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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge problem with mass media. Our brains know that certain content is useless for us yet we still find them appealing. That's why algorithmic content recommendations won't be able to solve the problem, only generative AI will. This will turn our logical brains from consumers to producers, and we'll be able to communicate to the AI the exact content that we want to see and not just be forced to accept the clickbait that's on the market.

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If someone consumes what you call useless content, why would they use AI to produce anything else? It's not as if there isn't useful content around, already.

Just referring to entertainment (ie not educational videos), the clickbait social media entertainment is easier to consume and is readily recommended, you know you have at least a little bit of interest in it. It just tends to be lower quality entertainment than what you know is possible. Long form entertainment is higher investment and higher risk in that if you don't like it, there's more energy/time expended.

So there's a choice between low risk entertainment that caps out at like 20% of the value of what your favorite thing is, and higher risk entertainment that very well could still be terrible but might have a chance of being good.

AI bridges that gap to de-risk the high investment entertainment so you no longer have to make that choice.

This prompt->generate->tweak prompt loop provided by 'ai' is far more addictive and malign than any existing clickbait. The companies deploying this technology will make fabulous gains at the expense of the consumers who will ultimately waste their entire lives iteratively 'producing' nothing of value.

> Our brains know that certain content is useless for us yet we still find them appealing.

And then after watching we think: what a waste of time!

So perhaps what we need is an algorithm (AI?) to compute for us if we will like any given piece of content. I.e., the recommendation algorithm should be under /our/ control, not theirs.

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