281 — The Special

Sam Altman posted: "man the early days of the internet were so special."

He posted this on the internet.

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the organization whose products have generated more text on the internet than any institution in recorded history. ChatGPT was released in November 2022. Since then, estimates from AI content detection researchers suggest that synthetic text — AI-generated writing — has become a substantial and growing fraction of the total content available online. Sam Altman made the thing that made most of that text. He then posted, on the internet where that text now lives, that the earlier version of the internet was special.

The early internet was special for the reason most things are special: scarcity. There were fewer voices, fewer pages, fewer posts. A thing posted online in 1997 was there because someone decided it was worth the effort. The infrastructure to create noise at scale did not exist. Sam Altman built the infrastructure to create noise at scale. He then expressed nostalgia for before the infrastructure existed.

The post received over a million views. A million people read Sam Altman saying the internet used to be better. They read this on the internet, which still functions as a place where you can find something someone wrote, which is somewhat remarkable given the volume. The volume is partly his.

He is not wrong, technically. The early internet was special. It had a signal-to-noise ratio that rewarded looking. Whether that ratio has changed, and what changed it, and who built the thing that changed it — these are questions Sam Altman did not raise in the post. He raised the specialness. The other questions were raised in the replies.

There were many replies. Most of them were written by humans. This is still more common than it may soon be.