Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Since no post about virtual pro wrestling is complete without a follow-up about the AI-driven death of the Internet as we know it, here's a provocative new Philip Rosedale essay predicting just that, in what he dubs the Ultraviolet Catastrophe:

AIs are now easily able to create accounts, establish IP addresses, and send plausibly important or interesting messages at effectively zero cost. This means that the internet will soon be saturated with websites, social media, YouTube, and Twitter accounts creating messages at millions of times the rate at which humans can create content. Worse yet, many of these messages will deceptively claim to be from real people.

[Y]ou may be also suffering from the fantasy that these messages for some reason won’t fool you. In sufficient quantity and quality, they certainly will. And even when they don’t, they will “flood the channel”, making it impossible for you to find actual useful information.

I've definitely seen early signs of this effect while researching my various writing projects.

This is so bad.

In the legendary D-Day scene of "Saving Private Ryan", @tomhanks says something like "gatac gatac" into a walkie talkie. So I checked Google to find out what he said.

And @GoogleAI… just totally made some shit up. 👇 pic.twitter.com/cQChICkTDr

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) May 22, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Google Search is being eroded by "AI summaries" which are often wrong or just rampant bullshit, even on well-known topics (see above!), while whole channels of content are AI slop. Earlier today, I came across a YouTube channel called "Second Life" which has nothing to do with virtual worlds, but is instead a slew of weirdly messianic gen AI videos. (No, I'm not linking to it.)

Anyway, as a consequence of all this, Philip believes we'll begin withdrawing from the Internet as we know it — though I'm not sure this will include legacy virtual worlds (i.e. Second Life, etc., but more on that down the way):

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