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Personally I love this new AI voice content booms. My favorite is the AI presidents discussing/playing/rating stuff [1], Attenborough narrating warhammer [2].

Personally I love this new AI voice content booms. My favorite is the AI presidents discussing/playing/rating stuff [1], Attenborough narrating warhammer [2]. While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. Which I think is a good trend. People getting depressed or so consumed by the internet culture that they loose all interest in the real world have been a trend I've disliked. We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously, and a lot of communities were closed /invite only. [1] https://youtu.be/IkaAZE_UGMo https://youtu.be/IkaAZE_UGMo https://youtu.be/q6ra0KDgVbg https://youtu.be/q6ra0KDgVbg https://youtu.be/iAq-yg72GWw https://youtu.be/iAq-yg72GWw [2] https://youtu.be/X6RCLJ4pDaw https://youtu.be/X6RCLJ4pDaw

boredemployee 4y ago
>> We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously Man I was just thinking about it lastnite. Back in the day we were (at some level) respectful to each other in places like IRC and forums, even tho nobody knew each other. And when some idiot started to f- around you had IRCOps and moderators, so it was somewhat easier and straight forward to maintain. That is something that I really miss, the old IRC days. Today people show their faces, you sometimes know who they are, but they are at times completely disrespectful and you have no moderation at all.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  then they get elected and your like...whaaat?
- majormajor 4y ago
  I don't think these things follow from each other. Smaller-scale, pre-social-media forums and such in many ways took things more seriously, not less. The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. Internet content was generally not taken too seriously, but internet communities were still serious, and they had better tools for enforcement than they do if they live inside of Twitter. In a world where someone could spin up a bunch of generative AI bots and target them at a forum to screw with people (whether commercial spam or trolling or just subtle disinformation) that seems a lot harder to maintain.
  - boredemployee 4y ago
    >> The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. But, honestly and genuinely asking here: isn't that exacly what happens when all you think is about scale, money and growth, at all costs? (I mean, on the big social networks side)
    - majormajor 4y ago
      I would definitely say that the big social network sites are bad for the internet and bad for "real world" society as well; I think it's a perfect example of an externality that they ignore in going for money at all costs.
  - ZainRiz 4y ago
    The tools for a community to self-moderate is the key here, along with communities being able to define their own boundaries. Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)
    - majormajor 4y ago
      The biggest question for me right now is "can Reddit [or similar] survive hordes of generative AI spam/troll/abuse bots without changing to a paid membership model?" I don't know if the current tools are up to the task.
      - ZainRiz 4y ago
        Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation. There's many other ways to set reputation thought: - I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you - StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past - Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model. I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered
jchw 4y ago
Hilarious. Donald Trump reacting to Joe Biden putting Chainsaw Man at number 2 is easily one of the funniest things I've heard done with these voice gen softwares in a long while. Obviously, the concept itself is already highly absurd, but the fact that the execution is so relatively good just really adds a lot. It reminds me of the 2000s a lot, yeah. For example, does anyone else remember all of the George W Bush sentence mixing? That famous "Fuzzy Math" song that spread around as a SWF. Good times. This is similar in some regards, but significantly more unhinged.
- chasd00 4y ago
  This and some of the "presidents play minecraft" videos my kids have shown me is the best internet entertainment i've had in a long while. It does remind me of the early days funny stuff that could be found on the Internet. Super absurd and ridiculous and made just for fun.
steve_adams_86 4y ago
Absolutely. This trend has put me on track for a sort of internet retreat. I can’t know if anything I’m reading or hearing is real suddenly. Previously I could be critical of it and consider sources and try to be rational, but at this point it seems reckless to be immersed in this environment. Even in terms of work, I’m suddenly put off by purely digital things. I want to interface with the real world, hardware, build systems that humans need. I’m very interested in AI, but it’s not a problem I’m solving and I suppose I don’t really want to compete with it or interface with it more than on an opt-in basis.
- freeqaz 4y ago
  By "internet retreat" I initially thought, "I'm going to sit in a room and binge YouTube deepfakes." I was mildly horrified! But yes, I agree. I really hope that this wave pushes people to get back outside and meet more people in the community. It's really hard to say what will happen though! We just need that in order to lower the current rates of depression/anxiety, imo, or else the situation will only get worse.
eurekin 4y ago
Same here! Although some get old quicker than others, I had few moments of laugh. I like Balenciaga ones: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CIfP547-JFhCFeLeRlA2MX1rGLvdGz- https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CIfP547-JFhCFeLeRlA2MX1...
justapassenger 4y ago
> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up I think that’s a very naive view point. Internet is core part of today’s society, like it or not. It’s almost like saying that since we invented home printer, which make it easy to forge money, people will just take money less seriously.
- 1066 4y ago
  I don't. I think it will be approached differently. > Internet is core part of today’s society Processing is _the_ core part of all society. The internet has enabled compartmentalized access to specific types of information. Eventually humanity will realize that the information in their technology is fundamentally the _same_ as the information they deal with day to day. Instead of being subjected to the emotional magnet of these technologies they will be incorporated _into_ our daily processes to enhance them.
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  If you don't mind my saying so, I think it's your point of view that's naive. OP is talking about a large cultural shift, the type that skeptics said was impossible back at the advent of the web. The orthodox opinion was that the web was a fad and we'd all be reading newspapers and using coin-operated phones forever. The scale of change that he’s describing — where the internet ceases to become a source-of-truth — would be a complete paradigm shift. Whether it's a "core part of today's society" is entirely irrelevant… newspapers were once core too.
  - gavinhoward 4y ago
    The reason newspapers shifted away from being core is because there were other communication media to replace them. There aren't such replacements for the Internet.
    - nickthegreek 4y ago
      I dont think we are talking about replacing "the internet", but replacing fb/twitter/insta with many many more micro communities that might be a bit more gated for entry due the cheapness of spam. These types of communities flourished in the 80s-2000.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
People have always made shit up on the internet. Even prior to Photoshop, the first rule of the net is don't trust anything you read.
- irrational 4y ago
  I thought the first rule was to never read anything and just comment based on the title of the post.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    In the beginning there was only body text and it was good.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    It's the same rule, just optimized.
- greenie_beans 4y ago
  boomer parents told this to their millennial children. then the boomers started believing everything they read on facebook despite the millennial warnings. now everybody needs a warning not to believe what they read on the AI.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    The suicide cults of the '90s say otherwise and have a lot in common with the ivermectin overdoses following people old enough to know better doing stupid stuff they read about on the internet.
    - greenie_beans 4y ago
      i mean sure if you want to split hairs over that, but "kids, don't believe what you read on the internet" is like a meme for a millennial who grew up with the internet.
- 4y ago
shaunxcode 4y ago
Yep I nonsarcastically think we need to go back to what we lost with the BBS. Mastodon is a step in this direction but EVERYONE should be an instance.
bg24 4y ago
I hope that we can reach a point where "trusted internet" becomes more popular . Trusted internet where you are dealing with identities (people) you know. And every hyperscale apps has a toggle to switch from noisy place to a familiar place.
- ratg13 4y ago
  I don't know if anyone remembers this detail of the book Ender's Game, but this is exactly how their "internet" was setup. Trusted networks where you had to identify yourself, and public networks where you could be anonymous. When I first read it, it really impacted me and I knew this is the likely future of our internet.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Wasn't that the present of the internet back in 1985? Private networks where you were an authenticated user, and public BBSes or USENET where you could be anonymous?
- nperrier 4y ago
  I doubt that's possible. How do you know for certain it's not an AI on the other end impersonating a human? Clever people will find ways to game it.
  - dogma1138 4y ago
    Ironically AI spam might actually make “blockchain” or at least widespread of digital signatures useful ofc it would also mean an end to a mostly anonymous internet.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      Without Internet Security, signatures mean nothing.
ineptech 4y ago
You may also enjoy the AI conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. https://infiniteconversation.com/ https://infiniteconversation.com/ (not generated in realtime I believe, due to being created in the ancient days of a year ago)
kneebonian 4y ago
When I was growing up there were 3 rules about the internet 1. Never believe anything you see, hear or read on the internet. 2. Never give out personal information of any kind. 3. Every girl that wanted to meet you on the internet was an FBI agent. It seems like almost every problem we've had with the internet comes from breaking one of those three rules. I wish/hope we could/can go back.
- chasd00 4y ago
  > 3. Every girl that wanted to meet you on the internet was an FBI agent. i can't remember who said it but there was a tagline for a while that went "The Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents".
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    It went: "The Internet: where the women are men, the men are boys, and the boys are FBI agents."
superfrank 4y ago
> I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up I've been starting to think this way as well. It feels like we're seeing something similar to the way that mass spam calls drastically changed the way people use the phones to the point where people don't recognize a phone number, they just don't pick up anymore. As the ratio of garbage goes up, people will just slowly stop using the medium. My semi-crazy prediction is that AI like GPT are going to be the death of large social media sites. I don't think the internet will die, but I think we're going to return to a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s, but for a completely different reason.
- thelogicguy 4y ago
  This is the path I've been going down as well and frankly, I think that's pretty exciting. This might be wishful thinking, but I'm coming to believe that AI like ChatGPT are capable of bringing out the absolutely worst qualities of massive social media sites and in that way might end up saving us from ourselves.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s I don't recognize this description of the Internet from any time after 1985 onward.
  - z0r 4y ago
    This might just be a way of aging ourselves. I do feel that Facebook blatantly flipped the norm that you used a pseudonym and kept personal information private when communicating (much less publishing) online - that's the norm I grew up with in the 90s and even the early 00s.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Back on usenet in the 80s and 90s, your ID was essentially your email address (but likely using bang path notation). There no pseudonyms, and everyone was a real person with identifiable features and a real world location.
stanford_labrat 4y ago
The presidents play COD zombies is so funny. The script author is really witty and the dialogue flows very well.
hkt 4y ago
> people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up Regrettably this doesn't seem to be the case pre-AI - just look at the scare stories about 15 minute cities being "stealth lockdown zones" where people will be allocated to an area and forbidden to leave. Media literacy is dire and always has been: in the 19th century it was normal for actors playing baddies (Brutus, for instance) to get mobbed on the street, so stage doors were invented. In the 1960s, the BBC did a parody of Panorama and convinced people spaghetti grew on trees. Ghostwatch in the 90s remains a cult programme taken as evidence of the existence of ghosts by some. The difficulty epistemically speaking is that in order to know something, _anything_ about the world, there must be trustworthy sources and people able to discern who they are. In the darkest timeline, fake news foreshadows the flood of misinformation by AI and renders all knowledge so difficult to trust that we enter a new dark age. The last dark age was our illiteracy and superstitution, the next will be our own creations bewildering us so utterly that we have no idea what to believe anymore.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
People will just perfect the bubble, creating entire realitys disjunct from the scientific verifiable one and dig in there.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
People wealthy enough to be insulated from a post truth world are more likely not to care. It’s gonna be a wild ride with many dangerous possible outcomes.
gtop3 4y ago
> I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. Neal Stephenson goes into this topic with some depth in his 2019 novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell". Through his narrative he argues against the notion that any amount of false information on the internet will lead to people not trusting the internet. Photography at large has been grappling with this same issue since at least the 90s when photography transitioned away from film and digital manipulation of images was suddenly possible. Today, photographs are still used all the time in journalism, in insurance claims, for identity verification, and in other matters were it is important to establish truth. We still largely trust photographs (but to a lesser degree), even if a skilled teenager can completely fabricate an image or video on a Saturday.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Those who forge legal documents need to remember to only use computer fonts (and printers) that were available at the time the document was supposed to have been created: Case OVER: Attorney Spots New Font on "Old" Document https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPSMWEMAJLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPSMWEMAJLA
outime 4y ago
>We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously, and a lot of communities were closed /invite only. What would prevent that some of those people use AI, even if it's invitation-only forum/whatever? I just don't think the "old internet" can come back anymore. If anything, maybe in-person activities may get increasingly popular.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Yeah it's not that concerning to me. At some point people realized that any photo could be photoshopped and started defaulting to that belief if something seemed off. That is starting to happen with video and audio. There will always be people saying how crazy that photo of bigfoot is and how that video of aliens is proof but most people will eventually start to realize just about anything you see online might be doctored.
jliptzin 4y ago
I think it’s a boon for privacy. If fake images/videos/sound can easily be generated indistinguishable from actual footage, if there’s something embarrassing out there you can quite legitimately just claim it’s an AI hit piece by a hater.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  People spread rumors today. "it could be a lie" is weak in practice. And if not, well now all crime is legal because nothing can be proven now that evidence can be fabricated.
  - jliptzin 4y ago
    Then what do you suggest the solution should be if fake evidence is so good it can’t be distinguished from the real thing?
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. LOL. Uhuh. Go read up on the raft of cognitive biases that humans are subject to. People won't take the internet less seriously, they'll just keep doing what they do now: only believe the stuff that confirms what they already think. The only difference is the tsunami of fake information will make it impossible for even well-meaning people to be able to tell the difference between truth and lies. Back in 2016 folks coined the idea that we were transitioning to a post-truth era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth We're now transitioning to a post-fact era. Buckle up. It's gonna be interesting...
rebuilder 4y ago
I kind of expect things to go the way Peter Watts prophesied in the Behemoth trilogy - the Internet becomes infested with self-replicating spambot-descendants to the point that an open, global network becomes untenable. No-one’s coupled an LLM with a worm yet AFAIK but I see no reason to think it will take very long.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pharrington 4y ago
I agree that without massive safeguards, it is only going to become harder to discern between fact and fiction. The problem is that people must be able to discern between fact and fiction in order to live healthy lives. Reacting to AI by becoming laissez-faire about your information intake is just one more way for people to disconnect from reality. I think a good analogy is how technological advances made forging physical currency trivially easy. Governments that deployed anti-forgery measures eventually weathered the storm. Governments that didn't ended up with catastrophically weak currencies. Information and data are the ultimate currency on the Internet.
- nirav72 4y ago
  >without massive safeguards How do you even set safeguards for this?
  - pharrington 4y ago
    I personally haven't thought about or looked into it enough to say, though the sibling comment seems like a good starting point.
- zuminator 4y ago
  I think eventually we should get to the point where it should be considered prima facie fraud to use an unidentified AI in commerce. That is, you can use AI generated text, voice, or video but it has to clearly identify itself as such. At the very least, responsible businesses can agree by common convention to abide by this code of conduct. There could be something like a "good AI seal of approval" issued to businesses that voluntarily adhere to the standard, like those web certificates that were ubiquitous in the early Aughts. Not only should the communications be public-key signed so the browser can identify them, but the the synthetic authors/speakers etc. should be named in a consistent way that unequivocally identifies them as AI. For example, appending a numeral to the name. Instead of calling itself Joe Rogan, the AI would be "Joe 7 Rogan." Or instead of an article written by Jennifer 8. Lee, it would be written by, hmm, okay there might be a little problem in her[0] case. One thing I've been mulling around is the idea of repurposing the Apple][ symbol. So Joe][ and Jennifer][, where ][ is pronounced "two." The convenience being that it's comprised of glyphs that are on every keyboard, and they also look mechanical and nothing like normal names. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
yellowapple 4y ago
And on the topic of AI Joe Rogan impersonations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etaA94eM2AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etaA94eM2AE
nirav72 4y ago
Yikes. That David Attenborough narrating Warhammer 40K was pretty damn convincing. If I wasn't aware of the context - I would probably thought it was indeed him narrating.
solarkraft 4y ago
Don't forget the beach that makes you old and getting ratatouilled: https://youtu.be/etaA94eM2AE https://youtu.be/etaA94eM2AE https://youtu.be/we1I6nK6OBg https://youtu.be/we1I6nK6OBg
raxxorraxor 4y ago
> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. The would be great. Finally a return to the old ways. "I have read about it on the internet" was a meme for a reason...

boredemployee 4y ago

>> We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously Man I was just thinking about it lastnite. Back in the day we were (at some level) respectful to each other in places like IRC and forums, even tho nobody knew each other. And when some idiot started to f- around you had IRCOps and moderators, so it was somewhat easier and straight forward to maintain. That is something that I really miss, the old IRC days. Today people show their faces, you sometimes know who they are, but they are at times completely disrespectful and you have no moderation at all.

sharemywin 4y ago
then they get elected and your like...whaaat?
majormajor 4y ago
I don't think these things follow from each other. Smaller-scale, pre-social-media forums and such in many ways took things more seriously, not less. The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. Internet content was generally not taken too seriously, but internet communities were still serious, and they had better tools for enforcement than they do if they live inside of Twitter. In a world where someone could spin up a bunch of generative AI bots and target them at a forum to screw with people (whether commercial spam or trolling or just subtle disinformation) that seems a lot harder to maintain.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  >> The poster-to-moderator ratio was WAY lower than somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, and things got handled faster. But, honestly and genuinely asking here: isn't that exacly what happens when all you think is about scale, money and growth, at all costs? (I mean, on the big social networks side)
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I would definitely say that the big social network sites are bad for the internet and bad for "real world" society as well; I think it's a perfect example of an externality that they ignore in going for money at all costs.
- ZainRiz 4y ago
  The tools for a community to self-moderate is the key here, along with communities being able to define their own boundaries. Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)
  - majormajor 4y ago
    The biggest question for me right now is "can Reddit [or similar] survive hordes of generative AI spam/troll/abuse bots without changing to a paid membership model?" I don't know if the current tools are up to the task.
    - ZainRiz 4y ago
      Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation. There's many other ways to set reputation thought: - I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you - StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past - Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model. I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered

jchw 4y ago

Hilarious. Donald Trump reacting to Joe Biden putting Chainsaw Man at number 2 is easily one of the funniest things I've heard done with these voice gen softwares in a long while. Obviously, the concept itself is already highly absurd, but the fact that the execution is so relatively good just really adds a lot. It reminds me of the 2000s a lot, yeah. For example, does anyone else remember all of the George W Bush sentence mixing? That famous "Fuzzy Math" song that spread around as a SWF. Good times. This is similar in some regards, but significantly more unhinged.

chasd00 4y ago
This and some of the "presidents play minecraft" videos my kids have shown me is the best internet entertainment i've had in a long while. It does remind me of the early days funny stuff that could be found on the Internet. Super absurd and ridiculous and made just for fun.

steve_adams_86 4y ago

Absolutely. This trend has put me on track for a sort of internet retreat. I can’t know if anything I’m reading or hearing is real suddenly. Previously I could be critical of it and consider sources and try to be rational, but at this point it seems reckless to be immersed in this environment. Even in terms of work, I’m suddenly put off by purely digital things. I want to interface with the real world, hardware, build systems that humans need. I’m very interested in AI, but it’s not a problem I’m solving and I suppose I don’t really want to compete with it or interface with it more than on an opt-in basis.

freeqaz 4y ago
By "internet retreat" I initially thought, "I'm going to sit in a room and binge YouTube deepfakes." I was mildly horrified! But yes, I agree. I really hope that this wave pushes people to get back outside and meet more people in the community. It's really hard to say what will happen though! We just need that in order to lower the current rates of depression/anxiety, imo, or else the situation will only get worse.

eurekin 4y ago

Same here! Although some get old quicker than others, I had few moments of laugh. I like Balenciaga ones: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CIfP547-JFhCFeLeRlA2MX1rGLvdGz- https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CIfP547-JFhCFeLeRlA2MX1...

justapassenger 4y ago

> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up I think that’s a very naive view point. Internet is core part of today’s society, like it or not. It’s almost like saying that since we invented home printer, which make it easy to forge money, people will just take money less seriously.

1066 4y ago
I don't. I think it will be approached differently. > Internet is core part of today’s society Processing is _the_ core part of all society. The internet has enabled compartmentalized access to specific types of information. Eventually humanity will realize that the information in their technology is fundamentally the _same_ as the information they deal with day to day. Instead of being subjected to the emotional magnet of these technologies they will be incorporated _into_ our daily processes to enhance them.
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
If you don't mind my saying so, I think it's your point of view that's naive. OP is talking about a large cultural shift, the type that skeptics said was impossible back at the advent of the web. The orthodox opinion was that the web was a fad and we'd all be reading newspapers and using coin-operated phones forever. The scale of change that he’s describing — where the internet ceases to become a source-of-truth — would be a complete paradigm shift. Whether it's a "core part of today's society" is entirely irrelevant… newspapers were once core too.
- gavinhoward 4y ago
  The reason newspapers shifted away from being core is because there were other communication media to replace them. There aren't such replacements for the Internet.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    I dont think we are talking about replacing "the internet", but replacing fb/twitter/insta with many many more micro communities that might be a bit more gated for entry due the cheapness of spam. These types of communities flourished in the 80s-2000.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

People have always made shit up on the internet. Even prior to Photoshop, the first rule of the net is don't trust anything you read.

irrational 4y ago
I thought the first rule was to never read anything and just comment based on the title of the post.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  In the beginning there was only body text and it was good.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  It's the same rule, just optimized.
greenie_beans 4y ago
boomer parents told this to their millennial children. then the boomers started believing everything they read on facebook despite the millennial warnings. now everybody needs a warning not to believe what they read on the AI.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  The suicide cults of the '90s say otherwise and have a lot in common with the ivermectin overdoses following people old enough to know better doing stupid stuff they read about on the internet.
  - greenie_beans 4y ago
    i mean sure if you want to split hairs over that, but "kids, don't believe what you read on the internet" is like a meme for a millennial who grew up with the internet.
4y ago

shaunxcode 4y ago

Yep I nonsarcastically think we need to go back to what we lost with the BBS. Mastodon is a step in this direction but EVERYONE should be an instance.

bg24 4y ago

I hope that we can reach a point where "trusted internet" becomes more popular . Trusted internet where you are dealing with identities (people) you know. And every hyperscale apps has a toggle to switch from noisy place to a familiar place.

ratg13 4y ago
I don't know if anyone remembers this detail of the book Ender's Game, but this is exactly how their "internet" was setup. Trusted networks where you had to identify yourself, and public networks where you could be anonymous. When I first read it, it really impacted me and I knew this is the likely future of our internet.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Wasn't that the present of the internet back in 1985? Private networks where you were an authenticated user, and public BBSes or USENET where you could be anonymous?
nperrier 4y ago
I doubt that's possible. How do you know for certain it's not an AI on the other end impersonating a human? Clever people will find ways to game it.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  Ironically AI spam might actually make “blockchain” or at least widespread of digital signatures useful ofc it would also mean an end to a mostly anonymous internet.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Without Internet Security, signatures mean nothing.

ineptech 4y ago

You may also enjoy the AI conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. https://infiniteconversation.com/ https://infiniteconversation.com/ (not generated in realtime I believe, due to being created in the ancient days of a year ago)

kneebonian 4y ago

When I was growing up there were 3 rules about the internet 1. Never believe anything you see, hear or read on the internet. 2. Never give out personal information of any kind. 3. Every girl that wanted to meet you on the internet was an FBI agent. It seems like almost every problem we've had with the internet comes from breaking one of those three rules. I wish/hope we could/can go back.

chasd00 4y ago
> 3. Every girl that wanted to meet you on the internet was an FBI agent. i can't remember who said it but there was a tagline for a while that went "The Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents".
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  It went: "The Internet: where the women are men, the men are boys, and the boys are FBI agents."

superfrank 4y ago

> I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up I've been starting to think this way as well. It feels like we're seeing something similar to the way that mass spam calls drastically changed the way people use the phones to the point where people don't recognize a phone number, they just don't pick up anymore. As the ratio of garbage goes up, people will just slowly stop using the medium. My semi-crazy prediction is that AI like GPT are going to be the death of large social media sites. I don't think the internet will die, but I think we're going to return to a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s, but for a completely different reason.

thelogicguy 4y ago
This is the path I've been going down as well and frankly, I think that's pretty exciting. This might be wishful thinking, but I'm coming to believe that AI like ChatGPT are capable of bringing out the absolutely worst qualities of massive social media sites and in that way might end up saving us from ourselves.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s I don't recognize this description of the Internet from any time after 1985 onward.
- z0r 4y ago
  This might just be a way of aging ourselves. I do feel that Facebook blatantly flipped the norm that you used a pseudonym and kept personal information private when communicating (much less publishing) online - that's the norm I grew up with in the 90s and even the early 00s.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Back on usenet in the 80s and 90s, your ID was essentially your email address (but likely using bang path notation). There no pseudonyms, and everyone was a real person with identifiable features and a real world location.

stanford_labrat 4y ago

The presidents play COD zombies is so funny. The script author is really witty and the dialogue flows very well.

hkt 4y ago

> people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up Regrettably this doesn't seem to be the case pre-AI - just look at the scare stories about 15 minute cities being "stealth lockdown zones" where people will be allocated to an area and forbidden to leave. Media literacy is dire and always has been: in the 19th century it was normal for actors playing baddies (Brutus, for instance) to get mobbed on the street, so stage doors were invented. In the 1960s, the BBC did a parody of Panorama and convinced people spaghetti grew on trees. Ghostwatch in the 90s remains a cult programme taken as evidence of the existence of ghosts by some. The difficulty epistemically speaking is that in order to know something, _anything_ about the world, there must be trustworthy sources and people able to discern who they are. In the darkest timeline, fake news foreshadows the flood of misinformation by AI and renders all knowledge so difficult to trust that we enter a new dark age. The last dark age was our illiteracy and superstitution, the next will be our own creations bewildering us so utterly that we have no idea what to believe anymore.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

People will just perfect the bubble, creating entire realitys disjunct from the scientific verifiable one and dig in there.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

People wealthy enough to be insulated from a post truth world are more likely not to care. It’s gonna be a wild ride with many dangerous possible outcomes.

gtop3 4y ago

> I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. Neal Stephenson goes into this topic with some depth in his 2019 novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell". Through his narrative he argues against the notion that any amount of false information on the internet will lead to people not trusting the internet. Photography at large has been grappling with this same issue since at least the 90s when photography transitioned away from film and digital manipulation of images was suddenly possible. Today, photographs are still used all the time in journalism, in insurance claims, for identity verification, and in other matters were it is important to establish truth. We still largely trust photographs (but to a lesser degree), even if a skilled teenager can completely fabricate an image or video on a Saturday.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Those who forge legal documents need to remember to only use computer fonts (and printers) that were available at the time the document was supposed to have been created: Case OVER: Attorney Spots New Font on "Old" Document https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPSMWEMAJLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPSMWEMAJLA

outime 4y ago

>We might be just going back to the time of early, anonymous internet forums time where most people used to it just didn't take it too seriously, and a lot of communities were closed /invite only. What would prevent that some of those people use AI, even if it's invitation-only forum/whatever? I just don't think the "old internet" can come back anymore. If anything, maybe in-person activities may get increasingly popular.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Yeah it's not that concerning to me. At some point people realized that any photo could be photoshopped and started defaulting to that belief if something seemed off. That is starting to happen with video and audio. There will always be people saying how crazy that photo of bigfoot is and how that video of aliens is proof but most people will eventually start to realize just about anything you see online might be doctored.

jliptzin 4y ago

I think it’s a boon for privacy. If fake images/videos/sound can easily be generated indistinguishable from actual footage, if there’s something embarrassing out there you can quite legitimately just claim it’s an AI hit piece by a hater.

hgsgm 4y ago
People spread rumors today. "it could be a lie" is weak in practice. And if not, well now all crime is legal because nothing can be proven now that evidence can be fabricated.
- jliptzin 4y ago
  Then what do you suggest the solution should be if fake evidence is so good it can’t be distinguished from the real thing?

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. LOL. Uhuh. Go read up on the raft of cognitive biases that humans are subject to. People won't take the internet less seriously, they'll just keep doing what they do now: only believe the stuff that confirms what they already think. The only difference is the tsunami of fake information will make it impossible for even well-meaning people to be able to tell the difference between truth and lies. Back in 2016 folks coined the idea that we were transitioning to a post-truth era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth We're now transitioning to a post-fact era. Buckle up. It's gonna be interesting...

rebuilder 4y ago

I kind of expect things to go the way Peter Watts prophesied in the Behemoth trilogy - the Internet becomes infested with self-replicating spambot-descendants to the point that an open, global network becomes untenable. No-one’s coupled an LLM with a worm yet AFAIK but I see no reason to think it will take very long.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pharrington 4y ago

I agree that without massive safeguards, it is only going to become harder to discern between fact and fiction. The problem is that people must be able to discern between fact and fiction in order to live healthy lives. Reacting to AI by becoming laissez-faire about your information intake is just one more way for people to disconnect from reality. I think a good analogy is how technological advances made forging physical currency trivially easy. Governments that deployed anti-forgery measures eventually weathered the storm. Governments that didn't ended up with catastrophically weak currencies. Information and data are the ultimate currency on the Internet.

nirav72 4y ago
>without massive safeguards How do you even set safeguards for this?
- pharrington 4y ago
  I personally haven't thought about or looked into it enough to say, though the sibling comment seems like a good starting point.
zuminator 4y ago
I think eventually we should get to the point where it should be considered prima facie fraud to use an unidentified AI in commerce. That is, you can use AI generated text, voice, or video but it has to clearly identify itself as such. At the very least, responsible businesses can agree by common convention to abide by this code of conduct. There could be something like a "good AI seal of approval" issued to businesses that voluntarily adhere to the standard, like those web certificates that were ubiquitous in the early Aughts. Not only should the communications be public-key signed so the browser can identify them, but the the synthetic authors/speakers etc. should be named in a consistent way that unequivocally identifies them as AI. For example, appending a numeral to the name. Instead of calling itself Joe Rogan, the AI would be "Joe 7 Rogan." Or instead of an article written by Jennifer 8. Lee, it would be written by, hmm, okay there might be a little problem in her[0] case. One thing I've been mulling around is the idea of repurposing the Apple][ symbol. So Joe][ and Jennifer][, where ][ is pronounced "two." The convenience being that it's comprised of glyphs that are on every keyboard, and they also look mechanical and nothing like normal names. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee

yellowapple 4y ago

And on the topic of AI Joe Rogan impersonations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etaA94eM2AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etaA94eM2AE

nirav72 4y ago

Yikes. That David Attenborough narrating Warhammer 40K was pretty damn convincing. If I wasn't aware of the context - I would probably thought it was indeed him narrating.

solarkraft 4y ago

Don't forget the beach that makes you old and getting ratatouilled: https://youtu.be/etaA94eM2AE https://youtu.be/etaA94eM2AE https://youtu.be/we1I6nK6OBg https://youtu.be/we1I6nK6OBg

raxxorraxor 4y ago

> While slightly silly, I think in future people might start to take internet way less serious when you can literally make things up. The would be great. Finally a return to the old ways. "I have read about it on the internet" was a meme for a reason...