13 ms·

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show the

by nomat 3y ago

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y. Reading back I sound like T*d K but the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable in terms of what silicon is going to be able to do. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough most of the time. Like a mcdonalds drive thru.

spicyusername 3y ago
I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.
- brianmcc 3y ago
  Yep. Case in point - I've given up buying on Amazon UK and use Argos as my go-to shop instead, for products of far better assured provenance without having to really overthink it all.
- citizenpaul 3y ago
  I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that Google uses human adjustments for their search results.
    - realusername 3y ago
      Knowing how Google is allergic to anything human in their product loop and obsessed with automation at all costs, I doubt they make a difference.
  - hedora 3y ago
    That’s not why Yahoo lost. They switched CEOs and corporate direction / business models more than once a year on average toward the end. Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams. To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.
- hedora 3y ago
  The streaming services business model more-or-less outlaws collections that are curated by third parties. We already know what happens when piracy is the most convenient/highest quality option, but I’m guessing media distributors will need a reminder soon.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Unfortunately, "personal recommendations" seems to mean "influencers" these days.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    that's the part that I love love love. society has gotten to this ridiculous follower stage that people seem to think it is a personal connection. maybe i've just spent too much time too close to the ad agency world to see how nasty they are, but anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation". too much "inside baseball" to know that nothing you see in an ad is real even if you don't consciously recognize the fact what you are looking at is an ad.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Hell yes. +9000 for your post. To me, the solution is much transparency around paid product placement through strong regulation. See "Parasocial interaction". Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
    - eropple 3y ago
      I'm currently noodling on a blog website and I'm thinking about adding a "recommendations" page largely in an anti-influencer sort of way--any affiliate marketing money is pretty incidental to somebody working in tech, but I want companies that make stuff that's good and valuable to stick around and continue to make stuff, so I want a way to spread the good news in a credible manner.
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  > relying on personal recommendations Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy. LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs"). The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. I'll just ignore the internet instead. The internet cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy, so I'm not going to give up any in the first place.
wpietri 3y ago
Yeah, my big concern about LLMs is not Skynet or a zillion people out of work. It's that the spammers and their ilk are now vastly more capable. The fact that generative LLMs are glib bullshit machines is a problem for most sane uses, but a plus for people who don't give two shits about the truth as long as they've got a chance of making some money.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  This, but also in the professional space. My coworkers much be 200% faster now, but I’m going to spend 80% of my time unfucking their work.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    But also good luck next time you google health symptoms - sure it’s bad, but everybody does it, and we’re going to move further and further away from accurate.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      You can rely on the internet to provide even remotely correct health information anymore. It was always a little questionable, due to all the variables, but you could get some indication on how quickly you should get yourself to the doctor. Same with weight-loss or exercise programs, that's basically impossible to search for due to the amount of spam and garbage content.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Regarding health, stick to Mayo Clinic, US Centers for Disease Control, or other very reputable websites. That one seems easier than buying stuff online. The slow descent is hard to navigate for many people.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Not everyone does it. I don't, because doing that is not only pretty worthless, but can be hazardous.
stevage 3y ago
I imagine everything constantly hovering on the threshold of what is tolerable enough for most people. If you could never buy anything useful on the internet, the system would collapse and people would do something different. But instead, the quality etc will just decline to a point where it is still marginally better than alternatives like shopping in person etc.
- ghaff 3y ago
  People who can afford to do so will perhaps just pay 2x to 3x to shop a more limited selection from personally curated stores.
  - shinycode 3y ago
    Unfortunately if you so create a new product or service it’ll be really hard to find you this way and it might require a lot more money and effort to reach out to the audience.
    - b112 3y ago
      Oooooh, custom search engines. Amazon would hate this, but make a deal with shopify to speed up spidering their sites. Then, spider all other retailors. You put in a product id/name, and it only shows results from amazon, shopify sites, and vetted retailers. The manual curation part, is vetting the retail site. Walmart would be a problem(for example), unless it was easy to tag 'sold by walmart'. Amazon's filter would only include shipped by amazon stuff. So like 'hanes t-shirt', and you get 7 links, from 7 sites, all woth prices and shipping cost estimates. Amazon has horrible pricing, bordering on predatory for some things. Maybe I'll do this, I'm bored this summer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
femto 3y ago
Even that's optimistic. I'd say "its best guess as the truth" should read "its best guess at what you will accept as the truth". It will be entirely about what sucks in the individual.
opportune 3y ago
Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  I think AI is going to make it harder to separate the signal from the noise, though. We’re already seeing this play out with sites like Amazon that are just full of cheap junk that’s blatantly ripped off and undercut in price, or Google as people are complaining about the quality of search results.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Notice that niche shopping sites don’t have reviews. Bigger sites have reviews but they don’t get gamed. Without affiliates or listing products like Amazon, there is no way for the spammers to make money. I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Amazon (UK, at least) don't even have a working search function, it's ridiculous trying to buy a specific thing there.
      - Matrixik 3y ago
        I think that's the reason why Allegro is market leader in Poland and Amazon is far, far away. I get really frustrated when I try to find anything on Amazon, sometimes to the point of thinking "how the hell they became so big with this shitty search?". When I search anything on allegro.pl it almost always return me products I search for and support tons of filters (and return actually nothing when they don't have it).
dclowd9901 3y ago
Is it not the case that AI is pretty good at detecting AI generated content?
- post-it 3y ago
  It is not the case.
- menus 3y ago
  OpenAI does not think so. > As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  It is not, which is why lots of people have been focusing on watermarking–which, obviously, all kinds of actors that don’t feel the need to comply with regulations, either because they are exempt (practically, even if not theoretically) governments, or “renegade” anti-establishment will simply either not implement or not provide the public with the pattern information needed to detect the watermark, so...
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  It's not. One of the things you can train an AI to do is to generate output that isn't recognized by a given "AI detector."
- HWR_14 3y ago
  If so, it's only for one generation, until they add "tricks current AI detection" as a metric for the next training.
coliveira 3y ago
This is already happening: whatever you ask Google, they have some crazy AI algorithm running in the back trying to discover what you want to see as result, so as to maximize the profit from your clicks.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Optimistic of you to assume “what you want to see” and “what makes you click most profitably” coincide.
  - slabity 3y ago
    Considering they haven't completely removed Pinterest from their platform, I absolutely agree.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think that this is a larger factor as to why Google search sucks these days than SEO is.
menus 3y ago
You have described Dead Internet Theory:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
mr_toad 3y ago
Maybe people will finally stop believing everything they see online.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Pxtl 3y ago
This is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital IDs. I don't see any escape from a hellscape of AI-generated-sludge unless we have a real way to say "somebody has signed their real government-confirmed reputation on this". The paranoid disinfo peddlers are the ones who benefit most from the untraceability of the horsecrap they put online. Otherwise it's all downhill until the singularity.
- nomat 3y ago
  Free speech should only apply to verified humans. We could use the blockchain to assign keys to babies as they are born. Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated. South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like the wrong direction but might be necessary if we want to maintain some semblance of sanity on the internet or whatever it is going to become in the future.
  - worldsayshi 3y ago
    There has to be some neat tricks you can use to allow verifying a human, using your id, without actually exposing your id though?
    - eropple 3y ago
      You can sign an intermediary certificate, but nothing stops you from then giving that to an LLM.
      - Pxtl 3y ago
        Well, if that cert can be traced back to its original creator, and that LLM is crapflooding, then that person can be blocked from user-contributed content systems.
  - kubanczyk 3y ago
    > verified humans Wouldn't it be elegant though if the new trust scheme applied the same to LLMs/bots as humans? Assuming that LLMs are a polar opposite of humans seems short sighted. Or assuming that humans are sole heroes of the story. It will be a spectrum, soon. For example when you say "all human weakness, eliminated" it's a weird lens to use. Every relative weakness is a challenge, whether its origin is in human ancestral environment or not. I'm curious whether the entirety of the system (I mean the current civilization) would morph itself into a pipeline disgorging specifically human "happiness". As of today, it's far from obvious!
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
This is exactly how it works today. Just with "copywriters" instead of "AI".
zen_1 3y ago
One of the few sentences more depressing (when relevant) than "Stallman was right" is "Ted Kaczynski had a point".
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  Categorizing useful arguments into boxes with labels like "Ted K" is over-simplification. Worldview is not about chains of arguments, but directed acyclic graphs of arguments. You can even have exactly the same starting assumptions, but arrive at a totally different branch. It all depends on how well you connect the dots on your way.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
ulfw 3y ago
People value choice in their purchasing behaviour. I am not saying people are always rational actors, of course not. We are all influenced to some degree by ads, social influences etc etc But the whole notion of "I just buy from one place and one place only without comparing anything at all ever again" is a bridge to far in my mind. So the whole "Siri send me whatever I tell you" I doubt will catch on with the majority of people. A niche maybe, sure. But not the majority of us.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Your first paragraph is just Amazon today. They don't need AI for people to make up products and send you garbage. They probably will use AI for reviews, but they already have fake reviews that reliably fool people, so this isn't much different. If it gets so bad that Amazon's bottom line is threatened, they'll actually crack down; they're assholes, not business-suicidal. "The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth" - you just described Google Search, like, 5 years ago. "the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable.." - not really. What we're capable of is not what happens. We only reach the minimum viable capability that meets a societal expectation. Once the expectation is reached, progress stagnates, until something exceptional changes the expectation. As a more specific example, regardless of how advanced hardware gets, software remains a gas that fills any container, so what we can actually do with the hardware is always limited by our horrible software. People keep talking about AI like it's going to transform everything. It's actually more like colorized talking movies vs the black-and-white silent ones. Reshapes industries and changes expectations and experiences? For sure. But the films, plots, characters, actors, industry, viewers, their effect on society, etc remain the same. 3D didn't take hold, neither did smell-o-vision, drive-ins, and countless other "innovations", even though they were feasible. This is just one example, there are tens of thousands of other examples I could give. It's like a law of nature. We don't accomplish what we aren't motivated to. Also, mcdonalds drive thrus work all the time, not just most of the time. The drive thru is the engine that generates most of the revenue; it's a conveyor belt for cash. A franchise would go out of business if the drive thru broke.
- nomat 3y ago
  I'm talking about the quality of the food here. as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    AI isn't going to change a pandemic or an election by itself. Those are completely controlled by societal norms and actions of humans, regardless of any technological powers or their uses. In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, we had the technology and knowledge to end it quickly. But nations around the world chose to spread disinformation and cover-up the story, which made it much worse. A third of the world died because of how society chose to act. And when we make a product that can do harm, we also make a product that can revert it, clean it up, or institute laws to restrict it. Now that we've seen things like Russian bot farms, we look for them and shut them down. Despite that we have good AI, we can also detect AI. Our ingenuity can almost always be surpassed by more ingenuity. As much as it can cause harm, it can also fix said harm. AI is just a hammer in a toolbox, and it isn't any worse than any other hammer we've had. Don't worry about the hammer; worry about the person holding it.
worldsayshi 3y ago
Many aspects of this problem doesn't sound hard to solve. But you need to involve cryptographic signing and reliable eIDs. Any content from a known author needs to be verified to be from that author by letting that author sign the content.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Right, just solve the Oracle problem. /s
red-iron-pine 3y ago
> But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y. dead internet theory -- the idea that the internet will eventually be mostly or entirely bots talking to bots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- elkhadiy 3y ago
  Very interesting! Bots roaming freely generating content and manipulating consumers sounds like early stages of the net beyond the BlackWall in the Cyberpunk universe post DataKrash. (just in case someone might be interested in sci-fi reading on the subject)
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago
    There won't be any consumers on the net to manipulate though. Our bots will be buying counterfeit junk off of shady e-commerce giants, but at least we will be out enjoying art, sports, and nature, because all the bots will be doing all the work as well anyway.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  It tickles me that somewhere out there on some forgotten instance in a dark corner of some massive data center, there is a #IndieMovies chat channel still running on some long forgotten college kid weekend project, and in that are two early gen chat bots that have been going back and forth for over a decade now, and will continue to for the next 20 years.
kzrdude 3y ago
It's only the future if we accept these half truths and deceptions. Like how Amazon is accepting it.
neycoda 3y ago
Nobody's expecting perfect but humans' definition of good enough typically isn't.
fellowmartian 3y ago
Ah yes, another classic apocalypse prediction! Goes something like this: - Identify a problematic trend - Extrapolate into infinity - Assume nothing will be done to correct it - Apocalypse! It’s very popular among journalists and experts, despite the fact that this literally never happens, because it turns out people don’t just stand still and drown if they see a wave coming for them.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Lmao, scams and crap products have always been a thing since we crawled out of the oceans. As always, the problem isn't technology but humanity itself.

by nomat 3y ago

spicyusername 3y ago

I think people have a lower tolerance for this than that, and will just go back to relying on personal recommendations and other reliable forms of curation.

brianmcc 3y ago
Yep. Case in point - I've given up buying on Amazon UK and use Argos as my go-to shop instead, for products of far better assured provenance without having to really overthink it all.
citizenpaul 3y ago
I think we will see the pendulum swing back. Yahoo lost to google because they were a manually curated search engine and could not keep up with google indexing and search. Now that all search is SEO gamed garbagebwe are going to see a new curated search engine rise in market share again
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Google uses human adjustments for their search results.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Knowing how Google is allergic to anything human in their product loop and obsessed with automation at all costs, I doubt they make a difference.
- hedora 3y ago
  That’s not why Yahoo lost. They switched CEOs and corporate direction / business models more than once a year on average toward the end. Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams. To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.
hedora 3y ago
The streaming services business model more-or-less outlaws collections that are curated by third parties. We already know what happens when piracy is the most convenient/highest quality option, but I’m guessing media distributors will need a reminder soon.
userbinator 3y ago
Unfortunately, "personal recommendations" seems to mean "influencers" these days.
- dylan604 3y ago
  that's the part that I love love love. society has gotten to this ridiculous follower stage that people seem to think it is a personal connection. maybe i've just spent too much time too close to the ad agency world to see how nasty they are, but anytime i see some random person on the internet that i do not personally know recommending anything, i immediately assume they are paid for that "recommendation". too much "inside baseball" to know that nothing you see in an ad is real even if you don't consciously recognize the fact what you are looking at is an ad.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Hell yes. +9000 for your post. To me, the solution is much transparency around paid product placement through strong regulation. See "Parasocial interaction". Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
  - eropple 3y ago
    I'm currently noodling on a blog website and I'm thinking about adding a "recommendations" page largely in an anti-influencer sort of way--any affiliate marketing money is pretty incidental to somebody working in tech, but I want companies that make stuff that's good and valuable to stick around and continue to make stuff, so I want a way to spread the good news in a credible manner.
kubanczyk 3y ago
> relying on personal recommendations Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy. LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs"). The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. I'll just ignore the internet instead. The internet cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy, so I'm not going to give up any in the first place.

wpietri 3y ago

Yeah, my big concern about LLMs is not Skynet or a zillion people out of work. It's that the spammers and their ilk are now vastly more capable. The fact that generative LLMs are glib bullshit machines is a problem for most sane uses, but a plus for people who don't give two shits about the truth as long as they've got a chance of making some money.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
This, but also in the professional space. My coworkers much be 200% faster now, but I’m going to spend 80% of my time unfucking their work.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  But also good luck next time you google health symptoms - sure it’s bad, but everybody does it, and we’re going to move further and further away from accurate.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    You can rely on the internet to provide even remotely correct health information anymore. It was always a little questionable, due to all the variables, but you could get some indication on how quickly you should get yourself to the doctor. Same with weight-loss or exercise programs, that's basically impossible to search for due to the amount of spam and garbage content.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Regarding health, stick to Mayo Clinic, US Centers for Disease Control, or other very reputable websites. That one seems easier than buying stuff online. The slow descent is hard to navigate for many people.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Not everyone does it. I don't, because doing that is not only pretty worthless, but can be hazardous.

stevage 3y ago

I imagine everything constantly hovering on the threshold of what is tolerable enough for most people. If you could never buy anything useful on the internet, the system would collapse and people would do something different. But instead, the quality etc will just decline to a point where it is still marginally better than alternatives like shopping in person etc.

ghaff 3y ago
People who can afford to do so will perhaps just pay 2x to 3x to shop a more limited selection from personally curated stores.
- shinycode 3y ago
  Unfortunately if you so create a new product or service it’ll be really hard to find you this way and it might require a lot more money and effort to reach out to the audience.
  - b112 3y ago
    Oooooh, custom search engines. Amazon would hate this, but make a deal with shopify to speed up spidering their sites. Then, spider all other retailors. You put in a product id/name, and it only shows results from amazon, shopify sites, and vetted retailers. The manual curation part, is vetting the retail site. Walmart would be a problem(for example), unless it was easy to tag 'sold by walmart'. Amazon's filter would only include shipped by amazon stuff. So like 'hanes t-shirt', and you get 7 links, from 7 sites, all woth prices and shipping cost estimates. Amazon has horrible pricing, bordering on predatory for some things. Maybe I'll do this, I'm bored this summer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

femto 3y ago

Even that's optimistic. I'd say "its best guess as the truth" should read "its best guess at what you will accept as the truth". It will be entirely about what sucks in the individual.

opportune 3y ago

Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
I think AI is going to make it harder to separate the signal from the noise, though. We’re already seeing this play out with sites like Amazon that are just full of cheap junk that’s blatantly ripped off and undercut in price, or Google as people are complaining about the quality of search results.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Notice that niche shopping sites don’t have reviews. Bigger sites have reviews but they don’t get gamed. Without affiliates or listing products like Amazon, there is no way for the spammers to make money. I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Amazon (UK, at least) don't even have a working search function, it's ridiculous trying to buy a specific thing there.
    - Matrixik 3y ago
      I think that's the reason why Allegro is market leader in Poland and Amazon is far, far away. I get really frustrated when I try to find anything on Amazon, sometimes to the point of thinking "how the hell they became so big with this shitty search?". When I search anything on allegro.pl it almost always return me products I search for and support tons of filters (and return actually nothing when they don't have it).

dclowd9901 3y ago

Is it not the case that AI is pretty good at detecting AI generated content?

post-it 3y ago
It is not the case.
menus 3y ago
OpenAI does not think so. > As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...
dragonwriter 3y ago
It is not, which is why lots of people have been focusing on watermarking–which, obviously, all kinds of actors that don’t feel the need to comply with regulations, either because they are exempt (practically, even if not theoretically) governments, or “renegade” anti-establishment will simply either not implement or not provide the public with the pattern information needed to detect the watermark, so...
CamperBob2 3y ago
It's not. One of the things you can train an AI to do is to generate output that isn't recognized by a given "AI detector."
HWR_14 3y ago
If so, it's only for one generation, until they add "tricks current AI detection" as a metric for the next training.

coliveira 3y ago

This is already happening: whatever you ask Google, they have some crazy AI algorithm running in the back trying to discover what you want to see as result, so as to maximize the profit from your clicks.

bombcar 3y ago
Optimistic of you to assume “what you want to see” and “what makes you click most profitably” coincide.
- slabity 3y ago
  Considering they haven't completely removed Pinterest from their platform, I absolutely agree.
JohnFen 3y ago
I think that this is a larger factor as to why Google search sucks these days than SEO is.

menus 3y ago

You have described Dead Internet Theory:: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

mr_toad 3y ago

Maybe people will finally stop believing everything they see online.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Pxtl 3y ago

This is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital IDs. I don't see any escape from a hellscape of AI-generated-sludge unless we have a real way to say "somebody has signed their real government-confirmed reputation on this". The paranoid disinfo peddlers are the ones who benefit most from the untraceability of the horsecrap they put online. Otherwise it's all downhill until the singularity.

nomat 3y ago
Free speech should only apply to verified humans. We could use the blockchain to assign keys to babies as they are born. Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated. South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like the wrong direction but might be necessary if we want to maintain some semblance of sanity on the internet or whatever it is going to become in the future.
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  There has to be some neat tricks you can use to allow verifying a human, using your id, without actually exposing your id though?
  - eropple 3y ago
    You can sign an intermediary certificate, but nothing stops you from then giving that to an LLM.
    - Pxtl 3y ago
      Well, if that cert can be traced back to its original creator, and that LLM is crapflooding, then that person can be blocked from user-contributed content systems.
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  > verified humans Wouldn't it be elegant though if the new trust scheme applied the same to LLMs/bots as humans? Assuming that LLMs are a polar opposite of humans seems short sighted. Or assuming that humans are sole heroes of the story. It will be a spectrum, soon. For example when you say "all human weakness, eliminated" it's a weird lens to use. Every relative weakness is a challenge, whether its origin is in human ancestral environment or not. I'm curious whether the entirety of the system (I mean the current civilization) would morph itself into a pipeline disgorging specifically human "happiness". As of today, it's far from obvious!

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

This is exactly how it works today. Just with "copywriters" instead of "AI".

zen_1 3y ago

One of the few sentences more depressing (when relevant) than "Stallman was right" is "Ted Kaczynski had a point".

kubanczyk 3y ago
Categorizing useful arguments into boxes with labels like "Ted K" is over-simplification. Worldview is not about chains of arguments, but directed acyclic graphs of arguments. You can even have exactly the same starting assumptions, but arrive at a totally different branch. It all depends on how well you connect the dots on your way.
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]

ulfw 3y ago

People value choice in their purchasing behaviour. I am not saying people are always rational actors, of course not. We are all influenced to some degree by ads, social influences etc etc But the whole notion of "I just buy from one place and one place only without comparing anything at all ever again" is a bridge to far in my mind. So the whole "Siri send me whatever I tell you" I doubt will catch on with the majority of people. A niche maybe, sure. But not the majority of us.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Your first paragraph is just Amazon today. They don't need AI for people to make up products and send you garbage. They probably will use AI for reviews, but they already have fake reviews that reliably fool people, so this isn't much different. If it gets so bad that Amazon's bottom line is threatened, they'll actually crack down; they're assholes, not business-suicidal. "The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth" - you just described Google Search, like, 5 years ago. "the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable.." - not really. What we're capable of is not what happens. We only reach the minimum viable capability that meets a societal expectation. Once the expectation is reached, progress stagnates, until something exceptional changes the expectation. As a more specific example, regardless of how advanced hardware gets, software remains a gas that fills any container, so what we can actually do with the hardware is always limited by our horrible software. People keep talking about AI like it's going to transform everything. It's actually more like colorized talking movies vs the black-and-white silent ones. Reshapes industries and changes expectations and experiences? For sure. But the films, plots, characters, actors, industry, viewers, their effect on society, etc remain the same. 3D didn't take hold, neither did smell-o-vision, drive-ins, and countless other "innovations", even though they were feasible. This is just one example, there are tens of thousands of other examples I could give. It's like a law of nature. We don't accomplish what we aren't motivated to. Also, mcdonalds drive thrus work all the time, not just most of the time. The drive thru is the engine that generates most of the revenue; it's a conveyor belt for cash. A franchise would go out of business if the drive thru broke.

nomat 3y ago
I'm talking about the quality of the food here. as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  AI isn't going to change a pandemic or an election by itself. Those are completely controlled by societal norms and actions of humans, regardless of any technological powers or their uses. In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, we had the technology and knowledge to end it quickly. But nations around the world chose to spread disinformation and cover-up the story, which made it much worse. A third of the world died because of how society chose to act. And when we make a product that can do harm, we also make a product that can revert it, clean it up, or institute laws to restrict it. Now that we've seen things like Russian bot farms, we look for them and shut them down. Despite that we have good AI, we can also detect AI. Our ingenuity can almost always be surpassed by more ingenuity. As much as it can cause harm, it can also fix said harm. AI is just a hammer in a toolbox, and it isn't any worse than any other hammer we've had. Don't worry about the hammer; worry about the person holding it.

worldsayshi 3y ago

Many aspects of this problem doesn't sound hard to solve. But you need to involve cryptographic signing and reliable eIDs. Any content from a known author needs to be verified to be from that author by letting that author sign the content.

dsr_ 3y ago
Right, just solve the Oracle problem. /s

red-iron-pine 3y ago

> But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y. dead internet theory -- the idea that the internet will eventually be mostly or entirely bots talking to bots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

elkhadiy 3y ago
Very interesting! Bots roaming freely generating content and manipulating consumers sounds like early stages of the net beyond the BlackWall in the Cyberpunk universe post DataKrash. (just in case someone might be interested in sci-fi reading on the subject)
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  There won't be any consumers on the net to manipulate though. Our bots will be buying counterfeit junk off of shady e-commerce giants, but at least we will be out enjoying art, sports, and nature, because all the bots will be doing all the work as well anyway.
Workaccount2 3y ago
It tickles me that somewhere out there on some forgotten instance in a dark corner of some massive data center, there is a #IndieMovies chat channel still running on some long forgotten college kid weekend project, and in that are two early gen chat bots that have been going back and forth for over a decade now, and will continue to for the next 20 years.

kzrdude 3y ago

It's only the future if we accept these half truths and deceptions. Like how Amazon is accepting it.

neycoda 3y ago

Nobody's expecting perfect but humans' definition of good enough typically isn't.

fellowmartian 3y ago

Ah yes, another classic apocalypse prediction! Goes something like this: - Identify a problematic trend - Extrapolate into infinity - Assume nothing will be done to correct it - Apocalypse! It’s very popular among journalists and experts, despite the fact that this literally never happens, because it turns out people don’t just stand still and drown if they see a wave coming for them.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Lmao, scams and crap products have always been a thing since we crawled out of the oceans. As always, the problem isn't technology but humanity itself.