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I think it's already over. Fixing the destruction generative AI has wrought upon the Internet would be like unscrambling an egg. I'm an optimist when it comes t

by masto 3y ago

I think it's already over. Fixing the destruction generative AI has wrought upon the Internet would be like unscrambling an egg. I'm an optimist when it comes to technology, but I also believe that being able to know what's real and what's not real is fundamental to survival as a species, and I think we've seeded our own destruction here. I'm confident buildings are already being built with formulas someone asked ChatGPT for help with, doctors and nurses are getting advice on how to diagnose and treat patients, subroutines are being copied and pasted into safety-critical software, etc. We put the lead in the gasoline, and we're going to face the consequences.

RobRivera 3y ago
>seeded our own destruction I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. And yes it is possible. It is possible to work in this economy, raise a family, eat well, and not need to be bombarded by fake anything, whether generative AI or human authored. I think the atomic bomb is more credible as a seed of human destruction. By the way does anyone know anything about any launch codes? Also - have you seen the whereabouts of John Connor?
- tshaddox 3y ago
  > I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. That commenter went on to list examples where one’s personal usage of the Internet would irrelevant to one’s wellbeing. It won’t affect one’s level of care received from doctors or one’s safety when crossing a bridge.
- blibble 3y ago
  > I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. it's not me I worry about it's all the facebook users, who can also vote
- rurp 3y ago
  >I think the atomic bomb is more credible as a seed of human destruction. Nuclear weapons absolutely are an existential risk. >By the way does anyone know anything about any launch codes? I don't have any top secret knowledge about current systems but have read about historical command and control systems and it's a terrifying slice of history. Now there is starting to be talk about integrating AI into those systems, which I find horrifying.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  >I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news Ok, but what do I do about the other 159,690,456 people that vote in this country?
slacka 3y ago
For the Internet as a whole, yes, but not for this narrow case of legitimate news organizations. If Facebook could have building full of moderators to review flagged content on their site, Google could easily fix this issue with a team to handle reports of low quality AI content. Not to mention, how most of these sites sprung up out of nowhere. That should already be a red flag for the algorithm to de-rank until a human could review. And the example of reworded blog spam with identical photos, posted at a later date, again, should be trivial for a team that cared to catch manually(flagged) or through an algorithm. It's not over, unless Google doesn't care enough about Google News to fix it.
lolc 3y ago
Humans are older as confident nonsense generators. Incompetence was around before we had machines that automate it. Of course some people will die due to machine recommendations, but I've yet to see an argument why this will be worse than deaths from overconfident humans.
- mola 3y ago
  The whole premise of our industry is scale and the difference it makes. So why is it so hard to fathom that the scale this tech is enabling is making a qualitive difference and not only a quantitive one?
  - lolc 3y ago
    We place responsibility with the humans that employ the generators. And we've always needed curators. If we see a section of the web drowning in nonsense that just means that that part will become irrelevant. If Google or Facebook can't find a way to curate, they will be forgotten and only revered by some people as the good old times. We can deplore it, but must not delude ourselves into thinking that the old web didn't have a nonsense problem. You had sites that would go unlinked because the creators were crazy. At first the thing that curbed influx of nonsense somewhat is barriers to entry such as cost and technical competence. Then the curation was reputation based with Google's pagerank as an example. Now we will find new ways. And it hurts. It hurts like spam hurts email.
- nurbl 3y ago
  This argument could also be used to dismiss the whole "AI" industry. After all, humans have been able to answer questions and write essays for a long time! Of course the problem lies exactly in the ability to automate incompetence.
Cpoll 3y ago
With that take, the internet was what seeded our destruction. Doctors could get credible-sounding bad advice on the internet a decade ago, no AI needed. This is just another "don't trust everything you read in Wikipedia" moment, and it will pass. I choose to be naively optimistic: the glut of reasonable-sounding bullshit will increase the practice of citing sources when making claims. Then we can go back to good-old-fashioned lying with statistics.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Saying that citations will save us, is very naïve. No one checks sources today.
  - pvarangot 3y ago
    They'll have to if they don't want to be fooled. The problem is that people want to be fooled, not the fooling machine. If LLMs are better at educating than at fooling it'll be ok, if they are not it won't be ok.
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      I'm glad we'll be saved from bullshit facts with bullshit citations to bullshit articles. This isn't hypothetical. We already have bullshit citations and bullshit articles today. The only thing remaining is to stick the two together.
MeImCounting 3y ago
We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. I for one am somewhat glad we are going to be forced out of our shell when it comes to the nature of truth in media. All it means is that people are going to have to have a higher standard for what they believe. Many wont, just as many today think infowars or Joe Rogan are telling them the truth, but we shouldnt cater our society to the lowest common denominator. Instead we should create a society where the more informed people can do their best to guide and educate the people more easily fooled to develop the skills to be more discriminating in what they believe.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  > This is a change of degree, thats all A large enough change in degree becomes a qualitative change. If what once required nation states budget is suddenly free and in your pocket, it’s potentially a tectonic shift.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. How is the "AI injected" world any different? There will be more disinformation to fool those of us who believe something they read based on anything but the source. So what? Thats already a huge industry. Fooling the easily fooled accounts for most social media and ad traffic already. So now they get more fooled or fooled more often? I think thats not good but also not catastrophic in the way that is being implied.
    - fnimick 3y ago
      > Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. That works for you, but for everyone else who is less diligent in source evaluation, this now gets worse. Don't you agree that society suffers when a large proportion of people now get their information from fake sources?
r3trohack3r 3y ago
I have a different perspective. Most media has been coercive throughout my lifetime through the capture of distribution channels. If you control the distribution of where people consume their content, you can sway public opinion/sentiment. For example, you might set a "narrative target" for your news outlet to report "Tech = Bad" this quarter. Or you might purge all rural content from your network, like in the Rural Purge. The internet has blown that wide open. Many people, especially younger demographics, are curating their own content now. Instead of "news networks," many of my younger friends talk about individual citizen journalists. Those journalists go by many names, vloggers, podcasters, youtubers, etc. I've noticed that, in the past few years, the people proclaiming the loudest that "Journalism is Dead!" are doing so because they've ignored where the craft of journalism has migrated to: the internet. They look at the hollow dying husks of organizations that were built around capturing distribution channels, husks that have burned their credibility over years of blatantly coercive reporting, and somehow feel nostalgia for those husks. The legacy distribution channels have, by-in-large, lost. The only metrics they appear to be relevant in are the ones that conveniently exclude the distribution channel they've lost to: the internet. With the rise of OSS AI, I'm _extremely_ bullish on personalized moderation and curation. In the next few years, I want a personal AI that automatically mines all of my social media feeds, email, text messages, calendars, subscribed channels, podcasts, etc. and gives me a personalized curated view. I want that AI to be highly-biased, and highly-aligned. But the measure of bias and alignment is _me_. I want it to have my bias. I want it to have my alignment. I want it to be fine-tuned on me. And I want it to go churn through a lifetime of content daily and bubble up the most valuable/meaningful content for me. I think we are moving into a period where the ability for people to be coercive by controlling media distribution channels is coming to an end. The rise of personalized AI will kill it. And this is before I get into generative AI disrupting the larger entertainment industry for the better!
- mola 3y ago
  And where will these models run? And who exactly will create the content? Your personal AI will just consume a shitload of content that the powers with most compute generates. Reality is gone, it won't even be accessible via the shadows on the cave wall.
bondarchuk 3y ago
The only thing that's real is the actual stuff in the physical world that you can see and hear with your own senses. Mechanical/digital/artistic reproductions (text/images/videos) were never real and I'm a bit baffled by how all those "loss of consensus truth" doomer takes overlook that fact. 1980s-2010s mass media is not the be-all end-all of possible worldviews and human communication/coordination patterns.

by masto 3y ago

RobRivera 3y ago

>seeded our own destruction I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. And yes it is possible. It is possible to work in this economy, raise a family, eat well, and not need to be bombarded by fake anything, whether generative AI or human authored. I think the atomic bomb is more credible as a seed of human destruction. By the way does anyone know anything about any launch codes? Also - have you seen the whereabouts of John Connor?

tshaddox 3y ago
> I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. That commenter went on to list examples where one’s personal usage of the Internet would irrelevant to one’s wellbeing. It won’t affect one’s level of care received from doctors or one’s safety when crossing a bridge.
blibble 3y ago
> I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news and narratives and such. it's not me I worry about it's all the facebook users, who can also vote
rurp 3y ago
>I think the atomic bomb is more credible as a seed of human destruction. Nuclear weapons absolutely are an existential risk. >By the way does anyone know anything about any launch codes? I don't have any top secret knowledge about current systems but have read about historical command and control systems and it's a terrifying slice of history. Now there is starting to be talk about integrating AI into those systems, which I find horrifying.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
>I mean, you can always just not rely on the internet for news Ok, but what do I do about the other 159,690,456 people that vote in this country?

slacka 3y ago

For the Internet as a whole, yes, but not for this narrow case of legitimate news organizations. If Facebook could have building full of moderators to review flagged content on their site, Google could easily fix this issue with a team to handle reports of low quality AI content. Not to mention, how most of these sites sprung up out of nowhere. That should already be a red flag for the algorithm to de-rank until a human could review. And the example of reworded blog spam with identical photos, posted at a later date, again, should be trivial for a team that cared to catch manually(flagged) or through an algorithm. It's not over, unless Google doesn't care enough about Google News to fix it.

lolc 3y ago

Humans are older as confident nonsense generators. Incompetence was around before we had machines that automate it. Of course some people will die due to machine recommendations, but I've yet to see an argument why this will be worse than deaths from overconfident humans.

mola 3y ago
The whole premise of our industry is scale and the difference it makes. So why is it so hard to fathom that the scale this tech is enabling is making a qualitive difference and not only a quantitive one?
- lolc 3y ago
  We place responsibility with the humans that employ the generators. And we've always needed curators. If we see a section of the web drowning in nonsense that just means that that part will become irrelevant. If Google or Facebook can't find a way to curate, they will be forgotten and only revered by some people as the good old times. We can deplore it, but must not delude ourselves into thinking that the old web didn't have a nonsense problem. You had sites that would go unlinked because the creators were crazy. At first the thing that curbed influx of nonsense somewhat is barriers to entry such as cost and technical competence. Then the curation was reputation based with Google's pagerank as an example. Now we will find new ways. And it hurts. It hurts like spam hurts email.
nurbl 3y ago
This argument could also be used to dismiss the whole "AI" industry. After all, humans have been able to answer questions and write essays for a long time! Of course the problem lies exactly in the ability to automate incompetence.

Cpoll 3y ago

With that take, the internet was what seeded our destruction. Doctors could get credible-sounding bad advice on the internet a decade ago, no AI needed. This is just another "don't trust everything you read in Wikipedia" moment, and it will pass. I choose to be naively optimistic: the glut of reasonable-sounding bullshit will increase the practice of citing sources when making claims. Then we can go back to good-old-fashioned lying with statistics.

jonathankoren 3y ago
Saying that citations will save us, is very naïve. No one checks sources today.
- pvarangot 3y ago
  They'll have to if they don't want to be fooled. The problem is that people want to be fooled, not the fooling machine. If LLMs are better at educating than at fooling it'll be ok, if they are not it won't be ok.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    I'm glad we'll be saved from bullshit facts with bullshit citations to bullshit articles. This isn't hypothetical. We already have bullshit citations and bullshit articles today. The only thing remaining is to stick the two together.

MeImCounting 3y ago

We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. I for one am somewhat glad we are going to be forced out of our shell when it comes to the nature of truth in media. All it means is that people are going to have to have a higher standard for what they believe. Many wont, just as many today think infowars or Joe Rogan are telling them the truth, but we shouldnt cater our society to the lowest common denominator. Instead we should create a society where the more informed people can do their best to guide and educate the people more easily fooled to develop the skills to be more discriminating in what they believe.

tambourine_man 3y ago
> This is a change of degree, thats all A large enough change in degree becomes a qualitative change. If what once required nation states budget is suddenly free and in your pocket, it’s potentially a tectonic shift.
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. How is the "AI injected" world any different? There will be more disinformation to fool those of us who believe something they read based on anything but the source. So what? Thats already a huge industry. Fooling the easily fooled accounts for most social media and ad traffic already. So now they get more fooled or fooled more often? I think thats not good but also not catastrophic in the way that is being implied.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    > Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. That works for you, but for everyone else who is less diligent in source evaluation, this now gets worse. Don't you agree that society suffers when a large proportion of people now get their information from fake sources?

r3trohack3r 3y ago

I have a different perspective. Most media has been coercive throughout my lifetime through the capture of distribution channels. If you control the distribution of where people consume their content, you can sway public opinion/sentiment. For example, you might set a "narrative target" for your news outlet to report "Tech = Bad" this quarter. Or you might purge all rural content from your network, like in the Rural Purge. The internet has blown that wide open. Many people, especially younger demographics, are curating their own content now. Instead of "news networks," many of my younger friends talk about individual citizen journalists. Those journalists go by many names, vloggers, podcasters, youtubers, etc. I've noticed that, in the past few years, the people proclaiming the loudest that "Journalism is Dead!" are doing so because they've ignored where the craft of journalism has migrated to: the internet. They look at the hollow dying husks of organizations that were built around capturing distribution channels, husks that have burned their credibility over years of blatantly coercive reporting, and somehow feel nostalgia for those husks. The legacy distribution channels have, by-in-large, lost. The only metrics they appear to be relevant in are the ones that conveniently exclude the distribution channel they've lost to: the internet. With the rise of OSS AI, I'm _extremely_ bullish on personalized moderation and curation. In the next few years, I want a personal AI that automatically mines all of my social media feeds, email, text messages, calendars, subscribed channels, podcasts, etc. and gives me a personalized curated view. I want that AI to be highly-biased, and highly-aligned. But the measure of bias and alignment is _me_. I want it to have my bias. I want it to have my alignment. I want it to be fine-tuned on me. And I want it to go churn through a lifetime of content daily and bubble up the most valuable/meaningful content for me. I think we are moving into a period where the ability for people to be coercive by controlling media distribution channels is coming to an end. The rise of personalized AI will kill it. And this is before I get into generative AI disrupting the larger entertainment industry for the better!

mola 3y ago
And where will these models run? And who exactly will create the content? Your personal AI will just consume a shitload of content that the powers with most compute generates. Reality is gone, it won't even be accessible via the shadows on the cave wall.

bondarchuk 3y ago

The only thing that's real is the actual stuff in the physical world that you can see and hear with your own senses. Mechanical/digital/artistic reproductions (text/images/videos) were never real and I'm a bit baffled by how all those "loss of consensus truth" doomer takes overlook that fact. 1980s-2010s mass media is not the be-all end-all of possible worldviews and human communication/coordination patterns.