I was talking to Kiko, whose entire social media diet is checking BlueSky once a week, and it was clear to me how hale and vigorous he was as a result. My own nutrition, pilfered by these deleterious forces, is patchy at best. Necessary compounds are scarce; youthful skin is a memory. I just saw myself in a mirror – for a few moments, I thought I was looking at bowling ball with a greasy napkin draped over it.
TikTok after its eleventh hour rescue has become an omnichannel of virulent mental illness, rushing fast toward AI slop, topsy-turvy conspiracy strenuously cosigned in the comments, and actual porn. BlueSky is… I don’t know what BlueSky is. I mean, I’m on there or whatever. Twitter, for its part, has only become increasingly more bizarre as the world in general has disintegrated. It’s like a funnel, or… a lens. Maybe a centrifuge is the correct model. It has spun human discourse so fast that the density at the extremes is probably just fatal, inimical to communication.
One especially weird new trend I’ve seen on there is that people are constantly appealing to AI models in the actual flow of the comments. Fact checking the OP, fact checking each other, like that kid who always says his dad could beat up your dad. The parental conception of all this holds, because sometimes they won’t like what Grok says and they’ll ask Perpetuity instead. This is not something I could ever do in public.
It makes sense as a usage schema, being on there – chatbots have a long history on Twitter. I’m just talking about what it looks like to bring in AI agents into the middle of a human dialogue, which is weird and oily and unwelcome. It has a weird smell. I wouldn’t hang out in a place like that for very long.
(CW)TB out.