正文 · AI 翻译
On November 6, Beijing time, WIRED magazine reported that Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian recently said that developing social media apps is “no longer cool.” As AI-generated content and automated bots flood the internet, he believes it is losing its original human-centered character. The next generation of user-generated content platforms may be some upgraded form of group chat rather than traditional social networks.
“I expect some better form of group chat to become the new form of user-generated content (UGC),” Ohanian said in an interview with WIRED senior reporter Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair.
Ohanian believes that much of today’s internet content and interaction has been manipulated. He subscribes to the so-called “Dead Internet Theory,” which holds that an increasing share of online content and activity is generated by bots rather than real users. As large language models develop rapidly, online activity by AI agents is increasing further.
“The internet I grew up with was designed first and foremost for humans,” Ohanian said. He added that traditional user interfaces and interactive experiences may gradually disappear because more and more internet services will be designed for AI agents rather than human users.
Ironically, while AI is changing the traditional internet ecosystem, it is also making platforms such as Reddit, with their vast stores of conversations among real users, more valuable.
Reddit has licensed its vast collection of user discussions to technology companies including Google and OpenAI for training AI models. Ohanian said, “Platforms like ours are becoming very, very valuable to large language models.”
However, AI technology is also beginning to disrupt Reddit’s traditional business. According to reports, Reddit warned last week that Google’s AI search was affecting external traffic to its site. Following this, Reddit’s share price plunged as much as 29%.
Ohanian worries that once human conversations become commercially valuable data, online content becomes easier to manipulate. “The internet has become so easy to manipulate precisely because manipulating it can be so commercially valuable,” he said.
To address third-party data scraping and maintain user engagement, Reddit recently said it would require users to log in. Ohanian did not comment directly on the measure, but emphasized that the internet needs mechanisms to verify that users are real people without compromising privacy.
Ohanian’s relationship with Reddit is also complicated. In 2020, after the George Floyd incident, he resigned from Reddit’s board, hoping a Black director would take his place, and pushed the platform to reform its content moderation policies. Recently, he learned that a user who had once tattooed the Reddit logo on his body later chose to cover it with another design. “I don’t blame him,” Ohanian said.
Ohanian now runs the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which manages more than $1.3 billion in assets. One of his investment priorities is sports because, in an era of proliferating low-quality AI content and an increasingly manipulated internet, sports can still bring together real-world communities.
Despite his criticism of the current state of the internet, Ohanian is not entirely pessimistic. An early investor in Anthropic, he remains optimistic about AI’s long-term potential and is especially hopeful that AI will drive breakthroughs in medicine.
He said AI technology could indeed cause serious harm and that the industry must carefully consider how to develop and apply it. At the same time, AI also has the potential to bring substantial improvements to many things.