Noise-Canceling Filters for the Internet are Coming

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I’m writing this at a busy cafe, but I can’t hear anything except my music, thanks to the algorithms that power my noise-canceling headphones.

When I turn my attention towards Twitter, it’s not so easy to tune out the noise. For each interesting tweet I see, my feed shows me roughly three vapid threads, two reposted TikToks, and maybe one semi-funny meme. Ok, sometimes they’re pretty good:

But still, when I see too much content like this, I start to feel bad in a way that is hard to explain. I call it “viral malaise”—that feeling when you’ve been exposed to too much viral content and your brain feels numb and slightly sad. Perhaps you can relate.

It makes me wonder: thanks to LLMs like GPT-4, is it now possible to build tools that can effectively de-noise our information diets, the same way AirPods can silence the noise in our physical surroundings? How would they work? How would they make us feel? What first- and second-order consequences would widespread use of these tools have on culture, media, and politics?