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This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not th

This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content. Why would we believe anything different of AI? The only way it won't happen is if we decide we don't want it, instead of accepting it as inevitable. And well, the article is ostensibly about AI, but then at the end: > The investors aren’t just doing this to be nice. Someone is going to expect returns on this huge gamble at some point. > ... > The LLM providers aren’t librarians providing a public service. They’re businesses that have to find a way to earn a ridiculous amount of money for a huge number of big investors, and capitalism does not have builtin morals. Those are the things that need to change. They have nothing to do with AI. AI is a symptom of a broken socioeconomic system that allows a small (not "huge" in the scheme of things) number of people to "gamble" and then attempt to rig the table so their gamble succeeds. AI is a cute bunny rabbit and our runaway-inequality-based socioeconomic system is the vat of toxic waste that turned that innocent little bunny into a ravening mutant. Yes, it's bad and needs to be killed, but we'll just be overrun by a million more like it if we don't find a way to lock away that toxic waste.

itzjacki 1y ago
> They have nothing to do with AI. Not inherently, but I think LLM services (and maybe other AI based stuff) are corruptible in a much more dangerous way than the things our socioeconomic system has corrupted so far. Having companies pay to end up on the top of the search engine pile is one thing, but being able to weave commerciality into what are effectively conversations between vulnerable users and an entity they trust is a whole other level of terrible.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  I'm not so sure. We've commercialized medicine, housing, music, you name it. It is that process of corruption that is at issue here. If we had ended it 10 or 20 years ago we wouldn't have AI in the sense we have it now (and that would be a good thing).
slfnflctd 1y ago
> Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process. I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of the woodwork. > lock away that toxic waste The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  > Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process. Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something. > The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this. I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.

itzjacki 1y ago

> They have nothing to do with AI. Not inherently, but I think LLM services (and maybe other AI based stuff) are corruptible in a much more dangerous way than the things our socioeconomic system has corrupted so far. Having companies pay to end up on the top of the search engine pile is one thing, but being able to weave commerciality into what are effectively conversations between vulnerable users and an entity they trust is a whole other level of terrible.

BrenBarn 1y ago
I'm not so sure. We've commercialized medicine, housing, music, you name it. It is that process of corruption that is at issue here. If we had ended it 10 or 20 years ago we wouldn't have AI in the sense we have it now (and that would be a good thing).

slfnflctd 1y ago

> Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process. I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of the woodwork. > lock away that toxic waste The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.

BrenBarn 1y ago
> Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process. Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something. > The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this. I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.