Authenticity Memes

Top panel: mild concern about the death of authentic human interaction online. Bottom panel: pure, unfiltered nostalgia for the golden age when you could actually tell if you were arguing with a real person or just some dude's perl script. There's something bittersweet about being the generation that witnessed the internet transition from "you're probably talking to a real person" to "is this ChatGPT or my actual friend?" We got to experience forums where people were genuinely passionate weirdos, not engagement-farming LLMs trained on passionate weirdos. We lived through the era where if someone was being stupid online, at least they were authentically stupid. Now every comment section is a Turing test, every profile pic is suspect, and that helpful Stack Overflow answer might've been written by GPT-4. The real internet died somewhere between Web 2.0 and the bot apocalypse, and we were there to see it happen.