In a world of AI-generated trash, provably genuine human-made content will be more valuable than ever.
A human’s stamp of approval is what gives content value, not the labor of creating it.
We'll just become used to it and only a few people in HN will shout to the clouds.
Compare with organic food: is it true that non-organic food can be healthy? Sure! Then why do people prefer organic food? Because it's just not worth it for them to figure out which one is healthy/unhealthy.
Similarly, it's just not going to he worth the effort to figure out if some AI-generated content is genuine or trying to astroturf. If there will be a "certified human" badge, people will use that as a positive signal.
But, ultimately, I don't buy the idea that astroturfing is all bad. Or the opposite, that the lack thereof is necessarily good. I think bombarding with AI content can have possitive effects, like overwhelming human moderators who built echo chambers and ban wrongthink (e.g., Reddit). Or, it has the capacity for a small organization to compete with the likes of the NYTimes, or The Atlantic, etc which currently control the narrative.
Very shortly (and PoCs have been made already) AI will be able to trivially create social media presences, forum posts, and anything else that could be used to determine “humanness” at scale.
hmm I can already imagine future culture wars around this being dubbed discrimination...
I realize I'm replying to a 4-hour-old account and just wasting my time, but I gotta say that it's not possible for a person to verify the accuracy of every bit of information that they will consume, so it's important to seek out sources that provide the highest quality, most authoritative source material that's available. That means reading things like research papers. I realize that a much smaller percentage of Internet users read and discuss research papers and other authoritative source material nowadays (I miss Usenet) and it seems that this problem is only going to get worse.
I want a different future, one where there are no authoritative sources, one where a journalist's words has no more relevance or weight than anyone else's.
What I mean is, I believe one can be closer to the truth when exposed to all sorts of ideas and propaganda, than when one specific entity controls the flow.