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This virus feeds on money. As long as there are economic incentives to produce content, people will use generative models to spew it onto the internet. It is un
by ChatGTP 3y ago
This virus feeds on money. As long as there are economic incentives to produce content, people will use generative models to spew it onto the internet. It is undetectable and therefore unstoppable. It will happen regardless of whether OpenAI exists or not.
So if the internet as we know it is dead, what would then inventive be for content farms to keep producing? The internet doesn't run on air, neither do LLMs. It's all very expensive to run. So if the internet does die from enshittification and false / crappy information then it should die pretty soon and then the inventive to produce bullshit content should go away with it. Who is going to pay to host, protect and make available exabytes of nonsense ?
It's wild when you think about what's happened recently. Twitter, for those without a login has just disappeared. Reddit has degraded a lot and my Youtube is so full of actual lies, rubbish and clickbait, I only use it when I really know what I'm looking for, and even then, it's getting really, really hard to find what I want.
What amazes me about YouTube is even people who seemed like fairly respectable YouTubers in the past have jumped on the viral clickbait / false info bandwagon.
I'm with the author, it's exciting but it's also kind of scary, like a fog of confusion is descending on our information space.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shswkna 3y agoThe fog of confusion has already descended on the traditional media in a different way. Modern economic pressures and incentives, as well as political ones, have made traditional media subservient to those, instead of the original ideal of informing the public. Some still exist that serve that ideal but it has become almost impossible for the average person to separate these from the rest.
- flangola7 3y agoThe answer is bad but IMO obvious. Any remote interactions with other humans will require bulletproof authenticity verification. At a minimum something like the chip + PIN that exists for payment cards or government CACs. Countries like India would be ahead of the ball on this. Any human communication that doesn't occur in-person will by necessity be treated as fake or hostile until proven otherwise.
- reducesuffering 3y agoBut the only part we need is the authenticity verification answer to "is this a human?" Yes, the human authenticated at some point. But fat chance we want any central organization doing it. Hate to say it, but if we can do distributed Proof of Work or Proof of State for crypto, then we need the same for auth.
- Nasrudith 3y agoNeither Proof of Work nor Proof of State would actually help. A human can always choose to operate based upon a script. All it shows is that a human signed off on it at some point. Removing privacy wouldn't help matters either. /At best/ you would get chilling effects combined with warmed over classism as the poorer are the most likely to be tempted into selling their certs and therefore "poor = shill".
- throwuwu 3y agoI’m quite happy that the always on firehose of ephemeral trash is dying. It only feels bad in the way that withdrawal sickness feels bad to a junkie. We need to kick this dopamine habit and focus on the important things.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoYouTube is interesting but it is in my experience is tamable with a lot of 'buts'. What I find ironic is that the algorithm is so sensitive to keeping you engaged, you can have the opposite effect and, instead of being barraged with clickbait at random, you're left with hyper-similar content to what you've previously watched, to the point that the variety becomes so narrow that you can't escape without "re-taming" it via text search and subscriptions. I agree completely about clickbait chasing from content creators. There's one guitar based content creator that has gone so far down the rabbit hole that I can't watch them at all any more as the content is just barely about guitar playing.