6 ms·

In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomi

In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

Macha 4mo ago
Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that
Qhemlomo 4mo ago
I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society. I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once. Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.
- panzi 4mo ago
  It's the wrong way around. If we get AGI (or any well working AI) before we abandon capitalism it's going to be a huge disaster. A handful of even richer even more powerful very greedy people will have all the wealth and everyone else will have nothing. I mean, there was a WW3 in Star Trek, so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?
  - Qhemlomo 4mo ago
    If AI takes over to slowly, we might play the boiling game aka we don't realize that the water gets warmer and warmer until we boil. But lets be honest, i don't know that, you don't either. But if a critical mass is reached, faster, we might need to actually solve this problem instead of migrating to a very dystopian future. Stoping is not an option i think. Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google <<< they ahve so much money and so much to loose. And then we have USA vs. China.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    > so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway? It was (aside from first contact, and the subsequent development of the replicator which enabled the post scarcity economy). The federation was built from the war, not after it. Suffering is what made the utopia possible, and if ever get to the point of nearing a post scarcity economy, we are likely to experience the same. Progress is built on catastrophe. Whether or not you call it progress depends on if you are born later after the catastrophe and can look back and call it progress, or if you lived through the suffering without seeing the end result.
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    Thankfully there's nothing to suggest that LLMs will ever bring us AGI (or any well working AI)
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once. While Star Trek is fiction, it's probably a good idea to understand the history of how the ST utopia came about, at the cost of a third of the worlds population and decades of suffering. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III
  - tintor 4mo ago
    "World War III was the last of Earth's three world wars, lasting from approximately 2026 to 2053."
DaveZale 4mo ago
I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.
- woah 4mo ago
  Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not
boelboel 4mo ago
A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago
  [dead]
- smith7018 4mo ago
  Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo
  - boelboel 4mo ago
    You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse. I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.
- whstl 4mo ago
  Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.
- throwaway85825 4mo ago
  There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.
- breezybottom 4mo ago
  It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.
- FabCH 4mo ago
  The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world. And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ge96 4mo ago
    Hard to beat shrimp jesus
  - hk__2 4mo ago
    > The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.
  - tempestn 4mo ago
    I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.
qurren 4mo ago
On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more. I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.
- larodi 4mo ago
  Indeed, people seem to try to engage more around me. May be generational, but it can definitely be felt. The internet of algorithmic media may experience a downfall nobody saw coming.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
  I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.
  - qurren 4mo ago
    I've also more or less stopped posting my photography on Instagram because (1) my Instagram feed is now full of AI images getting 10000 likes while I get 100; if nobody sees what I post it's not worth posting (2) people instead accuse my images of being AI even though I took painstaking effort to get to interesting actual places in the world during interesting weather (just after storms, etc.) and lighting, and this is incredibly discouraging.
    - queenkjuul 4mo ago
      It's probably AI accounts accusing you of AI
- joquarky 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
stackghost 4mo ago
>In hindsight, they were entirely correct. Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up. Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me. Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.
root-parent 4mo ago
Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

Macha 4mo ago

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

Qhemlomo 4mo ago

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society. I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once. Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

panzi 4mo ago
It's the wrong way around. If we get AGI (or any well working AI) before we abandon capitalism it's going to be a huge disaster. A handful of even richer even more powerful very greedy people will have all the wealth and everyone else will have nothing. I mean, there was a WW3 in Star Trek, so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?
- Qhemlomo 4mo ago
  If AI takes over to slowly, we might play the boiling game aka we don't realize that the water gets warmer and warmer until we boil. But lets be honest, i don't know that, you don't either. But if a critical mass is reached, faster, we might need to actually solve this problem instead of migrating to a very dystopian future. Stoping is not an option i think. Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google <<< they ahve so much money and so much to loose. And then we have USA vs. China.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  > so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway? It was (aside from first contact, and the subsequent development of the replicator which enabled the post scarcity economy). The federation was built from the war, not after it. Suffering is what made the utopia possible, and if ever get to the point of nearing a post scarcity economy, we are likely to experience the same. Progress is built on catastrophe. Whether or not you call it progress depends on if you are born later after the catastrophe and can look back and call it progress, or if you lived through the suffering without seeing the end result.
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Thankfully there's nothing to suggest that LLMs will ever bring us AGI (or any well working AI)
pixl97 4mo ago
>I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once. While Star Trek is fiction, it's probably a good idea to understand the history of how the ST utopia came about, at the cost of a third of the worlds population and decades of suffering. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III
- tintor 4mo ago
  "World War III was the last of Earth's three world wars, lasting from approximately 2026 to 2053."

DaveZale 4mo ago

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

woah 4mo ago
Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

boelboel 4mo ago

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

redsocksfan45 4mo ago
[dead]
smith7018 4mo ago
Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo
- boelboel 4mo ago
  You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse. I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.
whstl 4mo ago
Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.
throwaway85825 4mo ago
There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

breezybottom 4mo ago
It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.
FabCH 4mo ago
The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world. And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ge96 4mo ago
  Hard to beat shrimp jesus
- hk__2 4mo ago
  > The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.
- tempestn 4mo ago
  I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.

qurren 4mo ago

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more. I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

larodi 4mo ago
Indeed, people seem to try to engage more around me. May be generational, but it can definitely be felt. The internet of algorithmic media may experience a downfall nobody saw coming.
applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.
- qurren 4mo ago
  I've also more or less stopped posting my photography on Instagram because (1) my Instagram feed is now full of AI images getting 10000 likes while I get 100; if nobody sees what I post it's not worth posting (2) people instead accuse my images of being AI even though I took painstaking effort to get to interesting actual places in the world during interesting weather (just after storms, etc.) and lighting, and this is incredibly discouraging.
  - queenkjuul 4mo ago
    It's probably AI accounts accusing you of AI
joquarky 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

stackghost 4mo ago

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct. Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up. Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me. Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.

root-parent 4mo ago

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.