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It's the same idea as "lies spread faster than truth". Lies are often crafted to be especially juicy and salacious. Gossip has always been a problem; GenAI just

It's the same idea as "lies spread faster than truth". Lies are often crafted to be especially juicy and salacious. Gossip has always been a problem; GenAI just extends this problem to other media.

EGreg 1y ago
What is it that makes some people on HN pop up to always respond to any issue with AI with a version of "it was always this way, the problem always existed, AI does nothing fundamentally new". When it's clear that huge leaps in scale, coordination, and output quality accessible to anyone, are exactly what produces "new" use cases. Not to mention that swarms of agents are a fundamentally new thing, that doesn't require humans in the loop at all. Notice that this phenomenon didn't happen as much on HN for other technologies, e.g. when the iPhone came out, very few people said "well, this is nothing new, computers existed for a long time, this is just minituarizing it and unplugging it from the wall."
- supriyo-biswas 1y ago
  > when the iPhone came out, very few people said "well, this is nothing new, computers existed for a long time, this is just minituarizing it and unplugging it from the wall." This website is, of course, notorious for its Dropbox comment, so regrettably the viewpoint you speak of is rather common.
captainbland 1y ago
I think the other issue is that those lies can be pumped out at inhuman speeds, and specifically targeted at particular audiences automatically using existing online audience marketing tools. So you can end up in a situation where the lie not only spreads quickly, but different audiences are receiving specialised versions of that lie which makes it particularly compelling to them, generated by AI tools, and totally responsive to real world events and narratives at minimal cost (compared to hiring humans to do the same job) - and this might happen at a really fine grained level.
drweevil 1y ago
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” -- Jonathan Swift

It's the same idea as "lies spread faster than truth". Lies are often crafted to be especially juicy and salacious. Gossip has always been a problem; GenAI just extends this problem to other media.

EGreg 1y ago

What is it that makes some people on HN pop up to always respond to any issue with AI with a version of "it was always this way, the problem always existed, AI does nothing fundamentally new". When it's clear that huge leaps in scale, coordination, and output quality accessible to anyone, are exactly what produces "new" use cases. Not to mention that swarms of agents are a fundamentally new thing, that doesn't require humans in the loop at all. Notice that this phenomenon didn't happen as much on HN for other technologies, e.g. when the iPhone came out, very few people said "well, this is nothing new, computers existed for a long time, this is just minituarizing it and unplugging it from the wall."

supriyo-biswas 1y ago
> when the iPhone came out, very few people said "well, this is nothing new, computers existed for a long time, this is just minituarizing it and unplugging it from the wall." This website is, of course, notorious for its Dropbox comment, so regrettably the viewpoint you speak of is rather common.

captainbland 1y ago

I think the other issue is that those lies can be pumped out at inhuman speeds, and specifically targeted at particular audiences automatically using existing online audience marketing tools. So you can end up in a situation where the lie not only spreads quickly, but different audiences are receiving specialised versions of that lie which makes it particularly compelling to them, generated by AI tools, and totally responsive to real world events and narratives at minimal cost (compared to hiring humans to do the same job) - and this might happen at a really fine grained level.

drweevil 1y ago

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” -- Jonathan Swift