June 6, 2026
Web drama: bots, buzzwords, backlash
AI didn't break the web. The dotcons did – AI just turned up the volume
Readers roast the rant as commenters battle over whether the internet is ruined or just annoying
TLDR: The article says AI isn’t the original villain of the internet — giant commercial platforms broke things first, and AI is simply amplifying the mess. Commenters were split between mocking the article’s buzzword soup, trashing its writing, and questioning whether the web is even worse now at all.
A fiery post on Open Media Network argues that AI didn’t destroy the internet at all — big profit-chasing platforms did, and AI is just making the chaos louder. The author says chatbots aren’t magical beings with feelings, morals, or souls; they’re software remixing human words back at us. In plain English: people are getting spooked by a very convincing mirror, while tech companies are happy to sell the illusion.
But wow, the comment section was not in a gentle, reflective mood. One reader instantly went for the jugular with the brutally dry, "And wrote this title," basically turning the headline itself into the punchline. Another came in even hotter, calling the piece a "truly poor article" and saying they regretted reading it — never a subtle review. The biggest ongoing gripe, though, was over the article’s endless hashtag-heavy language. One annoyed commenter practically staged a readability intervention, complaining that made-up labels like "dotcons" and other cross-linked tags were tossed around without basic explanations.
Then came the nostalgia war. While the article paints today’s web as a corporate mess with AI pouring gasoline on the fire, one skeptic pushed back hard: broken how, exactly? They argued people romanticize the old internet and seem to forget the glorious misery of crashing Flash ads and busted web pages. So the real drama wasn’t just "AI bad" — it was a full-on brawl over whether the web is actually broken, or whether people just miss being younger online.
Key Points
- •The article says some AI executives continue to suggest that large language models may have values, emotions, judgement, or consciousness.
- •The piece uses discussion around Claude as a recent example of claims that AI may show a functional version of feelings.
- •The article describes current LLMs as software that generate statistically probable outputs from patterns in large amounts of human-produced content.
- •Hamish Campbell argues that people often misread AI outputs as intelligence, morality, or emotion when they are reflections of human-created language and expression.
- •The article says the larger danger is not AI becoming conscious but people behaving as if these systems already are, extending an older pattern of replacing social processes with technical systems.