Rude News 010

are we leaving the internet? A critique on AI, while using it.

A few days after I handed in my diploma thesis, I sat in my photography class, absentmindedly swiping back and forth between apps on my phone. I was still adjusting to the absence of pressure - the evenings, surrounded by stacks of paper, I had apparently assembled in a way that made sense a day ago but, 24 hours later, didn’t anymore.

My brain was fogged up. Hours upon hours of TikTok, the very medium I had written about, had left me with the attention span of a goldfish. The class sat in silence, watching the projected image from our beamer. My phone screen lit up my face, making it obvious I wasn’t paying attention. But I couldn’t stop. Email, Instagram, iMessage. Email, Instagram. A compulsive loop. I opened TikTok out of habit, its sound blasting through the dark studio, making me flinch.

It wasn’t a decision, more of an instinct, when I downloaded an app blocker, handed my phone to my friend Mike, and told him to set a password to lock TikTok. He smirked, fully aware of my weeks-long spiral into tradwives and clean girls, and happily obliged.

For at least a week, I kept opening the app. The bright white screen with a locked icon disrupted my muscle memory. But I am a proud person, I wasn’t about to ask Mike for the password. Deleting the app entirely felt like admitting defeat. So I kept circling between apps, now without even using them.

After a while, I adapted. My attention latched onto Instagram Reels, but they didn’t trigger the same dopamine spikes. Instagram’s world – airbrushed, rigid – made me yawn. So I started reading books, articles, magazines. I went to bed at reasonable hours and probably did my laundry more often than necessary.

When my relationship with my partner was coming to an end, I deleted the app blocker and dove back into the TikTok void. It was numbing, exactly what I needed. But the high was gone. Either my algorithm had lost its grip, or I had stopped playing by its rules. TikTok knew about my breakup before most of my friends. It served me a carefully crafted narrative: painting my ex as a villain, feeding me the heartbreak recovery pipeline. Maybe it would have been comforting if it were more true, but it only left me frustrated. I didn’t want my algorithm to reflect my failure to connect back at me, I wanted out.

At first, I welcomed the distraction, letting the endless scroll drown out my thoughts. But soon, the escapism soured. My feed, once filled with niche humor and oddly specific recommendations, became eerily impersonal. The algorithm wasn’t reflecting my interests anymore - it was dictating them. The glow-up content bled seamlessly into an overwhelming flood of small business owners’ hustle culture, hyper-curated brand aesthetics, and promotional videos disguised as entertainment.

Maybe I wasn’t leaving the internet. Maybe the internet was leaving me.

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My feed had become a loop. Brands acting like influencers, influencers acting like brands. Companies no longer just sold products; they sold identities, lifestyles, inside jokes, and parasocial relationships. Every brand needed a personality, a carefully crafted online presence that felt human enough to engage with but polished enough to never crack. Skincare brands posted Get Ready With Me videos, and fast food chains fought each other in the comments like teenagers with brand-safe personalities.

The shallow puddle of word salad, being blasted into my face, was burning away my last brain cell.

This content optimization was screaming ChatGPT. AI-generated text, used as scripts, commenting under posts, only to be answered with another generated, polished comment. It felt blank. As if I wasn’t using social media by humans for humans, it felt like being benched in the first half of a football game. Nothing seemed genuine, or social.

Playing with this, it seems that one day, AI might take over the internet, engaging in endless conversations with itself while we watch from the outside. Perhaps this moment of detachment could, paradoxically, be the very opening we need to reconnect with real human interaction. Our nights, spent alone, glued to our phones, could shift from a solitary experience into an opportunity for genuine connection once more.

Social media has been dangling the human connection we’re lacking so clearly in front of our faces, filling our minds with branded videos, disguised as genuine relatability.

I’d rather sit in a bar with a glass of wine alone, exposing my solitude to the world, than watch someone explain GPT-imagined love languages to me. Even though I haven’t felt this alone in a long time, watching algorithm-curated performances of ‘relatability’ only deepens the disconnect to my former retreat of choice.

Under Pressure

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The internet is evolving exponentially. Every brand, however small or big, has to be a content creator by now. Some brands get it: LOEWE, for example, is killing TikTok CC, in my opinion. Jaquemus has always been strong with CC in any way, so his posts, down to his captions, reading like a message from a friend, are spotless. Even Duolingo had its viral moment, though not necessarily to my taste, it at least understood the game behind it.

Many mid-sized brands, often still influenced by their older leadership, struggle to adapt, and it shows.
Even small brands outperform them, simply because their scale allows for a more authentic and relatable approach. The problem? Content teams are overstretched: too small, too underfunded, and too pressed for time. Under pressure, the best option seems to find refuge in AI.

But people aren’t stupid. We can tell the difference between AI-generated content and actual creative work.

But TikTok, like Instagram, is flooded with GPT-assisted content, optimized for engagement rather than originality. And I’ve had it. My last straw was a love language skit, reproduced by some bakery chain, and yet another stressed street interview of what songs people are listening to on a retail brand’s account.

The simple fact that brands are turning into entertaining or educating CCs in the first place is baffling, but its sheer amount, due to pressure, algorithm needs, and trend-hopping is just... well unattractive.

And while all that is to be remarked, it displays the lack of time for innovation in corporate life bleeding into privacy, in a cycle, producing AI content, leaving less and less feel for the need for human innovation and also the ability to produce in such manner, making thus CCs more and more dependent on AI. Maybe we are fucking up our ability to create, to a point where the only solution is to find other places to express ourselves and relearn to create.

Maybe the internet is, in fact, dying.

Like my relationship in private, my relationship with the internet is certainly starting to show cracks.

The question is: Can it be fixed, or is it time to let go?

Ironically this text was partly rewritten by ChatGPT.