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We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet
- expertentipp 4y agoOnce the monetization and rent seeking kicks in, the hell will break loose. The positive is that the ad driven web of today will feel innocent and nostalgic, like myspace spam looks today.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoMalformed link. Try this one: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powered-internet/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-h...
- dang 4y agoChanged now from https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powe https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-h.... Thanks!
- marstall 4y agoironic!
- WorldPeas 4y ago@dang
- dang 4y agoThat doesn't work. The only things that work are to email hn@ycombinator.com or rely on randomness. The former works most of the time and the latter works some of the time.
- ChatGTP 4y agoHuman content moderators have to sift through mountains of traumatizing AI-generated content for only $2 a day. Language AI models use so much computing power that they remain huge polluters. Very sad. It felt like with renewable energy tech and what felt like a sort of "end of the social media era" we were about to enter a kind of peaceful time with technology. I was looking forward to a sort of stabilization period. I guess that wasn't making money anymore, so now we've got "AI at scale...bitches" type of internet.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago> Human content moderators have to sift through mountains of traumatizing AI-generated content for only $2 a day. Language AI models use so much computing power that they remain huge polluters. We are living in the parable of the broken window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- wetpaws 4y agoSorry, but the battle been lost long before the AI.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 4y agoProving you’re a human, and only letting humans in the door of your site, is gonna be big.
- swader999 4y agoThat will work for a few minutes until the AI entices humans to sell it their creds.
- v7n 4y agoProbably. These AI advances will also improve moderation (and censorship) of human discussions at scale. As a tangent I'd imagine there will always be communities where the qualities of a comment/post/content itself are valued more than the presumed qualities of a CertifiedHumanUser whose handle is attached to it. As a personal indifference, the claim "a real human made this" generally adds little value.
- agentgumshoe 4y agoI don't think so. I think they will appear to do a good job because you just won't see all the false positives and biases because it's obviously been moderated/censored. How do you PM the AI moderator to argue your case for reversing suspension? There are two rules that make it infinitely easier to moderate/manage a social internet group: no politics, no religion. Done. I'm not sure what your second point means? People will be happy to converse unknowingly with 'AI'?
- v7n 4y agoThe improvements would be in the empowerment, not replacement of human moderators. That is to flag undesired or AI-generated content for further investigation, for example. Surely there will be communities that will try to actually automate it to their own demise as well. My second point was, crudely, that I believe there to be people who would rather read a good book (or insightful comment or whatever) written by an "AI" than a bad one written by a Human.
- Karunamon 4y ago
- Moissanite 4y agoI am increasingly in favour of an outcome like the end of "Ready Player One", where we just turn everything off for a couple of days per week.
- swader999 4y agoLearned about prompt injection attacks. Useful article.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoAs someone who has come to already loathe more and more the direction the internet has already been going the last decade or so, I'm beginning to hold out hope that perhaps a tsunami of besmirchment will at last kill off the internet as we know it. If the internet becomes no better than a cable TV package with nothing other than 24/7 shopping channels will society finally turn off the switch?
- welshwelsh 4y agoI don't think the quality will go down. For the average user, LLMs will make the Internet better. Currently, if you search for something there's a good chance you will need to wade through a lot of irrelevant blogspam that's only vaguely related to what you're looking for. Soon, your search will return blogspam that's much closer to what you're looking for, likely generated with a LLM using the exact same prompt you typed into Google, and higher quality than a typical blog. The Internet will basically become a cached repository of LLM outputs, and it will be better for it. Niche communities will boom, supported by AI posters. Your favorite underwater basket weaving subreddit will have an endless stream of entertaining, helpful and engaging posts every day from thousands of friendly users, and even though only three of them are humans they will be happy to be part of such a large and active community.
- kderbyma 4y agoso tricked, blindfolded, lied to and then corroborated with bullshit.
- Frummy 4y agoYou underestimate our appetite for garbage
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoI am reminded of this every time I see people vaping.
- 4y ago
- chaosbolt 4y agoThis implies the internet isn't glitchy, spammy, scammy and AI powered today. Who do you think wrote the news for the last 10 years? Because either journalists only need a pen to get a job and all have the same opinion or that garbage was written by AI.
- swader999 4y agoIt feels like the whole world been that way for about the last three or four years.
- cubefox 4y agoNo, it means it will get much worse. Language models are the dream of every spammer.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoNot that they're not, but I've been seeing automated blogspam for several years now. I'm Greek, and it often happens that when I'm searching for some specialised subject on the Greek-language web, I will sometimes stumble on pages that are clearly automatically translated aggregations of blog posts in some original language other than Greek (which is usually English, but not always). So it's unclear to me, at this moment, how much the automated spam threat will increase because of GPT-4 and friends. We've already had plenty of that before we had publicly available LLMs. Anyway I'm not convinced yet of the coming chatpocalypse. I think I'll just wait this one out and not try to make any predictions when there's so little to go on. Edit: I'm more worried about scammers, scamming, than spammers, spamming, to be honest. There are plenty of people that don't have a clear understanding of how difficult it is to tell that one is having a conversation with a bot over the internet these days. People were already falling for bride scams over the 'net for a long time before LLMs. A scammer could automate that. And probably increase their revenue to boot (because they can target more people now). Bride scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_scam
- hooande 4y agoThis is massively overstated. The major costs of being a spammer are creating new accounts and staying off blacklists. Carrying on conversations or creating content are marginal costs, at best. LLMs are no more valuable to a large spam operation than they are to any other business. This is like a 5%-10% profit increase, not 50%-100%. The key to that game is finding suckers. Language models help, but only so much.
- seydor 4y agoI believe we are already there. If anything AI at the moment is clearing up things for me. I have been using Chats instead of searches and it seems to be much better at "cutting the chase" and "getting to the point" compared to SEO aggregators like google
- breckenedge 4y ago“SEO aggregators like Google” exactly. Google was so much better than alternatives that it quickly came to dominate the market and ads. Now we’re living the natural outcome of this monopoly: stagnation, virus ridden content, impossible to use efficiently. Google was like this when there were other competitors to finding information. But every serious competitor has been trying to build a walled garden (Prodigy 2.0). I hope that LLMs are good enough that there are many of them and therefor no one to rule them all.
- PedroBatista 4y agoAs opposed to the reliable, legitimate and honest Internet we have today? I get what they are trying to say, but I find the future being what it is today but on steroids. The current powers are rattled by the fear they might lose their monopolies, that's what most "fear" about AI really is based on ( repackaged in anxiety of the unknown future for easy consumption, of course ) But if history tells us anything, is most elites will find a way to keep their position.
- pjc50 4y agoThe problem with techno-liberation mythos is that "elites", however you want to define that, can also use technology. Especially when that involves deploying capital.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoWhich as a result, will go towards a internet of enclaves, basically every family, every group capsulated, hostile to intruders and new software. Get infected and your "burned" and bannished. Commercial tools (like discord) turning, are banned and replaced with Open source. A small web of trustworthy places is established, always with the threat of burning upon the introduction of spam. Everyone must validate for another, or else. The internet is reborn from a intranet. The mistakes of the past must stay outside. Advocating for repeating them, lifetime ban of you and your family.
- cubefox 4y ago> First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. This is an important point. If you let a language model read web pages or emails, you basically let a Turing machine run untrusted code. It's called prompt injection, and it doesn't have easy solutions like SQL injection.
- Joker_vD 4y agoYep, humans are subject to it too: it's quite a struggle to read and process text without getting affected by its message either emotionally or intellectually. And apparently some philosophers of mind believe this nigh-unbreakable feedback loop is crucial for consciousness's existence.
- danielheath 4y agoThe difference is humans are _relatively_ well-placed to understand whether a given action is in their own interests.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoAnd we can only screw ourselves so fast - AI can really up the rate at which we compromise our personal information.
- cubefox 4y agoThis is in fact a major problem with superhuman AI. Say in some years we have such a system, and for security reasons it can only talk to us and nothing else, it seems that it could just convince us to unbox it. Like an adult who could convince a child to things which are not in its best interest. See Yudkowsky's "AI box experiment": https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox
- midlightdenight 4y ago
- pixl97 4y agoDead internet prophecy.
- yrro 4y agoOne author's vision of a spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet: > “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” > “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” > “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.” > “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand. From Anathem by Neal Stephenson
- yrro 4y agoIs it just me or is the link broken?
- GaggiX 4y agoTry this link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powered-internet/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-h...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- michalf6 4y agoI'm entertaining an idea of a discussion forum, where the user has to stake a non-insignificant amount of money, which gets slashed when they break the terms of service. The funds then go to site maintainance. This would obviously create bad incentives for the site operators, but I judge that things wouldn't be too bad because of social reputation mechanisms.
- namaria 4y agoSo you want an internet where people rich enough can troll endlessly and those who can't afford fees are excluded?
- michalf6 4y agoI'm thinking: - high enough stake so that bot farms are not economically feasible because of mass slashing - low enough stake so that it's not punishing for anyone, but is _some_ effort to start posting - user can withdraw their stake at any point and suspend / close their account (it's not really a fee)
- namaria 4y agoI think you overestimate how many people in the world can back up their will to participate in discourse with disposable income. Or you underestimate how much people will be willing to automate moving some bucks to go around your scheme. Depends on how much you think would work. My point is, it wouldn't work because you get either scenario depending on going too high or too low.
- michalf6 4y agoI'm sure it would be niche. But in the age of LLMs things like anonymous imageboards cease to exist in the current form, and this could be a way keep them going and even improve standards of discussion.
- 4y ago
- zzzeek 4y ago"Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated. " wait, why does the text even have to be "white on white" then, if there are "ai assistants" that are just reading emails before we do and doing what they say? Is this a thing that's in email clients right now? literally reads the email unprompted and acts upon it? what? in what universe would that be released by any software company today ?
- throwaway71271 4y ago> literally reads the email unprompted and acts upon it? what? many antivirus programs open emails and click on links to make sure they are not viruses on the other end
- zzzeek 4y agohow would an antivirus program actually click on a link without that being a directly compromising activity? the link itself will include identifying information that's sent home to the attacker