Kwanghoon Seok

Failed environmentalist. PhD in science and technology policy.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@curious_pleb1 @JG_Nuke @GaryMarcus @allthingsf74065 Or did pensioners have to waste their pensions to make the internet flourish when it was already available?

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@curious_pleb1 @JG_Nuke @GaryMarcus @allthingsf74065 Ask yourself the other question: didn’t the Dotcom bubble wipe out shareholders’ pensions even though the internet became part of their lives after the bubble burst?

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed that too. Google Search is getting worse. The results look professional but say nothing. The answers are longer but less useful. Every page reads like it was written by the same voice.

You thought Google was broken. It is not broken. It is being replaced.

Researchers published a paper at the ACM Web Conference 2026 proving what is happening. They call it Retrieval Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI-generated content is flooding the internet so fast that search engines are now showing you mostly AI-written pages. And the search engine cannot tell the difference.

They ran a controlled experiment. They started with a pool of real, human-written web pages. Then they gradually added AI-generated content until it made up 67% of the pool.

By that point, over 80% of the top search results were AI-generated. Not 67%. Over 80%. The ranking algorithm did not just let AI content in. It preferred it. The AI-written pages were better optimized, more fluent, and more keyword-rich than the human pages. They outranked the originals.

Here is the part that makes this invisible.

Answer accuracy stayed the same. The search results still looked correct. The information was still technically right. If you measured quality by accuracy alone, nothing appeared wrong.

But source diversity collapsed. Nearly every result came from the same type of content. AI-written. AI-optimized. AI-structured. The human-written pages, the ones with original reporting, personal experience, and genuine expertise, were buried.

The researchers describe a two-stage collapse. Stage one is Dominance. High-quality AI content silently takes over the top results. Everything looks fine. Accuracy is stable. Nobody notices. Stage two is Corruption. Once AI dominates the pipeline, adversarial and low-quality content starts slipping through. By then, the system is too dependent on synthetic sources to course-correct.

A separate analysis found that 74.2% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Organic click-through rates on pages with AI summaries have dropped 61%. The human internet is being outranked by the machine internet.

Model Collapse described what happens when AI trains on AI. The models get dumber. Retrieval Collapse describes what happens when search engines index AI. The results get emptier.

Both are happening right now. At the same time. And neither one looks broken from the outside.

The search engine still returns ten blue links. The links still load. The pages still answer your question. But the thing that used to make those answers trustworthy, a human who actually knew something, is being quietly replaced by a machine that sounds like it does.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@VulcanJoker @RealNickMugalli AI hasn’t real earning either ;)

[tim anderson @timand2037]

Funeral preparations for nine year old Ritaaj Rihan, who was shot dead by IDF terrorists while sitting at her school desk in north Gaza. This brutal and horrific crime also caused severe psychological trauma among the other students. https://t.co/Oza3rhfren

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

China’s top battery makers — CATL, BYD and Sungrow — have gained more than $70bn in market capitalisation since the US and Israel attacked Iran.

Everyone wants China’s clean energy products now. So much for “industrial overcapacity.”

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@dorfman_p It’s reasonable that Iran attacks the Barakah nuclear power in the UAE, considering the asymmetric nature of the war. Unlike Ukraine’s attacks on Zaporizhzhia, Iran is assisted by China’s high-precision satellite. The world will learn what energy security means in volatile times.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@KingBaeksu It's not a problem specific to Korean society. The entire global economy is susceptible to Israeli-American politics. They believe Trump's claim that the war would end within a few weeks, ignoring the lesson of the Ukraine war, which has now lasted four years.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

Trump said, “These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz and show some guts, there’s nothing to be afraid of…” Unbelievable.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Trump tells Fox News that the oil tankers should risk their lives and go through the Strait of Hormuz.

“These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz and show some guts, there’s nothing to be afraid of…”

Better idea. Trump should get on a boat without defenses and travel through the Straight of Hormuz. I'll pay for his trip.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@myunforcedera @ggreenwald

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@gomatsuo Do you believe OSINT's figures? If you had, Russia should have collapsed and Ukraine should be flourishing by now. Don't compromise your expertise with random amateurs and clickbait.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@BettyBVel @shanaka86 The Zero Hedge post is misleading clickbait spam. The “9-day” means the statutory minimum for peak seasons, winter/summer, rather than actual reserves. It’s off-peak now, & S. K. usually reserves far more than that. Besides, Qatar’s share is only 15%. Only problem is future price

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@SnupSnus @Scutty KOGAS, a state-owned monopoly, does not have a timely filing quota tracking system. It releases data only once a year, just before winter.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@SnupSnus @Scutty The 9-day requirement applies to peak season, summer & winter. It's off-peak now, so the quoted comment is hardly meaningful. Also, Qatari LNG accounts for only 15%, with 85% coming from others, e.g. Australia. The real problem is Gulf War III seems likely to continue for months.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@zerohedge FYI, the “9-day LNG reserve” is a minimum regulatory requirement rather than the actual reserve amount in S. Korea. Qatar's LNG share is about 16% of the country's LNG imports. Politicians now argue that LNG reserves should increase, but it is pointless.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@JoumannaTV @GreenWalker92 That's equivalent to about 16 USD/MMBTU, and the Asian LNG price is about 10.8 USD/MMBTU. It will cause lots of US-origin LNG ships destined to Asia to U-turn to Europe. Then, Asian buyers may have to add a premium to secure the ships. Deja vu.

[Predictive History @PredicHistory]

Trump’s 5 Reasons for the Iranian War

The lecture was recorded May 29, 2024

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@ShanuMathew93 @energy_said They probably know the data center fuss is a bubble that doesn’t end happily. That’s why.

[Kwanghoon Seok @khoonseok]

@dorfman_p It's not the first time a bubble has created a mirage electricity demand forecast. Some Americans believed the internet/PC would double the US electricity demand during the dot-com bubble era. The LLM bubble won’t last long. https://t.co/EUk8zeIdLt