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Comment by ram4jesus | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to live in a world where I'm tricked into reading things that were not directly created by other humans; I don't want to consume AI-generated or AI-infused content. Day by day, we're getting siloed by technology alienating us from the essential things that make us humans, like having meaningful interactions with others.

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I feel the same way, but I was struggling to understand why. Could you explain why you would not want to read content generated by AI? If you’re reading an article from CNET, it’s probably for the information value and so therefore should be no different from that perspective. Are you looking for opinions or other color as well that the AI won’t be able to provide?

-- for me it feel like the final nail in the coffin - in this area - i think - the race to the bottom removed ability of human to say what they want - be provocative - inspiring - forward thinking - now even the people who are supposed to thoughtfully give word view - journalist + reporters - seem to be at: what a camp wants to hear - not what they want to say - feel like AI generated is maybe the final straw in this? - hard to explain but feels bad --

The problem with consuming AI generated content for the human reader in 2023, is that the content is more likely to be in the uncanny valley and requires the reader to exercise extreme vigilance to triple-check priors, facts and conclusions. There is no human author that can be held accountable for lies or misrepresentations of facts. There is only the language model immune to cancellation on Twitter.

When the content on the other end is written by a sapient human (or, eventually, an AGI), as much vigilance is not needed. Vigilance is always necessary, but the level required for parsing the output of language models is much higher.

This requirement is why publishers like CNET quietly mislead their audience and do not clearly mark each submission as AI generated. If it were not an abomination and an abuse of the reader to the gain of the publisher, then they would proudly claim to be doing it.

It depends. Purely factual things, like reporting on the markets and a majority of objective news could be AI-assisted. Opinion pieces and reporting on subjective material (or trying to shape narratives), that's a whole different game and a topic that society is not ready to even begin tackling yet.

There is no interaction to be had in the consumption of most material online, and any perceived interaction is surface-level as best.

Factual reporting always has background, though. The bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of the article will be descriptive context, like what $SUBJECT did in a previous similar situation. I don't think the current AIs are up to the task of figuring out which accessory bits of information are most pertinent, and in what order.

The thing is, ChatGPT can't generate text like a writer would. It can generate a lot of text like a minimum wage "copywriter" would though.

Were you reading that stuff before "AI"? Why?

Several years ago I realized that the answer to "why" for me was that I found it entertaining to read a lot of "news". When I examined this however I decided that for me it was largely a waste of time. The fact is a lot of what web sites (and print journalism before it) publish has never been more than entertainment thinly disguised as something important. I still scan the news sites every day to look for things that might actually be important information that I feel I should be aware, but otherwise I read a LOT less "news" than I used to.

I totally hear you.

The interesting thing about this moment in AI, it seems, it’s not how good the AIs are, but how bad the lower end of human work and ability is relative to the AI.

In this case, how much SEO-farm rubbish content has been put out by salary-slave-humans and is it really better than being tricked into reading AI content?

Two evils I know. But maybe there are deeper issues than the met existence of decent non-general-AIs …?

We've been reading articles edited by grammarly for many years on various websites all without realizing that we're consuming "AI-edited" content. I doubt AI-generated content will feel much different.

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