noticing it more and more. i like to play retro video games but i don’t actually do it that often. 5 years or so ago i got a SNES mini and a playstation classic and one of those anbernac handhelds in the span of a year or two, so I was spending a lot of time reading lists online of games people thought were notable, underrated, good games for genre newbies, etc.
i have been playing games again recently so i have again been looking up games and the difference in content you get now is astounding. five years ago if you searched something like “best nes RPGs” or “obscure ps1 games” you would find lovingly handcrafted lists and articles by people who were passionate about it and wanted to share, make readers laugh, or ignite interest in something. Now there’s like 20 different sites that each have ai generated “best (genre) games for (system)” lists for every system and genre combination possible, with generic game descriptions, list orders likely cribbed from one of those ranking sites, and nonsensical filler copy (“every RPG enthusiast loves the N64” type words just mashed together)
photographs are also no fun to take or look at anymore, accelerated by new ai image generation but honestly ever since smartphone cameras started automatically editing the shot out of your picture before it even showed it to you.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author, glad i just got depressed and useless and never pursued it, considering what that space looks like today.
internet was a mistake
it seems like every time i search for anything it comes up with a million ai-generated wordpress pages with the same basic structure. obviously being churned out as someone’s “passive income” scheme. I wonder if there is a search engine with a way to filter out all wordpress sites…
This predates LLMs and the current AI fad, but yeah it’s a pain in the ass. I think they’ve gotten worse because at least 10-15 years ago when you searched “X release date” the actual real release date was sandwiched somewhere in the autogenerated garbage.