Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer
Freya Holmér2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2025–2025
commentary · general · 2025–2025 on HN
Freya Holmer delivers a long critique of generative AI, arguing it degrades the internet by flooding it with machine-generated junk. The video grew out of her frustration finding reliable information about a technical file format.
HN people link it when discussing AI-generated spam clogging search results and the broader harm of generative AI to the web.
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3 comments from Hacker News
have you seen the Freya Holmer video on generative AI as a parasitic cancer? ▶ this video Also I love how the internet is "dead", yet here we are, on a website with a bunch of humans providing soooo much value that at least corners of the internet still seem very much alive. I wish there were more sites like HN.
Related: Freya Holmér - "Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer" ▶ this video (1h19m54s) [2025-01-02]. She talks at length about how pages of AI-generated nonsense text are cluttering search results on Google and all other search engines.
Google Search is 95% unusable as of 2025. I don't want to use it anymore (as opposed to always wanting to use it because it did the job best). Search results it offers are either paid or LLM generated garbage. From Google's perspective, it is insane to destroy the quality of a market-leading product like this, or it is very intentional to drive users to LLMs for much better user manipulation and cashing opportunities. Of course, at some point users must pay LLMs. They will become like O365, it is just mandatory to pay at least 4,99/month at minimum. ▶ this video