It doesn't help to get depressed ahead of time about things that haven't completely happened yet, but when you can see the path they're heading down, it's hard not to.
I obliquely mentioned Cory Doctorow's word of the year (enshittification) a couple of days ago, and while he defined it in the context of tech companies purposely worsening their products to make more profit, I think it applies more broadly to what's happening to the interweb.
Jason Kottke today linked to post from a tech-writing site called 404 Media that documents all the times their carefully researched articles have been scraped by bots and AIs to churn out slightly changed versions on multiple sites.
Anonymous jerks have made realistic-looking nude photos purporting to be Taylor Swift, using no-talent-needed tools.
Robo calls with a deep-fake Joe Biden voice were telling people not to vote in the New Hampsire primary earlier this week.
Plus there's the swatting epidemic I mentioned earlier.
And that's all just getting started. Who knows what will be next, or how widespread it will get.
There are probably technological fixes for at least some of these things (like making it impossible to spoof phone numbers, which would help prevent robo calls and swatting), but that would take some political will, which seems in short supply these days.
The more of this I think of, the more I want to do gardening.
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