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Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if I'm starting to get that old person "new things are scary" instinct or if my gut level of fear about the implications of these things is warranted.

As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse. We're already drowning in ad dominated cynical soulless computer generated search results. Are all online forums going to end up being drowned out by cynical pumped out super cheap to produce simulacrums of creative content now too?

If I want people to buy more Triscuts next year what's stopping me from writing a bunch of prompts to insert subtle marketing cues to buy Triscuts with entire fake ecosystems of users, fan art, radio call ins, user stories, etc in like every niche community in existence and flooding them with soulless fake interaction?

That exists to a certain extent already, but I don't see how this stuff won't make it way easier, way more effective, and way more widespread.

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My YouTube feed is currently filled with videos of whitehats hacking into Indian scam call centers.

Most of the time, the giveaway is the callers' Indian accent. If you could simply type into a box and speak with an American accent, it would be really hard to get caught.

We're opening a pandora's box here if I'm honest. I'm hardly one for pro-regulation, but good God, we're playing with things here that can really hurt us down the line.

And here I thought the giveaway was just them trying to blatantly scam you.

> If you could simply type into a box and speak with an American accent, it would be really hard to get caught.

Not really. If they say "kindly do something", they are Indian scammers.

Yes, however if that were a problem in the scenario above, I'm pretty sure LLMs could fix that as well.

They're already very good at translation today, it stands to reason that they could do the needful when it comes to turning regional English into American English. Or Bri'ish English, if that's the accent you want your TTS model to have.

"Hey chatGPT, write a short script convincing someone that I'm from a small town in America"

There are a lot of words and phrases that indicate that you are speaking Indian English, separate from the accent. Using "learning" as a noun is a very common one in tech.

I'm sure that could be corrected by even a very basic language model

If you can use AI to create a fake voice, you can also use AI to create a prompt for the voice

>As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse.

My sentiments exactly. I think it's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. I'm reminded of the quote "everything has its pleasure and its price". The more expensive things are to produce, the the less of it there will be, but what is produced will be higher quality across the board. The less expensive it becomes to produce, the more of it will be, and the aggregate quality will be lower.

It's not always a bad thing, but the downsides are plain to see when you look at the amount of spam and low-effort content out there. That said, we've all massively enjoyed the upsides too, so it's a balancing act. I think where things were at before the recent wave generative AI tools was perhaps right on the sweet spot of "it's democratized enough that anyone can have a go, but still requires effort and a degree of talent to do well". The knowledge (and entertainment) I've been able to access thanks for randoms on YouTube is pretty incredible, and I sort of always just accepted the avalanche of spam and clickbait that came with it.

These new tools potentially push that effort/reward ratio to the point where the signal/noise ratio simply gets too high. Of course the "make money online" community is all over this stuff and today I watched a video of a guy showing how you could supposedly clone courses on Udemy using ChatGPT and other tools etc. The problem is the "course" would literally consist of generic advice, high-level information on a particular topic that suffices only as a very surface level introduction and isn't enough to help you build any functional skills in that domain, so it's effectively useless. The only person it's not useless to is him and as he would pocket a cool $5-ish per sale. It was somewhat sad and somewhat sick to hear him cackling away about being able to con people out of money while passing himself off as an expert.

And yet, it's entirely what I would expect would happen.

>The knowledge (and entertainment) I've been able to access thanks for randoms on YouTube is pretty incredible, and I sort of always just accepted the avalanche of spam and clickbait that came with it.

Adblockers are amazing

Are there "influencer" blockers?

youtube lets you tell them channels you don't want recommended... I don't know how well it works, I usually just say I'm not interested in a single video

I suppose the optimistic view--such as it is--is that there is already a vast amount of low quality content out there that was created for pennies and plastered with ads and/or hoping someone will pay a modest amount. So I'm not sure that things like ChatGPT make things that much worse than they already are--and we can mostly live with things today. The pessimistic view of course is a whole new cohort of grifters decide to give it a run whether they ultimately make money or not.

I agree with this completely. Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience. People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences.

The most dangerous aspect of this is that each step seems relatively harmless: right now, ChatGPT and DALL-E are amusements, but each small step is building a monstrous and as you say, soulless machine that overloads us so much that we will forget what it's like to even be human.

I firmly believe (and I have given this a lot of thought) that technology is ultimately evil, and that tech companies are trading short term gain of enormous wealth for the very essence of humanity, preying upon the basic instincts of individuals who are also trading their personal worth for convenience.

If I could have one single wish fulfilled in this world, it would be that every single human being gain a natural and instinctual revulsion for advanced technology. If someone asked me what disease was the worst that ever plagued humanity, it would not be smallpox or the flu or COVID, it would be the tech company.

> If I could have one single wish fulfilled in this world, it would be that every single human being gain a natural and instinctual revulsion for advanced technology. If someone asked me what disease was the worst that ever plagued humanity, it would not be smallpox or the flu or COVID, it would be the tech company.

Time to go live in a cabin in the woods and go write your manifesto on a typewriter...

Typewriter? You heathen! It must be chiseled into the cave wall with a bone.

Writing?! Surely not...

Ah yes... the oral tradition. How could I forget?

All this focus on writing things down has weakened your memory!

Why are you on a forum called Hacker News if you hate technology so much?

It's surprisingly on brand for this place.

I don't hate all technology. Rather, I advocate a specific approach to technology, which is a cautious one. Such an approach is antithetical to the classic tech company, and so I hate the approach.

I don't believe all technology is bad. Rather, I believe that all technology needs to be handled in a specific way so that it does not overwhelm us. Though, I do believe that some technology is fundamentally evil.

I would consider myself a hacker, but I do not believe in the capitalistic approach to technology advancement for the sake of short-term profit. I think technology can be used wisely and I do not believe we are doing so.

In fact, I started out as a mathematician and programmer and I still appreciate the beauty of those fields, but I think we need to treat STEM knowledge like we treat knives: useful but dangerous.

I would have died long ago without modern technology, and the many surgeries I have needed. It's hard to take your argument seriously when I consider the consequences of what you're advocating for.

Yeah but you have to balance the positives and negatives. Sure you being alive is all very well, but sometimes GP has to overhear teenagers talking about TikTok, and that is unacceptable.

> Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience. People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences.

I went to the mall today and you can tell malls are dying. I lived in a small town where the mall died and it had a zombie like existence a long time before it finally cratered. The mall here in this larger town has that feeling. I also thought about how nice it is to go to the mall just to be out among people. The same is true of the downtown. If the endgame is for everyone to stay home and shop online that's going to be a very soulless existence.

I never went to malls to socialize.

Sometimes circumstances mean that going to a mall is the only way some folk can get to meet their fellow human beings. And that doesn't mean it doesn't have other advantages such as conversing with people one might not normally come across.

Or don't shop at all and use that extra time to walk with friends in nature. Or when you really do need to shop, avoid the commute and use that extra time to spend with friends in nature. Being forced to be around strangers to get chores done doesn't put soul into my life.

I also avoid laundromats and do laundry at home and it doesn't feel soulless.

There's no lack of revolutionary tech that has made life overall better with higher quality.

Even like, a bic light is so much better quality than a flint and steel or fire sticks.

Smart phones are fantastic quality computers that enable cool stuff like meeting up with friends without first having to leave a note at their house some amount of time beforehand

Dishwashers and laundry machines and modern quality clothing let you avoid spending half your waking hours cleaning stuff, keeping us healthier, and enabling feminism

Electricity lets us stay awake at night without smoke inhalation from candles and fireplaces, with less likelihood of burning the house down, and advanced tech in housing standards make sure that when the building does catch fire, you'll be able to get out safely

Advancements in technology are mostly quite good, and improve both quality and convenience

> Dishwashers and laundry machines

> enabling feminism

Thats all it took?

So if theres no electricity - its back to square one?

Seems like for every advantage you list there's also a disadvantage.

> Even like, a bic light is so much better quality than a flint and steel or fire sticks.

And is part of the disposable society creating immense amounts of waste.

> Smart phones are fantastic quality computers that enable cool stuff like meeting up with friends without first having to leave a note at their house some amount of time beforehand

Smartphones reduce the quality of social interaction. People often check them when they should be paying attention to their friend, and they make cancelling last-minute easier thereby making people more flaky.

> Dishwashers and laundry machines and modern quality clothing let you avoid spending half your waking hours cleaning stuff, keeping us healthier, and enabling feminism

It's hard to argue with you there, though I suspect that all these "time-saving" inventions also make it more likely that we will spend more time on other things like more work and on electronic devices.

> Electricity lets us stay awake at night without smoke inhalation from candles and fireplaces, with less likelihood of burning the house down, and advanced tech in housing standards make sure that when the building does catch fire, you'll be able to get out safely

And electricity has also made it easier to stay awake at night, staying up later and reducing the quality of sleep. Hundreds of people get worse sleep by being exposed to devices at night. I think it's actually nice to wind down activities when the sun goes down though obviously that is not as easy in the latitudes closer to the pole.

Basically, I think there are a lot of hidden dangers that people accept because in the short term they don't realize that technology makes life less fulfilling.

I think what gets lost in these doom and gloom predictions is that there is a large healthy portion of young adults that do not engage in internet forums or social media.

It is perfectly viable in the modern day, to work a job, have passionate hobbies, regularly meet for social events, volunteer, etc and spend minimal to zero time engaging on the internet, besides pragmatic things like map directions

And mind-boggling you criticize and demonize technology on a forum about technology all while not only being on the internet but also using electricity, a computer, and certainty surrounded by gadgets and other amenities of modern life.

Nature is SHIT, that is why people created technology. There is nothing preventing you from going to the middle of nowhere and reject modernity, no one is forcing you, but you are that because you wanted and liked it. You talk people should have an "instinctual revulsion" towards technology, but not even you yourself has this reaction towards technology because it is a stupid idea that not even luddites like you commit to it.

If anything the technology we have nowadays is not even 0,01% of what we should have. We should have the technology to make any movie anyone ever wanted to see in a blink of an eye, all done in the best quality ever imagined. We should have the power to build a Dyson Sphere around the sun to harness its energy. We should be able to construct fully immersive virtual reality, like San Junipero from the Black Mirror's episode, we should have the power extend human life indefinitely.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Why are you so hostile? What sense does it make, to attack him because he does not already have, what he is wishing for?

Nature is not "SHIT", for whatever that should mean. Neither the blanket statement "Technology is evil" nor "Nature is shit" make sense. We are humans. We need nature - it is what we evolved to and our technology is not able to replace it without loss. Specific technology is great to overcome existential limitations, but most technology is not.

Sure, there is great technology out there that improves our lives. On the other hand, there is so much technology that makes our lives worse (because of how it is used: e.g., by being of advantage to few people, while being bad for everyone else or by helping individuals now but having severe effects lateron), it can hardly be ignored, that a better process for selection or containment of technology would be necessary to improve everybodies life. But mankind is bad at forgoing.

Current technology seems to be great at generating convenience and excitement. And the examples you mention (movies, infinite energy, VR and eternal life) feel like the wishes for more excitement of a teenager (and this is not meant condescending), but life is so much more than excitement. Excitement is just the cherry on top. I'd rather see more tech that is wholesome - but that area seems to be left to nature.

> And mind-boggling you criticize and demonize technology on a forum about technology all while not only being on the internet but also using electricity, a computer, and certainty surrounded by gadgets and other amenities of modern life.

I don't demonize all technology. There must be an optimum somewhere, and I would like to engage in open discourse in order to understand where that optimum is. I believe advanced AI takes us away from the optimum.

Extending human life indefinitely is a terrible idea. We have a natural lifespan and we need to function within it. We should not proceed towards being saturated in technology as that will surely destroy the natural life on this planet.

I think ,it's not technology that's real problem ,it's that loss of ethics in domain of knowledge ,since industrial and scientific revolution ,we put more emphasis on reductionism and objectification ,even human are being objectified ,this disease of over rationalism plaguing to every domains of knowledge ,I think it's always been constant battle of rationalism vs romantics .

May I suggest you research the proper way to format commas?

I know, proper form is a skill that has been lost with the advent of social media.

I posit that the mastery of orthography is a precondition to be taken seriously even today.

i think english just isnt their native language, this seems pretty snarky.

In what language do you put a space before comma but not after? Even without that the usage is puzzling enough to make me genuinely curious what their native tongue is. It almost reads like a haiku.

Sorry ,English isn't my native language ,thanks for the feedback anyway ,I will sure consider researching.

>I firmly believe (and I have given this a lot of thought) that technology is ultimately evil, and that tech companies are trading short term gain of enormous wealth for the very essence of humanity, preying upon the basic instincts of individuals who are also trading their personal worth for convenience.

I've more or less come to a pretty similar conclusion. I wouldn't characterize it as evil per se, but it's a fools errand at best. My line of thinking goes somewhat like this - before the Neolithic revolution humans had an extremely small set of problems. The main problem being "what am I going to eat?", and to a large degree, life must have revolved around this problem almost entirely. There weren't that many people, there weren't that many problems, we somehow persisted in that state for hundreds of thousands of years with literally nothing to write home about. Any advance in technology has literally been trading one problem for at least three more. Now there are loads of problems, loads more people, and the standard approach to solving all the problems is to invent new technologies, which in practice seem to actually exacerbate the problems. So, I just sort of view the current state of things as "somewhere around the turn of the Neolithic Revolution we took a wrong turn, and it has widely been regarded as a bad move."

It's a weird sort of defeatist, nihilistic, melancholy worldview, but to be honest, I don't think we're wrong. I mean... what's the endgame of technology?

I would put the optimal state around native American level of technology. At least some sense of medicine and first aid, food is largely figured out, but no real oppressive technologies figured out yet.

>but no real oppressive technologies figured out yet

And there-in lies the arms race, for if you figure out an oppressive technology, you can oppress people with it who don't have the means to resist.

Hmm... the evil argument starts to make more sense.

> Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience.

Technology evolves. Even if it may start with some low quality aspects, it doesn't need to stay that way.

> People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences.

Which is just different communication, not better, nor worse in general. Of course this kinda sucks for people who do not know the new communication-code well enough. But people do evolve communication to replace relevant missing parts. Body language for example was mostly replaced with emojis and memes, which can be better, or worse.

> we will forget what it's like to even be human.

You can't forget what you are. You are you everyday, ever minute, every second of your existence. What you speak about is people having a different culture from the one you know and understand. That's something completely different.

> technology is ultimately evil

Technology is a tool, is can't be evil or good. It's up to the users how they handle it.

> Which is just different communication, not better, nor worse in general.

That is where we disagree fundamentally. I do posit that the communication is actually absolutely and unequivocally worse.

> Technology is a tool, is can't be evil or good. It's up to the users how they handle it.

I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I believe evil is roughly equivalent to the inevitability of bringing about evil, and I believe AI falls under such a classification.

> technology is ultimately evil

If we stop pursuing technological progress, we'll never be able to reach humanity's true potential. If we keep pursuing technological progress, those futures are still possible. We need to be wiser and mature about the way we pursue it but we still need to pursue it.

But at the same time, there are tons of positive uses for things like this too. Imagine being a creator who wants to share their interests with the world, but hates their own voice or doesn't have the confidence to speak on camera. You could make a lot of people's lives better by creating content for YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, etc, but you wouldn't be brave enough to otherwise.

Something like this could be incredible for those people. A natural sounding alternative to text to speech for people who dislike how they sound.

And it could also be used to anonymise people in documentaries about serious topics (like say, organised crime) without actors, letting people bring the atrocities of said folks to light without need to trust others or the risk of being found out.

Other examples could include vTubers, artists creating characters for TV shows, films and video games, etc.

All technology can be abused, and sadly with how humanity acts, like will by a small percentage of the population. But for every person abusing it for dubious purposes, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of others who can make the world better with it.

I think a great tool for this would be a cross over voice changer AI, so you could still speak naturally but then sound like the model voice, that way it would be a little less soulless.

Honestly, that would be incredible for so many purposes! vTubers and amateur media creators would love to be able to just speak and have it translated into their voice of their characters in a more natural way!

Would also be an interesting one for theme parks, since it could led the costumed characters speak in the voices of the relevant characters rather than remaining silent, which would add a lot to the sense of immersion there too. (something like the website on the other hand could let the animatronics, CGI characters and others hold conversations with guests too, which would also be neat)

Yes, I’m sure there are many positive uses as well, I just have a hard time seeing how that’s not going to be outweighed by the bad given the current environment. There’s going to need to be some sort of social/cultural/technological adaptation when the negative starts hitting with force to curb it towards positive uses. People need to start thinking about mitigation strategies now.

I am with you on this one. What defines us as a people is the ability to enjoy shared social experiences. The more tailored and personalized an experience becomes the more it isolates us. We don't (at least I am my social circle) speak about TikTok's the way we speak about YouTube videos.

But more importantly, boredom triggers innovation. As we are consuming ourselves to death, we might lose the ability to truly create. Maybe that's why the last 20 years of content feel quite generic and sterile.

I think we already have a lot of soulless human generated search results.

I think there will be need for a greater level of filtering and curation yes, but I see it as an opportunity both for creators and curators.

The barriers to entry for media creation will go down, but with saturation also the already low margins of profit will get worse.

Also, AI will do the filtering, not just blocking uninteresting content, but actually removing known and uninteresting information from content.

I'm not confident that ai will ever catch up with scams for new scammer tactics.

we'll go back to the old way of consuming media - recommended by friends, vetted by known curators.

> As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse.

Eh. I’ll take a MAYBE over the past 10 years or more of the human driven social media manipulations and scams and poison. We’ve made almost literally fucking nothing of value in a decade. It’s been ads, Ponzi schemes, and a race to the bottom of tolerance.

I’ll take the democratization of content. Knowing that it will allow the good and the bad.

… so how it different from the radio or TV or “influencers” now? I have limited time to consume media and am not going to be less picky when it gets easier for people to make garbage.

There was some innovation but 2010-2020 had some dead air as investors lavished ponzi scheme SaaS companies with cash and big firms poured the profits of early internet into VR, AR, AI, drones, self-driving, etc.

The last year and a half things are starting to pop off. OpenAI, SpaceX, Comma, Helion, many more…that doomer “everything sucks and is collapsing” mentality is on the way out in my opinion. The time for talk is over and it’s time to build, or so they say.

I’m hopeful that, as with most apocalypse-capable technologies, humans will adapt and overcome.

Humans will be different on the other side of this coming wave of simulation indistinguishable from reality, but we’ll be okay.

It’ll suck living through the transition though. Not looking forward to the crap tsunami on the horizon.

But as a species, we’ll adapt and survive as always.

Assuming the internet will soon mostly be generated content, and assuming this content is dull and soulless as you describe it, I'm wondering if it's not going to make the real world and interactions in person more interesting?

I could do with cutting my screen time and the best way to do that might be to make everything boring.

> to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse

Worse? We already have 8 billion people a significant part of whom are pumping sterile soulless content.

If anything it will heat up the competition in the creativity field and allow truly creative things to proliferate.

I'm optimistic. I think the progress in AI will make people more aware where the soul really is, as they will learn to distinguish. I think the human spirit will be faster in learning to recognize that which is not really interesting than AI will be able to make improvements faking it.

The ideal use case is someone who wants to be an influencer, but is neither pretty, intelligent, nor has a good voice, could simply use face filters, GPT text, and a voice filter to make themselves sound and look beautiful.

I don't follow influencers but my guess is that they already do this, at least they use filters. If someone can use all these tools to gain considerable amount of fame and fortune, is (s)he really not intelligent? Of course, all these online personas will be lies, even bigger lies than today but I don't think it really matters. I'd argue that most people following these contents are not looking for reality.

I want to agree with you, but I have to admit I hate most human narrators of audiobooks. I would actually much prefer this company‘s voices to most of the humans reading books that I have encountered.

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