I was really hoping that with the onset of AI people would be more skeptical of content they see online.

This was one of the reasons. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent people from acting like this, but what we can do as a society is adjust to it so that it’s not as harmful. I’m still hoping that the eventual onset of it becoming easily accessible and useable will help people to look at all content much more closely.

Not entirely surprised.

The numbers were already up there, but I imagine YouTube’s recent campaign only drove them higher. More people than before are now aware that adblockers exist and they love using them.

This. It sounds great, but realistically companies will just control the supply of repair materials and scalp us that way instead.

People are fake. A lot of online spaces outside of spots like Facebook (which is Gen X/boomer territory) are more so left leaning, so a lot of people tend to spout what they think is popular. Some might believe it but won’t put any efforts into practicing those beliefs, while others just simply don’t believe what they’re sharing.

Pride month is a good example of this. As soon as the months over most people who were spamming their socials with all sorts of LGBT support messages could care less.

I used to be excited about it, especially the image generation AI.

I believe that the internet has already lost a lot of authenticity in general. The amount of misinformation boomers and gen X lap up on their socials is unreal.

Having advanced image/video AI that would force people to call everything into question, to double check and to fact check sounded good. Except, people aren’t fact checking.