GenAI changed everything: harder to find quality content, social media flooded with bots, lost communities. But maybe it’s making us more human again? #GenAI #TechCommunity

The way I feel seeing AI news every day

Just like many (most?) of you, I am using AI every day. I like it for some things, like giving me insights on topics and explore new ideas or create learning plans. I’ve been way less successful for other things (well, most things actually). Heck, I’m even currently leading AI adoption for engineers in my current job, so let’s say I’m pretty invested. In this article though, I want to discuss a few of the ways AI has drastically impacted me and my life so far.

It’s generally harder to find quality technical content online

Because AI is able to generate tons of content in minimal time, many content farms out there generate massive amounts of data and flood the market with it. Some sources even report that 3/4 of websites online already contain generated content. It makes it increasingly difficult to use search engines to find quality technical information. This is a not a new phenomenon in DevRel, it’s well known that many of the large actors out there externalise the "lower quality / more generally" content to third parties. But with the arrival of LLMs, it has scaled up tremendously. I simply find myself relying less and less on "insert your search engine" to get proper technical information. Instead, I directly go to specialised places like Discord, Reddit or simply the documentation.

This is also true for smaller scale content publishers and personal blogs. For as little as 50$ a month you can have a completely automated blog generating content for itself, including social media promotion.

Social Media has always been a double edged sword for me. Even 10 years ago, unless you’d curate your timeline like a madman, you’d have to sift through a lot of irrelevant content to find a few gems. But those gems were worth it. As a long time Kotlin developer, I’ve found most of "my people" online first by sharing and reacting to Kotlin content. Today, those gems are still there but the amount of low quality / irrelevant content has spiked up to incredible amounts. I feel like it’s more blatant on Youtube, play around with shorts (🤢) for 30 minutes and your timeline will be full of AI generated videos that voice over successful reddit posts from completely automated accounts. Worse, the content is very often plain wrong. Not only that, AI is also being pushed on people using social media. Insert a few words, and LinkedIn will transform those into a full fledged 500 words post babbling about said words.

Everything looks the same

Because of how easy it is to generate content, as well as how aggressively it is pushed everywhere (Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, ..., basically everywhere!) the share of people using it is increasingly large. This leads to posts that basically all look the same. Same formatting, same verbosity, same use of emojis, bullet lists everywhere with separated sections AND SAME LIFELESS TONE... The online world is really losing its flavour. Essentially, AI generated content has no soul. It also means that shallower content will tend to be posted more often, because of how cheap it is to generate posts. Which increases the signal/noise ratio issue I mentioned above.

One can find many semi automated accounts posting engagement traps to and this simply pushes the more technical audience away.

The social media world has also become a lot more fragmented the last few years. First because of the Twitter acquisition (leading to many people being on different platforms) but also lately because the ever more aggressive chase for data to feed the almighty models. Add to this that by being on a platform, you have to coexist with some outrageously voluntarily biased models and the use of social media becomes very unattractive.

Because of all these reasons, a large share of the people I used to follow are now using social media for "push only", meaning that they use cross-posters and do not interact with their replies. Others have left the game altogether.

And given that discussions (for me) are where connection gets created, I simply find it harder to find inspiring people (whose behaviour or work give me energy) online.

We’ve become so much more used to stealing other people’s content

One of the things that bothers me the most is that we all know that those large models are only possible because we have been essentially been stealing people’s data at an unprecedented scale. In a world where some of the most used Open-Source projects struggle to survive for lack of sponsorship, all of us techies are using AI assistants that have been fed the entirety of GitHub. Anthropic has just lost a lawsuit because they used books to train their models without authorisation. The same is true for images, music, video generation, . . . you name it.

We developers are at the same time lamenting for the lack of sponsoring from the big corps while using stolen data on a daily basis.

It all feels unsustainable

I am no expert in economics, so please don’t take my word for it but given the already insane amount of revenue generated by AI the past years and the sheer size of the losses that those companies are still making, I find it extremely hard to believe that the current pricing models of AI tooling is sustainable (and I’m not the only one). A few years back, Netflix cost 12 dollars. The convenience and the size of the catalog made me a very happy user. Eight years down the line, it is now close to 25 dollars (and climbing) and I have to pay 4 similar services for the same catalog.

What’s even more, the insane levels of investments loops being made make me genuinely worried the whole industry ends up crashing hard.

It’s like driving a Ferrari at 250km/h on the highway : It feels good and exhilarating, but it’s genuinely a bit hard to not have a large part of your brain wondering what will happen when a mistake happens....

It’s easy to be lazy

I use AI everyday, and it can really be amazing. A pet-project that used to take a week now takes 1/2 day. It’s also really great at helping me dive into an existing project or domain quickly. Or update dependencies for older maintenance projects. It’s also a rather good rubber ducky (even if it tends to agree with you too much for my taste) and it’s a useful creative companion at giving project or gift ideas.

What I find difficult though is how easy it can be to fall into the trap of "just do it for me please".

• This blog post you have to write ? "Do it and I’ll do some changes".
• This slide deck that is expected of you "Oh, I’ll just need a couple hours and AI will do most of the work for me".
• Darn I’m stuck on Advent of Code, Claude, do your magic.

It takes effort to stay sharp. And now, we constantly have a backup plan next to us to do our work. It’s easier to just let it slip and requires (me) more discipline and motivation to stay relevant.

I am sometimes really glad I am not a student today, because I feel GenAI would have done me a lot of harm back then. The grind is useful to get past a certain level of understanding. It was always possible, you simply needed to copy the work of someone else or use a mechanical turk platforms. But now it’s always available on all your devices, for free. And it turns out, research seems to agree.

Hiring online has become harder

A few months back, I was hiring for a couple technical positions. I made the mistake to post the openings on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has always been a bit of a hit and miss for hiring, but I’ve had some success in the past finding very relevant people way out of my network (Shoutout to my former Adyen team!!). Things seem to be different since the GPT era though.... Within one hour, I had received over 300 responses. Most clearly generated and not a single one relevant to the position. I closed the gates as the requests were still pouring in and decided to use my local network again. I am unsure exactly what happens here, having not used the platform to search for a job myself but I believe that many people use tools like n8n to build automated pipelines those days generating applications responses on the fly .

I have to admit I don’t quite understand this to be honest, I’ve always been more of the "apply to 2 jobs but go 300% for it" kind of person. What are your chances to get an interview based on a fully generated application? The current market is quite overcrowded though, so I guess I can still understand why people do this...

And so what now?

This article ended up being much longer than I expected. I don’t intend to do any low key AI bashing here. I am using AI everyday myself and am genuinely excited about the possibilities that technology can bring us in the future. I have Claude writing a new pet-project for me literally as I am writing this.

I’ll write more about it soon but as a community person, I have never seen such engagement from a community than with AI tooling. There is deep, genuine interest; people experiment a lot and fast and this creates a lot of positive excitement. Optimists and Skeptics alike, close to everyone feels involved.

That being said, I also see that my behaviour has a changed a lot the past couple years :

• I mostly lost interest in social media, for the reasons mentioned above. I am almost push only now and it has become infrequent.
• I am slowly migrating out of GitHub and my pet projects have become private by default.
• I am much more skeptical of any news I see and verify almost everything I read (which is not a bad thing in itself).
• I am always "on alert" for anything I see / read / hear to see if it is generated content.
• Most visibly AI generated content has become a red flag for me and a sign of "low effort". I don’t dismiss it but I do alter my expectations about the content / person / company in front of me based on this.

Most interestingly though, I see renewed interest in smaller, gated communities. Physical Meetups, local groups, closed content publications, indie writing, ... I actually feel like we’re coming back to where it all started for me 15 years ago. Locally, with people I know, making genuine connections. AI can’t replace that, and in some ways, it might be making me more human again...

To be continued!