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Comment by mostlysimilar | Hacker News Reader

Who could have guessed giving away all of our data to corporations wholly focused on profit would be a bad thing?

If the end result is ai chat agents that anyone in the world can access for free, that seems like an absolutely wonderful thing

That's wishful thinking though.

That said, AI tech is or is quickly becoming freely accessible; unless they have a USP, free / homemade versions will end up competing with the paid services, and it's hard to compete with free.

If the companies making those agents are paying top dollar for training data then the product isn't going to be truly free, at best it will be "free" with caveats. Do you want to use an AI agent which is fine-tuned according to the wishes of the top bidding advertisers? Because that's probably the first thing they'll try to make "free" chatbots actually turn a profit.

The future is having your own personal AI assistant, completely free of charge, which is suspiciously eager to recommend shopping at Temu and eating at McDonalds.

As Yuval Harari suggests the AI economy will move away from money and man power. What will be important are control over resources and their distribution. These big companies won't care about a number in some database. They won't care about selling stuff to you, maybe in the midterm but not in the long run.

that sounds good until you realize that money is just an abstraction of resources.

Because the economy functions better when decoupled and provides autonomy in current paradigm. Consider a future when those in power, rich don't depend on majority for food, transportation and security or services then they don't have the need to convince you to work for them.

What makes you think that will be the end result?

It's already the case, there are free models that were trained on this data

What's publicly and easily available for free is not good, so we're stealing labor and replacing it with worse labor.

We can be forgiven for not having foreseen how social media would be used against us, connecting the world sounded like a cool idea on the surface. But having gone through that there's no excuse to be naive and simplistic about AI.

What harm has been inflicted upon you directly as a result?

I imagine that probably /can/ name direct harms but why does someone need to have been directly harmed for them to be concerned about it/think it's bad? I've never been murdered but that's hardly reason for me to be okay with murder.

That's the beauty of the system we have. Your data can be routinely used against you and you'll never be told about it.

Your health insurance company can buy up records from a data broker that show you've been spending 6% more time at fast food restaurants compared to last year and they can use that to raise your rates, but they'll never tell you that was the reason, you'll just have a higher bill than before

An employer can pass you over for a job you've applied to because you wrote something on a social media site 12 years ago that offended their political ideology, but you'll never know that was why, you'll just never get a call back.

If you get arrested, you could be denied bail because some AI decided you were a flight risk or more likely to reoffend if released, but no one will be able to tell you what made the AI decide that and you may not even be told an AI was used to make that choice.

As our lives become increasingly interconnected and recorded and analyzed it becomes extremely difficult for you to be aware of how or why your data is impacting your life, but it would be a huge mistake to assume that it isn't.

The funny thing about insurance is that as it becomes perfect at assessing risk, it becomes worthless.

Oh, you’re about to have a $x claim this year, your premium is $x + y% admin fee.

Just self insure and save yourself the y%.

That's like asking: "What harm has been inflicted upon you, individually and directly by some parts-per-million of a cancer-promoting chemical dumped in the town's water supply over the last twenty years?"

The worst downsides of social media weren't apparent or even necessarily occurring yet until we were well into it by more than just the first few years.

> for free

Even if a future service doesn't have an obvious charge or subscription, just because you don't recognize how you're being exploited doesn't mean it's truly "free."

There's a reason advertising exists as an industry at all, let alone a global trillion-dollar one. Today's "free" is actually paid for by exploiting user attention and attempting to hack your brain--sometimes in ways that are culturally accepted due to long tradition of use, sometimes in new disturbing ones.

Yes. If a thing is being paid by the collection of user data (which is what advertising involves in these sorts of use cases), then it's not free in any meaningful sense. You're still paying, just using a different medium of exchange.

Perplexity is already looking to include ads. Free is a hook to get users invested before they trap them and extract all the value for themselves.

Are you an artist selling their own work?

Code. Every day.

When you solve something tricky, you just basically released that as open source and trained ChatGPT 2030 how to do it without you.

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