So what's the solution? I imagine the right one isn't specific to fan wikis. We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written. Who is building this? How will it work?
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
There's already people kinda living like this. Fentanyl is abused because of the intense euphoria the users experience. As tech improves the downsides will go away and the highs will get even more powerful.
I am not an expert on drugs but my impression is that heroin, fent is just really cheap and easy to transport bc it’s so powerful it is so powerful it mostly knocks you out and causes intense withdrawal. It’s not a fun time its a cheap fix for heroin withdrawal that makes things worse. My understanding is that when heroin prices went up (in part because america stopped subsidizing production in afghanistan after 2021) ppl started switching to fent.
I know nothing about fentanyl honestly, but my impression from heroin users at least is that it really is that good, and issues like addiction and withdrawal are somewhat overblown - many occasional users completely avoid them.
You can still hitch a ride on a pearling lugger to the horizontal falls and shoot them with a homemade sea kayak in real life .. and as yet there's no VR / AR plugin for that in the digital world - at least not one with real whirlpool stoppers, salt water crocodiles, and warm equatorial water sharks.
> We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written.
I don't think the boundary should live at human-written or AI-written, it should just be factual.
This weekend I was playing Stalker 2 and got frustrated that the trader prices in the game seem nonsensical. I spent a lot of time trying to research the mechanic but most guides and some wikis are outright wrong. They either buy into the games marketing or just assume mechanics work as expected.
So what I did was I let Claude read through my game files. 5 minutes later I ended up with a document that very concretely explains all the factors that influence trader prices with references to the game scripts to back it up.
My point is that having AI write game wikis is fine, as long as the information is verifiably correct.
You make a beautifully honest point that few people want to admit which is that things can be factually verified. Too many people are stuck on this idea that everything is up for debate.
I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to just see an annotation, a sort of glow around the content that has verified human signatures. Or maybe we go full dark-forest and configure the browsers to only render content that has a trusted signature.
Maybe for high-stakes things, serious journalism or closer interactions, but most of the time in the Internet we just consume content by unknown people and we don't stop to check their trustworthiness. In the OP's context (game wikis) you're probably not going to know the people signing the wiki's content.
You probably know somebody who knows somebody who knows them, we're just not presently engineering for that fact to matter.
The most famous attempt at a web of trust was PGP, but it just attempted to bind a public key to a name. That's too generic. Only privacy nerds are actually going to have a key signing party if that's all they get out of it.
I think that it'll go better if the we're attesting about common interests. Like, go to the event because you're enthusiastic about games, end up with some public keys as a side effect.
It'll be hard if you're the only person you know with a particular interest and it's impractical to travel to wherever people with that interest gather. Then you'll have to take a gamble on some internet handle you've never met. But really that's just falling back to the dubiously trustworthy web we currently have.
That makes more sense for decryption keys than it does for signing keys.
For any of this to work we have to already be gossiping metadata about each other's content. "I think this key was compromised on Nov 1, 2026" is exactly that kind of metadata. That sort of thing rarely happened in PGP because key revocation was necessarily a side channel that you were often ignoring. But if the only way to avoid being inundated by slop is to assemble the page from the gossip of trusted peers, then the untrusted nature of the recently compromised key is gonna show up right next to its dubiously trustworthy signatures, and your browser can then interpret it without you having to do any sleuthing on your own.
How hard are you really gonna work to compromise a key that you can only use for a few days? I mean, the going rate for placing an ad on a page is like, fractions of a cent per view. Maybe it'll be more valuable in a post-ad world, but I have a hard time imagining that getting your content in front of some eyeballs for a day or two will ever be valuable enough to be worth hitting somebody with a wrench over. What you have to gain by doing so just isn't valuable enough to be worth the risk.
Right, for that we need different domains of trust. Like maybe my commentary on current events is trash but I can be trusted to give good plumbing advice. So people who know this about me can trust some of my content but not the rest, which causes it to be seen/hidden by the people who only trust me transitively through them.
The architects of the original web gave up on the trustworthiness problem pretty early. All we got is : "is this server lying about its name?". We're going to have to pick that problem back up and bake solutions to it into our browsers. Except instead of attestations about server names, I'll be about the content. Was it made by somebody who is known to be sloppy with AI? Or maybe they're the sort that would put out content that doesn't disclose that its secretly an ad.
People have been gossiping this sort of stuff about each other for a very long time. If were gonna have a useful web again, we'll need to find a way to scale that capability.
Remember strategy guides? One dedicated person can document a game in detail. A small team can manually review every wiki edit and contribute most themselves. We just need reputation (there are reputable people) and funding (the game companies themselves have funded these).
Alternatively and for more general communities, the solution is invite-only with tracked invites (so it’s easy to disinvite a bot or otherwise malicious actor) and federation (if you’re invited to one group, you’re automatically trusted by many more).
So now you have to somehow get an invitation and be constantly tracked to get any reliable information about a game? I'll bet game companies will love that idea.
Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour instead of automated systems (so-called "soft security" https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ).
I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.
We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written
It needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.
I imagine with a fan wiki (or company docs in my experience) no one bothers to put the effort in. That's probably because the rewards are for writing the content, and there's absolutely no reward for checking it's correct.
Even if you could come up with a perfect vetting process and create a site with only 100% factual content, wouldn’t the scrapers and trainers just gobble it up and make their own sites, ad-filled and ranked higher in search results and AI responses?
Those ad-filled websites will still be filled with errors so people who know they can get trustworthy info elsewhere won't go to them. Keeping the trusted site ad-free would help too.
Yeah, maybe that’s the way it will end up. A small web of “if you know you know” sites and communities, strictly curated and enforced, with the corporate web scraping it to feed content generation farms for the social media masses
I don't think there is a solution. The internet as we knew it is over, I give it 5 more years before it becomes borderline impossible to find new human-created content on it.
Agreed on the first point, and I think the way to do that is to just not render content unless there's a trust-path to its author. No need for bolt-on ad-blockers, just revoke trust in the advertiser and you'll never see an ad from them ever again.
The only reason there's a connection between the richness of the content, and the likelihood of it being an ad, is because advertisers attract attention by making things shiny. But if we short circuit that upstream, by not running untrusted js to begin with , then there's no reason that we can't have shiny content downstream of where the trust was verified.
We can't reliably detect AI text, and they are getting better at producing plausible humanlike text (albeit still with flaws and mistakes). I do expect them to become impossible for humans to detect when the companies put effort into that (so far they've been focussed on other domains like dev or maths).
I'm afraid your dystopian future where the zone is flooded with shit and nobody can trust anything seems eminently plausible, partly because the internet was built without identity.
I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers. We'll probably need that anyway for other reasons.
It's not a trivial problem. Websites like this could require webauthn tied to a hardware identifier of their choice (like a fingerprint or faceid) - I'm not sure if webauthn provides that level of detail to providers (which method was used), and how secure that attestation is. Of course that's not going to be popular but it might be the lesser of two evils.
> I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers.
That's what surveillance-capitalism wants, but what regular people need is something which is easier to supply and less likely to be turned against them: A lesser proof of "I invested enough time/effort/money into this identity that I'll be hurt if its reputation craters".
Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human. Identity is vitally important for us, the end users interacting with each other. Far more important than it is for nation states and companies, who have always had ways to track us and care more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.
I'm not sure I share your concern about surveillance capitalism - that ship sailed long ago - you are stored in many nation-state and corporate databases under all the aliases, phone numbers, IPs you've ever used. I sincerely doubt your opsec has always been even near good enough to evade this surveillance, it's a little late to start worrying about it now, particularly when there are other concerns.
I'd be more concerned about billionaires spending on bots impersonating humans to sway elections in my local state than a nation state snooping on forum comments and linking them with something else.
Proof of identity is badly needed in order to use the online spaces we've come to know and trust, and time is running out.
> Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human.
If my options are "give all my data to malicious corporations and their bots" or "wonder if the pathological liar I'm talking with is a bot" I'll stick with guessing about the liar. Proof of identity is a scam, not a solution.
We shouldn't abandon the entire idea of an internet where people can find information and speak to each other without being identified and monitored 100% of the time just because the companies who want us to be identified and monitored filled the web with bullshitting bots
Maybe you've already given up and no longer care about that freedom, but don't count on everyone else giving up theirs.
You are dreaming if you think that has been the reality for the last 20 years. Your data is all sitting on servers in Utah, either decrypted or waiting to be decrypted. You can easily be identified and tracked by your online footprint, unless you take really quite extraordinary measures.
The internet does not provide anything close to anonymity and never really has. Even a simple IP address is enough to out the majority of users, when combined with fingerprinting, metadata tracing and the use of metadata from other users, there really is no possibility of hiding your identity from a determined attacker.
I would choose the opposite option personally, and would welcome it if this site for example allowed biometric identification and used that to weight comments. While I wouldn't want to force that on anyone I do think it's going to be necessary given the rise of LLMs.
> there really is no possibility of hiding your identity from a determined attacker.
If there's no possible way to hide your identity then as long as we're determined to identify humans and bots we already can. In truth, most people are able to hide their identity pretty well from most people most of the time. The government can pretty much always track down who you are if they feel like it. If you're using a cell phone apple and google can find out who you are. If you use windows Microsoft will have a pretty good idea of who you are, but the vast majority of websites can't get anything more identifying than an IP address and a user-agent unless you tell it to them without trying to correlate your traffic with other traffic. That's where browser fingerprinting comes in really, it tells them the same browser a person used to log in with their name and address at one website is using another website. That lets them make some educated guesses, but they can't be sure who is behind the screen and there are easy steps a person can take to make it even harder for them to guess.
The fact that anonymity on the internet isn't perfect doesn't make it useless.
Giving that up because you're afraid of reading something a bot wrote seems crazy.
> Unless you are knowledgeable in a field, you wouldn’t be able to make out if something is off.
Maybe in the future that will be true, but right now AI is constantly making very obvious mistakes and errors. That might even eventually become one way we tell if something was written by AI. If human pathological liars get flagged as AI by mistake, that wouldn't even be so bad.
Unfortunately it's worse than the problem with email, and it's also adding to the problems of email, but making it very cheap to send infinite unique and persuasive messages.
It is expensive! It's so expensive it's cannibalizing all other non AI consumers of high end chip dies, and forcing entire countries to redesign their power grids.
I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.
Which has been good & bad with some of the shadier smaller conventions, mismanagement and overgrowth of some of the larger conventions into worse hotel/con experiences.
But to go beyond furcons, nerd conventions in general are now dealing with gen-ai art showing up in lazy con hosts who are just trying to scrape money from the hobby. Struggling to police makers who just download common models online and try to sell budget 3d printed crap at dealer dens / artist allies, taking spaces from actual artists.
I've been walking around Dealer's Den and I noticed that there's a sizeable amount of AliExpress items but then I thought that presentation is part of the service. I mean sure, it's bad if it's all AliExpress, but if it's just a bit then it's not exactly a problem, because the merchant is doing the work of discovering interesting items and then presenting them nicely. I bought a few things that I could as well order on Amazon but I never did because I didn't know it's actually that nice.
In a healthy community people will notice crap and simply won't buy it, which discourages merchants from selling crap. If that's not the case, then it's quite likely that the community has bigger issues because they cannot distinguish crap from good items.
I mean, if someone shows up with hand-made crap then the community should also push it out, whether it's hand-made or mass-produced is pretty much besides the point.
Regarding the cons themselves, of course there are good ones and bad ones. That's how it is with everything.
None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
I think fundamentally you are right. People or AI will generate artifacts of value and a system will evlove to find that value. Partially because there will likely be a financial incentive to do so.
> I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
Except that Astra will happily lie to your face just like it lies in the wikis. It might even "fix" things that are perfectly correct. The problem here isn't that wikis have errors, the problem is that AI gives wrong information.
We are no longer on a web that assumed humans first.
LLMs can shitpost like the best of us. I’ve had to point out content was AI generated so many times that its futility is apparent.
Consumers have more to consume.
A new category of producers can provide.
If the content produced is close enough to the real thing, is cheaper, then that’s enough to change consumption patterns.
You would need to identify some attribute of content that cannot be replicated at scale, for the old system to persist.
Currently the average output of an LLM matches the average output of an online conversation. It’s only when it’s pushed or put in front of an expert in a domain that its weaknesses are apparent.
Unless everyone becomes an expert, I’ll output is a good enough substitute.
I've seen a couple of these in search results while looking for info about more niche games and at first I thought they were fan made but like the article mentions they're not actually wikis, nor do they contain accurate information.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
I think there are people who just assume there's money to be made if you're pushing the sloppified tomorrow hard, and no time to stop and think about why.
Maybe there are other people selling the tools, who try to convince the former people that what they're doing is smart and profit will roll in any day now.
Anyway it would be a mistake to think something is profitable just because someone bets on it.
I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.
For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.
On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.
On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.
YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.
Have you tried going to a library or a bookstore? Or even Amazon, since the return policy is excellent. Books are still a reliable resource for anything that hasn’t changed in the last 5 years (since there will be a pre-LLM text). Fortunately that includes loads of DIY tasks.
Don’t get me started on Google’s propensity to show a full page of unwanted shopping results now without any way to show websites unless you turn verbatim on. “Brand picks” what garbage.
Thank you for mentioning DDG - I don’t know what it is about their search algos but whenever I tried switching I found I got far less helpful results compared to Google. Like at least half the first results were total slop fest unusable.
DDG has become so unusable because of AI word vomit sites that I'm finally seriously considering the paid search engine that HN loves... Kagi, I think?
Wait until you have to audit your average codebase post-AI.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
So this is why we are seeing all these CVE's and vulnerability disclosures? Because of the careful curation? Feels to me it is more like ignorance is bliss.
I know the steel made before this particular year is look after because was not affected or build during periods of radiation, and that gives it qualities sought after.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
I believe someone created a website specifically for that purpose with regards to LLMs: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ (not mine, nor can I remember who shared it on HN)
Are you willing to share that? I didn't have the space at the time to download the entirety of Wikipedia (though I think I have an old copy of Wikipedia sans images floating around somewhere).
In this new era it is almost zero effort to stand up a convincing website on any topic, which is mostly correct, but riddled with small confabulations and errors. It can take typing one sentence (even with grammatical errors) to do so, the bar is now zero for creating plausible 'content' and flooding the internet with it. As the article notes bad actors, but also people who have good intentions, are flooding the zone with slop.
If it was all clearly completely incorrect, it wouldn't be such a huge problem, but it is plausible and hard for humans to detect in a short time unless it is long form text.
Even search providers are giving us this new kind of generated result at the top of their results, which most people will be using blindly to verify answers. So it's turtles all the way down.
If you're not a domain expert you have no idea which things are right and which are wrong so it's very hard to determine the truth or trust results.
To top all that, LLMs are being trained on this new untrustworthy data without differentiating it from older data, and trained by other LLM instances in a sort of recursive loop to improve performance on very narrow goals. What could possibly go wrong!
On the other hand, frontier LLMs are extremely good at getting super accurate info from games. They’ll happily disassemble the actual game binary to get to the bottom of certain game mechanics, including ones not obvious in the game itself, without even an explicit prompt to do so; I can merely ask questions about certain mechanics. That’s way better than often guessed (and guessed wrong) mechanics commonly found in game wikis. I’ve observed this over and over again when vibe coding some helper tools for some games I’m playing; I used to build these for wider communities and got some recognition for them, now I can do what I used to finish in 100 hours in like half an hour of prompting. I no longer share them though.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
I fully agree! I have done a few game decomps and some deep RE passes on other games, and that uncovers a lot of details that game wikis/discords/forums get wrong or just don't mention, going as deep as undocumented mechanics that change the online gameplay. It's only a matter of having the LLMs properly reverse engineer the games instead of relying on other players' info, lossy wikis, or game manuals.
By the way, since fandom and fextralife were already such a huge blight on the concept of wiki, for a while people have been making solutions that might incidentally also help with AI slop wikis. For instance, https://getindie.wiki/
LLMs have created a new problem. Previously it was a lot of effort to create a bad wiki with unreliable information that looked plausible. Now you can generate one with thousands of pages and correct grammar and spelling (or not if you prefer) in an instant.
So what's the solution? I imagine the right one isn't specific to fan wikis. We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written. Who is building this? How will it work?
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1395152040389713922
FYI, that tweet is not visible without an X account. You may want to consider an alternative link or at least a description of what's about.
replace x. with tw1tter.
That comic is considered sensitive? By whom? The AI overlords?
That link prompts for a signup.
xcancel, nitter and twitterwebviewer are all down. does anyone know of an alternative to those?
god that comic hits so hard. what a horrible world we are building.
There's already people kinda living like this. Fentanyl is abused because of the intense euphoria the users experience. As tech improves the downsides will go away and the highs will get even more powerful.
I am not an expert on drugs but my impression is that heroin, fent is just really cheap and easy to transport bc it’s so powerful it is so powerful it mostly knocks you out and causes intense withdrawal. It’s not a fun time its a cheap fix for heroin withdrawal that makes things worse. My understanding is that when heroin prices went up (in part because america stopped subsidizing production in afghanistan after 2021) ppl started switching to fent.
I know nothing about fentanyl honestly, but my impression from heroin users at least is that it really is that good, and issues like addiction and withdrawal are somewhat overblown - many occasional users completely avoid them.
You can still hitch a ride on a pearling lugger to the horizontal falls and shoot them with a homemade sea kayak in real life .. and as yet there's no VR / AR plugin for that in the digital world - at least not one with real whirlpool stoppers, salt water crocodiles, and warm equatorial water sharks.
> We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written.
I don't think the boundary should live at human-written or AI-written, it should just be factual.
This weekend I was playing Stalker 2 and got frustrated that the trader prices in the game seem nonsensical. I spent a lot of time trying to research the mechanic but most guides and some wikis are outright wrong. They either buy into the games marketing or just assume mechanics work as expected.
So what I did was I let Claude read through my game files. 5 minutes later I ended up with a document that very concretely explains all the factors that influence trader prices with references to the game scripts to back it up.
My point is that having AI write game wikis is fine, as long as the information is verifiably correct.
You make a beautifully honest point that few people want to admit which is that things can be factually verified. Too many people are stuck on this idea that everything is up for debate.
This story seems to be missing the part where someone verified any of the document is correct.
It’s not fine if it also has the side effect of damaging the community around the wiki.
I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to just see an annotation, a sort of glow around the content that has verified human signatures. Or maybe we go full dark-forest and configure the browsers to only render content that has a trusted signature.
The problem is that the majority of the time, the one ultimately trying to dupe you is not the AI model, but the person who handles it.
In other words, signatures don't address the fact that a human can ask an AI model for content and then sign it to pass it as their own.
Isn't that an enormous risk though? As soon as such abuse becomes known, that individual will never be trusted again.
Maybe for high-stakes things, serious journalism or closer interactions, but most of the time in the Internet we just consume content by unknown people and we don't stop to check their trustworthiness. In the OP's context (game wikis) you're probably not going to know the people signing the wiki's content.
You probably know somebody who knows somebody who knows them, we're just not presently engineering for that fact to matter.
The most famous attempt at a web of trust was PGP, but it just attempted to bind a public key to a name. That's too generic. Only privacy nerds are actually going to have a key signing party if that's all they get out of it.
I think that it'll go better if the we're attesting about common interests. Like, go to the event because you're enthusiastic about games, end up with some public keys as a side effect.
It'll be hard if you're the only person you know with a particular interest and it's impractical to travel to wherever people with that interest gather. Then you'll have to take a gamble on some internet handle you've never met. But really that's just falling back to the dubiously trustworthy web we currently have.
unfortunately this would lead to more innocents getting coerced into various schemes, or simply their signature stolen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
https://xkcd.com/538/
That makes more sense for decryption keys than it does for signing keys.
For any of this to work we have to already be gossiping metadata about each other's content. "I think this key was compromised on Nov 1, 2026" is exactly that kind of metadata. That sort of thing rarely happened in PGP because key revocation was necessarily a side channel that you were often ignoring. But if the only way to avoid being inundated by slop is to assemble the page from the gossip of trusted peers, then the untrusted nature of the recently compromised key is gonna show up right next to its dubiously trustworthy signatures, and your browser can then interpret it without you having to do any sleuthing on your own.
How hard are you really gonna work to compromise a key that you can only use for a few days? I mean, the going rate for placing an ad on a page is like, fractions of a cent per view. Maybe it'll be more valuable in a post-ad world, but I have a hard time imagining that getting your content in front of some eyeballs for a day or two will ever be valuable enough to be worth hitting somebody with a wrench over. What you have to gain by doing so just isn't valuable enough to be worth the risk.
Right, for that we need different domains of trust. Like maybe my commentary on current events is trash but I can be trusted to give good plumbing advice. So people who know this about me can trust some of my content but not the rest, which causes it to be seen/hidden by the people who only trust me transitively through them.
The architects of the original web gave up on the trustworthiness problem pretty early. All we got is : "is this server lying about its name?". We're going to have to pick that problem back up and bake solutions to it into our browsers. Except instead of attestations about server names, I'll be about the content. Was it made by somebody who is known to be sloppy with AI? Or maybe they're the sort that would put out content that doesn't disclose that its secretly an ad.
People have been gossiping this sort of stuff about each other for a very long time. If were gonna have a useful web again, we'll need to find a way to scale that capability.
[bell ring] What is PGP?
[dead]
Remember strategy guides? One dedicated person can document a game in detail. A small team can manually review every wiki edit and contribute most themselves. We just need reputation (there are reputable people) and funding (the game companies themselves have funded these).
Alternatively and for more general communities, the solution is invite-only with tracked invites (so it’s easy to disinvite a bot or otherwise malicious actor) and federation (if you’re invited to one group, you’re automatically trusted by many more).
So now you have to somehow get an invitation and be constantly tracked to get any reliable information about a game? I'll bet game companies will love that idea.
Presumably that is required to edit, not merely read.
Wikipedia is mostly going in the direction of just having very strict rules enforced via human review. If you get caught using LLMs and refuse to stop, you get banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_wit...
I think its working so far.
Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour instead of automated systems (so-called "soft security" https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ).
I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.
We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written
It needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.
I imagine with a fan wiki (or company docs in my experience) no one bothers to put the effort in. That's probably because the rewards are for writing the content, and there's absolutely no reward for checking it's correct.
> AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.
If that were even remotely true AI fan wikis wouldn't be riddled with errors.
Even if you could come up with a perfect vetting process and create a site with only 100% factual content, wouldn’t the scrapers and trainers just gobble it up and make their own sites, ad-filled and ranked higher in search results and AI responses?
Those ad-filled websites will still be filled with errors so people who know they can get trustworthy info elsewhere won't go to them. Keeping the trusted site ad-free would help too.
Maybe but at least we fans who know would know…
In some ways that’s the web, everyone posts their stuff. Or at least it was.
Yeah, maybe that’s the way it will end up. A small web of “if you know you know” sites and communities, strictly curated and enforced, with the corporate web scraping it to feed content generation farms for the social media masses
I don't think there is a solution. The internet as we knew it is over, I give it 5 more years before it becomes borderline impossible to find new human-created content on it.
Its really just the web that has this problem. The internet is OK, and we can build a new web for it.
>a new web for it.
Incentives will make sure that this new web will become the old one given enough time.
Yeah, but if we play our cards right it could be quite a lot of time
You could increase that time by making the new web less ad friendly. A text only internet for example.
Agreed on the first point, and I think the way to do that is to just not render content unless there's a trust-path to its author. No need for bolt-on ad-blockers, just revoke trust in the advertiser and you'll never see an ad from them ever again.
The only reason there's a connection between the richness of the content, and the likelihood of it being an ad, is because advertisers attract attention by making things shiny. But if we short circuit that upstream, by not running untrusted js to begin with , then there's no reason that we can't have shiny content downstream of where the trust was verified.
Instant information was always a mistake. I hope we will go back to libraries. Time has come to preserve the paper books.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthro...
We can't reliably detect AI text, and they are getting better at producing plausible humanlike text (albeit still with flaws and mistakes). I do expect them to become impossible for humans to detect when the companies put effort into that (so far they've been focussed on other domains like dev or maths).
I'm afraid your dystopian future where the zone is flooded with shit and nobody can trust anything seems eminently plausible, partly because the internet was built without identity.
I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers. We'll probably need that anyway for other reasons.
It's not a trivial problem. Websites like this could require webauthn tied to a hardware identifier of their choice (like a fingerprint or faceid) - I'm not sure if webauthn provides that level of detail to providers (which method was used), and how secure that attestation is. Of course that's not going to be popular but it might be the lesser of two evils.
> I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers.
That's what surveillance-capitalism wants, but what regular people need is something which is easier to supply and less likely to be turned against them: A lesser proof of "I invested enough time/effort/money into this identity that I'll be hurt if its reputation craters".
Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human. Identity is vitally important for us, the end users interacting with each other. Far more important than it is for nation states and companies, who have always had ways to track us and care more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.
I'm not sure I share your concern about surveillance capitalism - that ship sailed long ago - you are stored in many nation-state and corporate databases under all the aliases, phone numbers, IPs you've ever used. I sincerely doubt your opsec has always been even near good enough to evade this surveillance, it's a little late to start worrying about it now, particularly when there are other concerns.
I'd be more concerned about billionaires spending on bots impersonating humans to sway elections in my local state than a nation state snooping on forum comments and linking them with something else.
Proof of identity is badly needed in order to use the online spaces we've come to know and trust, and time is running out.
> Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human.
If my options are "give all my data to malicious corporations and their bots" or "wonder if the pathological liar I'm talking with is a bot" I'll stick with guessing about the liar. Proof of identity is a scam, not a solution.
We shouldn't abandon the entire idea of an internet where people can find information and speak to each other without being identified and monitored 100% of the time just because the companies who want us to be identified and monitored filled the web with bullshitting bots
Maybe you've already given up and no longer care about that freedom, but don't count on everyone else giving up theirs.
You are dreaming if you think that has been the reality for the last 20 years. Your data is all sitting on servers in Utah, either decrypted or waiting to be decrypted. You can easily be identified and tracked by your online footprint, unless you take really quite extraordinary measures.
The internet does not provide anything close to anonymity and never really has. Even a simple IP address is enough to out the majority of users, when combined with fingerprinting, metadata tracing and the use of metadata from other users, there really is no possibility of hiding your identity from a determined attacker.
I would choose the opposite option personally, and would welcome it if this site for example allowed biometric identification and used that to weight comments. While I wouldn't want to force that on anyone I do think it's going to be necessary given the rise of LLMs.
> there really is no possibility of hiding your identity from a determined attacker.
If there's no possible way to hide your identity then as long as we're determined to identify humans and bots we already can. In truth, most people are able to hide their identity pretty well from most people most of the time. The government can pretty much always track down who you are if they feel like it. If you're using a cell phone apple and google can find out who you are. If you use windows Microsoft will have a pretty good idea of who you are, but the vast majority of websites can't get anything more identifying than an IP address and a user-agent unless you tell it to them without trying to correlate your traffic with other traffic. That's where browser fingerprinting comes in really, it tells them the same browser a person used to log in with their name and address at one website is using another website. That lets them make some educated guesses, but they can't be sure who is behind the screen and there are easy steps a person can take to make it even harder for them to guess.
The fact that anonymity on the internet isn't perfect doesn't make it useless. Giving that up because you're afraid of reading something a bot wrote seems crazy.
Well, surveillance capitalism now has a killer app.
Utilizing terms like surveillance capitalism, doesn’t serve as a useful deterrent, because the underlying system has changed.
Previously Bots were piloted to be marginally effective at appearing to be normal users. With LLMs, that’s basically out of the window.
At this point your false positive detection rate is going to start hitting human users.
Users are also going to accept AI content. Simply because their feeds are going to provide it to them.
It’s cheap, and it achieves the same dopamine hits that human interaction will achieve.
Unless you are knowledgeable in a field, you wouldn’t be able to make out if something is off.
The most likely positive outcome is we see bots that take on bridging roles in conversations.
The question I would ask is why would and who would, pay to verify a user is human ?
> Unless you are knowledgeable in a field, you wouldn’t be able to make out if something is off.
Maybe in the future that will be true, but right now AI is constantly making very obvious mistakes and errors. That might even eventually become one way we tell if something was written by AI. If human pathological liars get flagged as AI by mistake, that wouldn't even be so bad.
Make the use of AI expensive. This is the same problem we have with email
Unfortunately it's worse than the problem with email, and it's also adding to the problems of email, but making it very cheap to send infinite unique and persuasive messages.
It is expensive! It's so expensive it's cannibalizing all other non AI consumers of high end chip dies, and forcing entire countries to redesign their power grids.
Expensive for the user. Right now you can easily use AI without paying anything
I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.
Case in point: the proliferation of furcons.
>Case in point: the proliferation of furcons.
Which has been good & bad with some of the shadier smaller conventions, mismanagement and overgrowth of some of the larger conventions into worse hotel/con experiences.
But to go beyond furcons, nerd conventions in general are now dealing with gen-ai art showing up in lazy con hosts who are just trying to scrape money from the hobby. Struggling to police makers who just download common models online and try to sell budget 3d printed crap at dealer dens / artist allies, taking spaces from actual artists.
I've been walking around Dealer's Den and I noticed that there's a sizeable amount of AliExpress items but then I thought that presentation is part of the service. I mean sure, it's bad if it's all AliExpress, but if it's just a bit then it's not exactly a problem, because the merchant is doing the work of discovering interesting items and then presenting them nicely. I bought a few things that I could as well order on Amazon but I never did because I didn't know it's actually that nice.
In a healthy community people will notice crap and simply won't buy it, which discourages merchants from selling crap. If that's not the case, then it's quite likely that the community has bigger issues because they cannot distinguish crap from good items.
I mean, if someone shows up with hand-made crap then the community should also push it out, whether it's hand-made or mass-produced is pretty much besides the point.
Regarding the cons themselves, of course there are good ones and bad ones. That's how it is with everything.
Scientific articles: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-m... (although this is an old one)
None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
I think fundamentally you are right. People or AI will generate artifacts of value and a system will evlove to find that value. Partially because there will likely be a financial incentive to do so.
> I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
Except that Astra will happily lie to your face just like it lies in the wikis. It might even "fix" things that are perfectly correct. The problem here isn't that wikis have errors, the problem is that AI gives wrong information.
Yes.
We are no longer on a web that assumed humans first.
LLMs can shitpost like the best of us. I’ve had to point out content was AI generated so many times that its futility is apparent.
Consumers have more to consume.
A new category of producers can provide.
If the content produced is close enough to the real thing, is cheaper, then that’s enough to change consumption patterns.
You would need to identify some attribute of content that cannot be replicated at scale, for the old system to persist.
Currently the average output of an LLM matches the average output of an online conversation. It’s only when it’s pushed or put in front of an expert in a domain that its weaknesses are apparent.
Unless everyone becomes an expert, I’ll output is a good enough substitute.
> So what's the solution?
There is no solution (though there will be plenty of grifters trying to sell one).
The open internet we currently know will be lost to mountains of slop just like usenet and email were even prior to the AI era.
[dead]
I've seen a couple of these in search results while looking for info about more niche games and at first I thought they were fan made but like the article mentions they're not actually wikis, nor do they contain accurate information.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
I think there are people who just assume there's money to be made if you're pushing the sloppified tomorrow hard, and no time to stop and think about why.
Maybe there are other people selling the tools, who try to convince the former people that what they're doing is smart and profit will roll in any day now.
Anyway it would be a mistake to think something is profitable just because someone bets on it.
I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.
For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.
On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.
On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.
YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.
Have you tried going to a library or a bookstore? Or even Amazon, since the return policy is excellent. Books are still a reliable resource for anything that hasn’t changed in the last 5 years (since there will be a pre-LLM text). Fortunately that includes loads of DIY tasks.
Don’t get me started on Google’s propensity to show a full page of unwanted shopping results now without any way to show websites unless you turn verbatim on. “Brand picks” what garbage.
Actually, yes! Books are great - although building code has changed a surprising amount in the last 10 or 15 years.
Thank you for mentioning DDG - I don’t know what it is about their search algos but whenever I tried switching I found I got far less helpful results compared to Google. Like at least half the first results were total slop fest unusable.
DDG has become so unusable because of AI word vomit sites that I'm finally seriously considering the paid search engine that HN loves... Kagi, I think?
Wait until you have to audit your average codebase post-AI.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
I’m not sure I’d call most enterprise code repositories, carefully curated. I think lava flow is way more standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)
So this is why we are seeing all these CVE's and vulnerability disclosures? Because of the careful curation? Feels to me it is more like ignorance is bliss.
Post-AI?
I know the steel made before this particular year is look after because was not affected or build during periods of radiation, and that gives it qualities sought after.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
In case anyone isn't familiar with that type of steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I believe someone created a website specifically for that purpose with regards to LLMs: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ (not mine, nor can I remember who shared it on HN)
Are you willing to share that? I didn't have the space at the time to download the entirety of Wikipedia (though I think I have an old copy of Wikipedia sans images floating around somewhere).
[dead]
[flagged]
In this new era it is almost zero effort to stand up a convincing website on any topic, which is mostly correct, but riddled with small confabulations and errors. It can take typing one sentence (even with grammatical errors) to do so, the bar is now zero for creating plausible 'content' and flooding the internet with it. As the article notes bad actors, but also people who have good intentions, are flooding the zone with slop.
If it was all clearly completely incorrect, it wouldn't be such a huge problem, but it is plausible and hard for humans to detect in a short time unless it is long form text.
Even search providers are giving us this new kind of generated result at the top of their results, which most people will be using blindly to verify answers. So it's turtles all the way down.
If you're not a domain expert you have no idea which things are right and which are wrong so it's very hard to determine the truth or trust results.
To top all that, LLMs are being trained on this new untrustworthy data without differentiating it from older data, and trained by other LLM instances in a sort of recursive loop to improve performance on very narrow goals. What could possibly go wrong!
On the other hand, frontier LLMs are extremely good at getting super accurate info from games. They’ll happily disassemble the actual game binary to get to the bottom of certain game mechanics, including ones not obvious in the game itself, without even an explicit prompt to do so; I can merely ask questions about certain mechanics. That’s way better than often guessed (and guessed wrong) mechanics commonly found in game wikis. I’ve observed this over and over again when vibe coding some helper tools for some games I’m playing; I used to build these for wider communities and got some recognition for them, now I can do what I used to finish in 100 hours in like half an hour of prompting. I no longer share them though.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
I fully agree! I have done a few game decomps and some deep RE passes on other games, and that uncovers a lot of details that game wikis/discords/forums get wrong or just don't mention, going as deep as undocumented mechanics that change the online gameplay. It's only a matter of having the LLMs properly reverse engineer the games instead of relying on other players' info, lossy wikis, or game manuals.
I've pulled loot spawn formulas this way a couple of times, stuff that Reddit had been debating for years and still getting wrong
Fandom (ex-Wikia) has been a dumpster fire since day one.
As witness the choice to squat on the name "Fandom" when they were notoriously averse to treating fandoms reasonably.
Don't forget f*xtralife
By the way, since fandom and fextralife were already such a huge blight on the concept of wiki, for a while people have been making solutions that might incidentally also help with AI slop wikis. For instance, https://getindie.wiki/
> Attempts to reach GameDB for comment via their public contact email resulted in an error, stating "the remote server is misconfigured".
this is such an emblematic thing for the slop peddlers
> ... I put the question into Google and clicked the first result: the Nighthawks Wiki.
The problem here is Google. Bad websites have always been around.
LLMs have created a new problem. Previously it was a lot of effort to create a bad wiki with unreliable information that looked plausible. Now you can generate one with thousands of pages and correct grammar and spelling (or not if you prefer) in an instant.
People talk about their being a market for google without the AI features, but i think the real market would be google that filters out slop results.
Bonus points for also filtering out paywalls.
I'm tired of search results being useless. The signal to noise ratio on internet search is much worse now a days.
well it's because the AIs are trained on what they find online. And what they find online is now ai generated bullshit.
[flagged]
oh no, now gamers might have to actually play the game