The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Much of the public web has started to feel lifeless, its open spaces filled with bad-faith actors, bots and clickbait, so that people retreat into smaller, private spaces. This is sometimes called the dark forest theory of the web.

In this talk from UX Brighton 2024, themed around UX and AI, designer Maggie Appleton looks at what generative AI does to that picture. If language models make it cheap to flood the web with low-quality content, how will we find original insight? How will we know which authors are human, and does it matter whether something was made by an AI?

For designers working with AI, the talk raises practical questions about trust, authorship and content quality that affect how interfaces present machine-generated content to users.