I guess that’s also what you’re saying.

Yep. And it's gonna get so much worse once LLMs are mainstream. Perhaps they have been for some time. After all, the Dead Internet theory precedes the onslaught of ChatGPT.

I’ve been passively wondering how long it will be until I have to start adding before:2023 to get remotely useful web search results on any topic. Don’t know what to try yet if I need to look up something from after that.

Yes, that's very sad. And what would we get in return for losing the Web to the bots? Nothing but automatic expensive BS at scale.

Oh yeah, definitely. I just meant that as an ironic silver lining, the damage would probably be worse if there wasn’t already some level of dishonesty and deception in society, because then we’d be too pure to have any defences against LLMs.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. You're right. Distrust is essential to critical thinking also. Maybe once everyone learns to assume that you absolutely shouldn't trust anything on the internet (and especially not anything produced by ChatGPT), it will be easier to combat the spread of fake news and nefarious propaganda. But I doubt it. Even smart people seem to fall into this trap, lured by the plausibility of the output, as was shown by Mozilla recently.