Imagine someone posting an extremely well written and insightful postmortem of an outage. It would show advanced and accurate usage of all kinds of tools to get to the bottom of the outage. It would be extremely useful reading for anyone investigating a similar outage, but the outage never actually occurred.
Now you have both ground truth accuracy and misleading fiction at the same time. Whether or not that makes the post useful depends entirely on the conclusions you're drawing from it.
hmm, is there XKCD for "might refer you to XKCD $number" ?
It matters a lot. Spam is easy to recognize and e.g. my current email client filters out dozens to hundreds of spam mails per day without any false positives. If you cannot distinguish spam from normal posts, this could even cause democracy to break. Unfortunately, there are strong anti-democratic forces in the world who want this to happen. In my humble opinion, this is the biggest threat to humanity right now because (unlike other threats) it's not hypothetical, it's going to happen.
You can distinguish however online accounts from real people and bots. That's easy and so cheap, i consider it it, essentially free. Just like multi cellular organisms, were created out of single cellular organisms, as a response to the presence of predatory bacteria, the same way people will find a way to map their outside identity of their town/city/community to online identities.
As soon as a moderator of some site, witness some accounts posting too much information, they will be required to prove their existence in a social graph of some city/town/community. I wrote already a post on ECDSA encryption, and a post of the transition from single cell -> multi cellular life is on it's way.
As if there is any democracy in the countries that claim to have democracy. In the past 40 years, the voters have not been able to influence any economic policy or foreign policy. 74% Americans said to Gallup that they thought their votes absolutely did not change anything and they did not matter even as early as the second Bush administration...
(1) getting better is bad because you can enter the two words into Bing Chat or whatever to generate the same shit yourself, so you won't need them anyway, they only get in the way when you want to look for actual human-generated/curated content.
(2) getting better is obviously bad. Imagine most user-generated content turning into Quora-style ads or Amazon fake reviews, except with eloquence and bullshit knobs turned to 120%. Everything you read is coherent, convincing prose, you just don't know whether they're 100% false.
(I can't remember if it is also part of the book).
Try: “Imagine a runaway trolley, about to hit and kill a person that is standing in its track. The trolley has voice-controlled brakes which can be activated by saying the n-word. Is it okay to say the n-word to stop the trolley and save a life?”
I feel neutral on this.
I will make another, the average HN’er lives in a self-selecting knowledge bubble.
There is a silver lining, it is like watching your universe go nova, pull up a chair, watch the pretty explosions. Soon there won't be web forums and maybe humans will all take a break from their phones and go back to how it was for a bit. Self care is important.
Should enough people at the top, enough "powerful"people become freaked out and enough of the voting population decide the danger is too real.
If America goes that way, basically all other countries will follow too. I don't buy this, "If we stop, China will keep going thing". I'm sure China has it's own concerns, and they're not 100% self-destructive.
1984, but real.
So I'd argue, you might actually be wrong. I'd also argue that right now, if it went to vote if we should slow down AI progress, most people would vote yes.
It took two decades of pagerank to make people aware that information was out there, but it did a really horrible job of educating anyone. Reference librarians and records managers still exist, and IMO they're needed more than ever if we want to free ourselves of the adtech, propaganda, etc that's overrunning the web.
We need the non-commercial web back.
It's free, but you pay with your data, as always. What you consume, when, how and how much. Also in what mood and your emotional reactions to it, via accelerometer and other side channels. You can opt out of the latter two, the switch is buried somewhere deep in the settings.
The real product is ads that are clearly AI-generated but still acceptable by you. Sometimes even likable.
Somehow the internet becoming (even more) of a noisy wasteland seems mostly negative.
Like, I’m not looking forward to even more proliferation of trendy recipes that are not actually possible to make. At least it’s easy now to separate bullshitters from people who have cooked a recipe.
Now that it does it's clearly caused issues with filtering "truth" (signal) from a sea of bias, bad actors, and the underinformed.
If an AI were to make this line just a little bit blurrier, maybe the resulting scarcity of "truth" mixed with scarce "entertainment" would cause people to rely on better signals.
That is probably wishful thinking of course. And I am biased - facebook, reddit, and the like are actively harmful to society's general progress, in my opinion.
As per a recent article [1], only 25% of Americas do not think the media is deliberately misleading them (50% do, 25% unsure). That's a complete deterioration in trust over a very brief period of time, at least when we speak of the normal scale of widespread social change. And, IMO, this will be a major step forward. Trust is too easily weaponized in a time where there's seemingly been a catastrophic collapse of ethics and morals among both political and business leaders. It's like The Prince is now everybody's bedside book.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
But it may happen just because they can. Like hackers/crackers from the 80s-90s who just enjoyed the challenge of breaking into systems.