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I have a different perspective. Most media has been coercive throughout my lifetime through the capture of distribution channels. If you control the distributi

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.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  > And where will these models run? Locally, on my devices. Where property law says I own the fine-tuned model and the device. > And who exactly will create the content? Anyone and everyone? I don't understand what you mean. What you just posted here is content. You produced content. I assume you will continue doing that moving into the future. > Your personal AI will just consume a shitload of content that the powers with most compute generates I think that assumes a random walk through the internet? Content discovery probably shouldn't be random? As your AI curates content, you give it ongoing feedback about the quality of the content it gives you, (feedback based on your highly biased definition of "good" and "bad" content). Your AI learns what is "good" to show you and what is "bad" to show you. As your AI finds "identities" and "content channels" that produce reliably high-quality content that your highly-biased and highly-aligned AI can curate for you, I'd imagine your AI would prioritize searching those content spaces for quality content first. For example, I'd like to think my personalized AI would learn to surface up interesting conversations and content from Hacker News. As content channels get "overrun" by noise, the AI is filtering out the noise, the signal-to-noise ratio drops, and the AI slowly lowers the priority of those content channels in favor of channels that consistently produce content you find valuable to consume. The key here is that the AI is ultimately accountable to me, overseen by me, controlled by me, fine-tuned on signals generated by me, etc. Imagine you had an army of 1 million personal executive assistants who could scour the world looking for information relevant to you, and give you a curated feed of useful information on an ongoing basis. That sounds like a pretty cool future to me. And if someone wants to spend their time squandering their wealth to accumulate enough hardware to run 1 trillion personal executive assistants to generate a bunch of valueless (or value-negative), coercive, uninteresting dribble on the internet? Cool. Let them squander their wealth. My executive assistants will filter that out for me.
rideontime 3y ago
It sounds like you want a computer to craft the most comfortable echo chamber possible for you to live in. I find that terribly depressing.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  I want the opposite. Personally, I want to be challenged regularly. I want AI's that are biased based on the direction I need to be challenged in the moment, which I would mark as "good." I want an AI that can challenge my assumptions as I work by surfacing relevant research papers that show I might be following the wrong path, which I would mark as "good." I want AIs that can adopt the personas of someone I'm reading that I disagree with, who has long been dead, so we can have a conversation over beers and sort out some of my personal philosophy. And I want all of that on my terms. To ground this desire in classical terms, I want to pick the books I read. I have a bookshelf full of books. I have books I agree with. I have books I disagree with. But I only have books that make me think. Being able to pick my own books doesn't mean I want to live in an echo chamber. It means I want to cultivate my own personal philosophy on my terms.
  - StreetChief 3y ago
    An ai persona of someone dead will be filled with guesswork, fakes, and inaccuracies, just like today's generative ai. The technology is literally guessing at the missing peices, with no ability to verify accuracy. Enjoy conversations with people while they live, because the dead don't talk explicitly.

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.

r3trohack3r 3y ago
> And where will these models run? Locally, on my devices. Where property law says I own the fine-tuned model and the device. > And who exactly will create the content? Anyone and everyone? I don't understand what you mean. What you just posted here is content. You produced content. I assume you will continue doing that moving into the future. > Your personal AI will just consume a shitload of content that the powers with most compute generates I think that assumes a random walk through the internet? Content discovery probably shouldn't be random? As your AI curates content, you give it ongoing feedback about the quality of the content it gives you, (feedback based on your highly biased definition of "good" and "bad" content). Your AI learns what is "good" to show you and what is "bad" to show you. As your AI finds "identities" and "content channels" that produce reliably high-quality content that your highly-biased and highly-aligned AI can curate for you, I'd imagine your AI would prioritize searching those content spaces for quality content first. For example, I'd like to think my personalized AI would learn to surface up interesting conversations and content from Hacker News. As content channels get "overrun" by noise, the AI is filtering out the noise, the signal-to-noise ratio drops, and the AI slowly lowers the priority of those content channels in favor of channels that consistently produce content you find valuable to consume. The key here is that the AI is ultimately accountable to me, overseen by me, controlled by me, fine-tuned on signals generated by me, etc. Imagine you had an army of 1 million personal executive assistants who could scour the world looking for information relevant to you, and give you a curated feed of useful information on an ongoing basis. That sounds like a pretty cool future to me. And if someone wants to spend their time squandering their wealth to accumulate enough hardware to run 1 trillion personal executive assistants to generate a bunch of valueless (or value-negative), coercive, uninteresting dribble on the internet? Cool. Let them squander their wealth. My executive assistants will filter that out for me.

rideontime 3y ago

It sounds like you want a computer to craft the most comfortable echo chamber possible for you to live in. I find that terribly depressing.

r3trohack3r 3y ago
I want the opposite. Personally, I want to be challenged regularly. I want AI's that are biased based on the direction I need to be challenged in the moment, which I would mark as "good." I want an AI that can challenge my assumptions as I work by surfacing relevant research papers that show I might be following the wrong path, which I would mark as "good." I want AIs that can adopt the personas of someone I'm reading that I disagree with, who has long been dead, so we can have a conversation over beers and sort out some of my personal philosophy. And I want all of that on my terms. To ground this desire in classical terms, I want to pick the books I read. I have a bookshelf full of books. I have books I agree with. I have books I disagree with. But I only have books that make me think. Being able to pick my own books doesn't mean I want to live in an echo chamber. It means I want to cultivate my own personal philosophy on my terms.
- StreetChief 3y ago
  An ai persona of someone dead will be filled with guesswork, fakes, and inaccuracies, just like today's generative ai. The technology is literally guessing at the missing peices, with no ability to verify accuracy. Enjoy conversations with people while they live, because the dead don't talk explicitly.