5 ms·

I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good' content, but it will be faster and ch

by gz5 3y ago

I think we will see tidal waves of 'not-so-good' AI-generated content. Not that AI can't generate or help generate 'good' content, but it will be faster and cheaper to generate 'not-so-good'. These waves will mainly be in places in which we are the product. And those waves could make those places close to uninhabitable for folks who don't want to slosh through the waves of noise to find the signal. And in turn that perhaps enables a stronger business model for high quality content islands (regardless of how the content is generated) - e.g. we will be more willing to pay directly for high quality content with dollars instead of time. In that scenario, AI could be a_good_thing in helping to spin a flywheel for high quality content.

rwmj 3y ago
Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're waiting: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
- hinkley 3y ago
  Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite neither each other or the same chain of citations. And preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating [1]. In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two books to contain the same misinformation or mis-identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant in a google image search? More times than I care to count). Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and you have dead people. [1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and many are older.
  - eindiran 3y ago
    Damn had no idea about wild ginger. That is a bummer.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Isn’t it. It went from somewhere around 10th on my planting list to, “when I get really bored”.
omnicognate 3y ago
Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed. There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. There will always be a place for subscriptions, but people want the hypertext model of just following a link from somewhere and there is absolutely no technical reason for that to be incompatible with paying for content. The idea that ads are the only way to fund the web needs to be challenged, and generative AI might just provide the push for that to finally happen. Or maybe there will be no such crisis and it'll just make the whole thing even more exploitative and garbage-filled.
- munificent 3y ago
  > There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. People have been saying this and building startups on this and having those startups crash and burn for decades. It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem. Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds of microtransactions. See also [2]. It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate heuristics don't work well for the technically and economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
  - omnicognate 3y ago

by gz5 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

Assuming not too many people die eating mushrooms while we're waiting: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...

hinkley 3y ago
Common foraging rhetoric is that you need two independent sources asserting that a wild food is edible. Ones that cite neither each other or the same chain of citations. And preferably a human who says, "I've been eating these for years and no problems." or scientists who did recent blood work to make sure you aren't destroying your organs by eating [1]. In a world with fake books, it would be quite easy for two books to contain the same misinformation or mis-identification (how many times have I found the wrong plant in a google image search? More times than I care to count). Two fake books putting the wrong mushroom picture next to a mushroom because they were contiguous on some other page and you have dead people. [1] In the ten years since I started working with indigenous plants, wild ginger (asarum caudatum), has gone from quasi-edible to medicinal to don't eat. More studies show subtler wear and tear on the organs (wikipedia lists it as carcinogenic!) and it is recommended now that you don't eat them at all, even for medicinal purposes. I'm not sure I own a foraging or native species book younger than 5 years, and many are older.
- eindiran 3y ago
  Damn had no idea about wild ginger. That is a bummer.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Isn’t it. It went from somewhere around 10th on my planting list to, “when I get really bored”.

omnicognate 3y ago

Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed. There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. There will always be a place for subscriptions, but people want the hypertext model of just following a link from somewhere and there is absolutely no technical reason for that to be incompatible with paying for content. The idea that ads are the only way to fund the web needs to be challenged, and generative AI might just provide the push for that to finally happen. Or maybe there will be no such crisis and it'll just make the whole thing even more exploitative and garbage-filled.

munificent 3y ago
> There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. People have been saying this and building startups on this and having those startups crash and burn for decades. It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem. Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds of microtransactions. See also [2]. It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate heuristics don't work well for the technically and economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
- omnicognate 3y ago