this emerging technology. From creating images from basic prompts to generating massive amounts of text at the snap of your fingers. And whilst this technology by many accounts can do a lot of good for the world, it does also present problematic scenarios where it can do a lot of harm.
No, I am not talking about the common trope of AI caused annihilation by the likes of SkyNet, HAL 9000 or a rampant supercomputer. I am talking about when AI silently, and in large part unnoticeably, takes over our common digital social domains. Many are perhaps already familiar with the Dead Internet theory, a theory based on the fact that a lions share of the Internet is made by bots and AI, creating a space of algorithmically dictated content primarily made for selling products and propagating political agendas. By perusing even just one of the big platforms like Instagram or TikTok for a time, it is almost immediately apparent that while it might not be fully dead, it certainly is slowly but surely necrotizing.
Most of us will recognize the feeling of being trapped in a scrolling spiral. Photo: Adrian Swancar on Unsplash.
Sisyphean “entertainment”
The Internet was once envisioned as a highly revolutionary force, a limitless archive of human knowledge and a breeding ground for creativity where ideas could be exchanged freely. Instead, it has now largely become a wasteland of overstimulation, a rather vapid shell of its former potential, dominated by content designed not to inform, inspire, or elevate but to pacify, distract, and addict.
The rise of this type of Sisyphean entertainment — being short-form videos of algorithmically curated distractions, and AI-generated content — has reduced digital experiences to little more than an infinite scroll of empty dopamine stimulation. Attention spans seems to take a nose dive, self-diagnoses of ADHD run rampant, and depth and nuance is sacrificed in favor of engagement metrics that reward only what is quick, loud, and instantaneous gratification. While short-form videos like reels on Instagram and TikTok definitely is a type of content we seem perpetually drawn to despite it causing harm to our mental health, it is not the only perpetrator.
Hypersexuality is a hypothesized consequence of pornography and rampant sexual content online. Photo: charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.
From hypertext to hypersex
The Internet, once heralded as a tool for human advancement, has now become a digital space with soulless, mass-produced content, diluting originality and creativity into an indistinguishable slurry of regurgitated noise. At the same time, hypersexualization and debauchery have become central to the online economy, driving many to develop a skewed perspective on sex and sensuality by a constant bombardment of pornography and suggestive content. Not because they contribute anything meaningful, but because they provide the easiest route to exploiting human psychology for profit.
Services like OnlyFans are prime examples of this, having many people from all walks of life abandoning their careers to pursue easy profit from soliciting salacious content of themselves. It might be an easy road to take, but may prove costly in ways of self worth and integrity. While pornography online is hardly a recent development, the consequences of having unrestricted access to a proverbial tidal wave of sexual content on smart devices throughout your childhood, teens and young adulthood is now veering its ugly head.
Platforms like Instagram desensitize us by flooding us with awful content, oftentimes even without giving us a heads-up. Illustration: Camille Tindogan, Figma.
(De)sensitivity
Looking to platforms like Instagram, it is readily apparent that there is a blatant disregard of users and their well-being, virtually drowning them in violent ‘not safe for work’ content, or NSFW, often not even providing warnings of violent and gory content. Even though Meta have apologized for having an algorithm recommending this content, most users on Instagram will already know the feeling of seeing tragic, violent and sexually explicit videos on the site. Many even report to being desensitized after seeing the gruesome and explicit almost on a daily basis.
The Internet is no longer a tool for self-improvement or collective growth; it has become a lame, violent and pornographic dopamine factory, keeping users locked in a never-ending cycle of consumption. Numbing empathy and critical thought, ensuring we never step away long enough to realize how much of agency has been stripped away from us. What I can recall being a uniquely liberating space has now instead devolved, paradoxically enslaving us in its hypnotic grasp.
In its current form, the Internet is no longer a space for discovery and creation, but a machine designed to keep its users docile, dependent, and endlessly scrolling.
A game of numbers
The rise of AI-generated content on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok is not just an emerging trend — it is an inevitability shaped by the very mechanics of digital monetization. These platforms reward engagement, clicks, and sheer volume over carefully crafted quality, fostering an environment where speed and efficiency is what dictate so-called “success”.
In such a landscape, AI-generated content presents an irresistible shortcut, allowing creators to churn out vast amounts of videos, images, and posts with minimal effort. The algorithm-driven nature of social media is poorly distinguishing between human-made and AI-crafted content. What is being pushed to the masses is whatever is frequent, fast, and widely shared. This fact is widely acknowledged by creators, having already led influencers like Kwebbelkop, a YouTuber and content creator, to pivot toward AI-generated videos.
In the current state of platforms like YouTube it rewards “gaming” the system by blatantly regurgitating mass produced trash content for some “content creators”. Screenshots: From YouTube by Markus Tonholt Hovland
The content being made has left many nonplussed, being regarded by most as a cheap and lazy way to line his pockets without doing the minimal effort of actually being creative (not that the content created by the YouTuber previously could be considered particularly creative). The videos feature the YouTuber in an AI form, shown in a plethora of situations that are often quite trivial, uninspired and lazy.
Like shown in the screenshots above, Kwebbelkop is posting a slew of these short AI videos — often no longer than 10 seconds — simply to ‘hack’ the system by mass-producing tripe in an effort to generate revenue through views. The content provides nothing in way of entertainment, but rather to garner the necessary numbers to sustain his income.
As AI advances, its ability to generate viral, attention-grabbing material will only improve. The result of continuing down this path is a dysfunctional ecosystem where content is increasingly engineered for maximum reach rather than artistic merit, a shift that risks diluting creativity even further in favor of gaming algorithmic predictability. Even the leader of the free world, Donald Trump, is easily swayed by the technology. As he shares what can only be described as a jarringly tone deaf AI-video, likely made satirically in reference to the President’s statements regarding converting the war torn Gaza into his very own ‘Trump Gaza’. The video depicts a gilded resort where himself and Netanyahu are seen lounging by a pool sipping cocktails, while Elon Musk saunters through the Tesla-filled streets, being showered with money.
This story serves as a perfect symbolic image of how far we’ve strayed from the almost utopian promises of technologic advancements to slowly transitioning into a dystopian reality.
World Wide Wasteland
The paradoxical state we now find ourselves in is in complete opposition as to what was predicted by Web 2.0 and social networks like YouTube. YouTube’s former slogan “Broadcast yourself” was truly words the average content creator lived by in the 2010s, where personal stories, vlogs and creative collaboration dominated the content creating space. Those words of YouTube’s slogan are now but a phantom of a former Internet-paradigm, substituted by an obstreperous and pernicious machinery where the idea of being a “creator” means making a living off of online content more than it means being a creative, and the idea of “audience” being reduced to numbers on a screen. By those metrics YouTube should also consider nixing the “You” as well as their old slogan, seeing as it was meant to signify the role of the user on their platform.
The cesspool that is the current social media experience, where comment sections are riddled with hate speech and derogatory statements and algorithms fill our feeds with violent, sexual and disturbing content. To put it simply, the modern Internet is a Wild West, a frontier in dire need of being tamed through stricter regulations. The majority of the Internet has become what feels more like a cash cow, a dying horse being pummeled by tech billionaires with greedy capitalist intentions and really no interest in facilitating a creative community.
What was once a space for you and me to interact, it now resembles a vacuous, soul-sucking void of uninspired detritus, often riddled with AI, draining whatever creativity is present within us. The result is a state of existence where we all experience the feelings of fatigue and apathy of being stuck in a spiral of scroll, a spiral we constantly return to in spite of being very conscious of how much we despise it.
The era of broadcasting ourselves is long gone, in favor of becoming perpetually consumed consumers.
Can we escape the current paradigm of social media, or are we always doomed to return? Illustration: Eva Wahyuni on Unsplash.