Unreliable narrators

What a strange and dis­turbing idea: a web browser that doesn’t dis­play a page according to its actual HTML source, but instead filters it through an LLM prompt of arbi­trary com­plexity and violence. The cre­ator writes:

Spegel (“mirror” in Swedish) lets you explore web con­tent through per­son­al­ized views using your own prompts. A single page can have mul­tiple views, maybe one sim­pli­fying every­thing down to ELI5 or another high­lighting key actions. It’s entirely up to you and your prompting skills.

I don’t feel any animus here. The opposite: gratitude, because this kind of explo­ration reveals just how unre­li­able the inter­me­di­aries for reading online are about to become.

Ear­lier this year, I wrote:

A pre­mo­ni­tion is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the crea­tures of the dig­ital night: ghostly bots, cack­ling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punc­tu­ated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, bea­cons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.

A project and provo­ca­tion like Spegel only rein­forces my pre­mo­ni­tion, and it makes the flight to higher ground — defensible terrain — feel more urgent. If you want to be sure a reader is encoun­tering your writing as you actu­ally wrote it, you’d better print it out.