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Comment by famahar | Hacker News Reader

I've kinda given up on the internet at this point. It's sad but comforting. My social networks are just my friends and I've started to get back into reading books and long form blogs. Don't want to be exposed to this endless slop. Every day it gets harder to find something that was so easy before. It's all being buried by endless content. I'm hoping some non AI generative content branch of the internet will be created. Don't know if something like that is possible. Curation seems like the next best step.

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It's just a technology. Much like you can still buy "hand made" shoes, there will be people that create curated hand made content. And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

I really don't understand why there is so much negativity for a new technology. It's never explained, just taken as a fact and people bemoaning the new state of the world.

Technology is not neutral.

> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud.

> It's never explained

You’re not paying attention, it is often explained. One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. It’s not hard to find explanations if you really care to spend 5 seconds typing it into a search engine. Heck, I bet that if you asked an LLM, it’d tell you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_do...

Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by hand?

Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists?

ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses?

Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that came before.

These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand washers provided a very different ‘thing’. To that of artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes, getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch. These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it’s very reasonable for people to seek insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.

Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings.

I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which form, and people will still find joy in it.

Considering a significant portion of art appreciation revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and story they possess, and the level of effort and expression that went into the piece… I don’t know about that.

There’s plenty of visually impressive AI art out there right now. No one is celebrating it.

Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...

This is awesome, thanks for the link.

A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting, conceptually and visually.

> Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and brush are technologies. They enhance paintings.

I didn’t mean to imply artists don’t use technology. And certainly include photography in my definition of things made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a degree in photography to back that up. But as with all technologies individuals will choose where their line of interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their will also be an audience who don’t want it.

> These are all completely different to the work of an artist or craftsperson that expresses something

The thing is, as was the case with many goods where individual craftspeople were largely displaced by industrialized mass production, the expression of the individual artist or craftsperson was often not what the market was paying for anyway. They were paying for something utilitarian, but limited by the available methods of production.

Its not any different in principle than any other technological innovation. Arguments to the contrary amount to special pleading. The jobs of many, many craftspeople were displaced in the wake of industrialization and the digital revolution. We all buy and consume things that are mass produced all the time and don't bat an eye. Some artisianal version of these things is available in many cases. You're free to buy the mass produced version or the artisianal version. Technological progress is the engine of capitalism. History shows that you can't stop it, and slowing it just enables competitors to swoop in and eat your lunch. But Capitalism has a shelf life. Feudalism came to an end, and so will the market system. In practice, the implementation into all aspects of production will lead to an insurmountable economic crisis. What comes after is up to us.

Things like washing machines and cars liberated people from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable endeavour for millions of people.

Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines.

This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand I've never had before.

It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.

I always felt that the beauty of film is in the collaboration between all the people involved to create something larger than themselves. Everybody in the credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and together they transcend a singular vision to build a work of art.

This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians. Nobody’s bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with three other departments to bring a scene together. It feels less like art when it’s a computer using models based on real stolen art to generate content off of a prompt.

> But now I get to control way more myself

is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many instances

> But now I get to control way more myself.

You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are making.

>I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.

I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.

My partner is a graphic designer and now uses a lot of generative AI in her work. It’s very much an iterative process. She would run hundreds (sometimes thousands) of prompts over the course of compositing a single image. There’s huge amounts of editing involved, too. It doesn’t take less time than before when she was primarily an illustrator. But it enables her to do different types of artwork she wasn’t previously able to.

It’s definitely different. And has some bad sides for sure. But professionals using LLMs for creative work tends to be a lot more involved than just typing a prompt.

That's like how LLMs help me with software development. I don't work less, instead I produce more and what I produce is of greater benefit to my clients.

Diffusion models aren't LLMs and aren't necessarily text promoted. You can paint with them.

> You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not how it works.

When directing a film, you're issuing verbal commands to your team. It's actually quite similar to prompting. And I almost never get what I envision. Diffusion in a way gets me closer to what's in my head.

I thought that was one of the problems with some of the art models - that you could input the right sequence of words and get exact copies of famous copyrighted images out.

It's like saying that cameras take away oil painting as a viable endeavor. You can still be an oil painter in today's world. It's just a bit more niche, and not many people can make a living doing it. Plenty of people are still going to make art. They're just going to have to get day jobs like the rest of us to support that activity. Or they're going to have to figure out how to do something so weird and unique that AI can't possibly replicate it. Things like multimedia storytelling, ARGs, and performance art could enter a golden age as TV and movies become outmoded.

> Plenty of people are still going to make art. They're just going to have to get day jobs like the rest of us to support that activity.

You make it sound like producing art isn’t a real job and artists are just fucking around all day. Art takes work, it is a job. One where few can earn a living.

Most artists already have “day jobs like the rest of us”. What’s happening now is that even fewer people can afford to even begin to learn or improve their artistry, they have to give up before they start. Which, by the way, will in turn reduce what image generators can consume.

No, it's just that pursuing what you love as a job is a rare privilege. That doesn't mean it isn't work. But it's different from a day job, and if you expect me to believe that pursuing art is not more fufilling than some bullshit white collar job, thats laughable. It's kind of a moot point, because these jobs are going to be displaced. There's no sense in fighting technological innovation; history shows you can't stop it. If you try, some other joker is going to come in and take advantage of the technology, putting you at a disadvantage. This is how capitalism drives innovation, and historically, it's one of the few good things about this particular economic system.

It's a double edged sword, having what you love be tied to a wage. Capitalism mediates the scope of what you are allowed to depict. Market forces have created a scenario where existing IP is a safer bet. Just get out of the game. It rarely produces anything worthwhile anyway. Most art is garbage in this system. Better to do independent things on the side.

My argument is this: technology has been driving down the market value of human labor for the last century at least, and soon the market value of human labor will be pennies.

I specifically use market value because the market valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of "value" is different from what people often mean when they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the fireman's labor is far lower.

Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if you argue that in the past new technologies have created new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some turning point where human labor market value in emerging skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion.

Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic national crisis.

Stopping technological development probably isn't the long term solution. Unions are great but also just a bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the benefits of decreased scarcity?

It's time to start having real conversations about how to organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or if you don't like that, how to organize our societies with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply won't be able to justify their existence through labor.

If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop requiring people to justify their existence with labor and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today we definitely will in 50 years.

Human attention doesn’t get freed up by creating more content. It gets consumed.

In all your examples -

1) Yes. It was a good thing

2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and a niche skill

3) Yes, yes, yes.

IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain activity, yup it’s true. It happens. There are fewer horses than there were yesterday.

Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on to bigger things.

The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies for both useful content and pollution.

Except if finding valid information is made harder, - then life becomes more complex and we don’t go on to bigger and better things.

The abundance of fabricated content which is indistinguishable from authentic content means that authentic content is devalued, and that any content consumed must now wait before it is verified.

It increases the cost of trusting information, which reduces the overall value of the network. It’s like the cost of lemons for used cars.

This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.

who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with price of a mass manufactured tech.

For art - I can get the dissonance. It’s inherently subjective.

I’m concerned with facts and science.

I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental health with my dad before I can get to the actual science that will help him.

I have to remind people about things they studied in the 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads.

This is what I am concerned about.

If it was cheaper to create true content, and more expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn’t be arguing about this with people who write code.

It’s just cheaper to create content and more expensive to identify content.

> Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists?

Actually yes.

Ask any professional photographer what they think of the selfie generation.

Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have with you".

But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the professional photographer.

I know photographers who, for example, spend their life swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle, the light and you turn up and devalue all that....

I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for themselves devalue the work of a professional photographer?

Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine there’s a tool that kind of does what you do, for free but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do what you did, and all around you see the output of that subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most don’t understand why it was better, despite the fact that it was.

Have you ever seen those “graphic design is my passion” memes? That’s a good analogy. Effective graphic design isn’t just plastering some words on a page, it’s understanding where those words go, where to break the lines, which font to use, what background is balanced… All things the tool doesn’t do for you but that affect the final result and how it’s perceived at a subconscious level. There is a difference between a good and a bad poster. Even if both have the same information, one of them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad designer doesn’t understand what or why.

> One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation.

All productivity technology marginalizes sellers in the same field that choose not to use it. And somehow, I don't think the objections would be any less if models were trained on exclusivelt material in the public domain.

> It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud.

Isn’t this what happened to Etsy? You really can’t tell, so the artisanal goods became mostly factory produced in China. But beyond the romantic and ethical concerns, I wish there was real tangible advantage from buying from an artisan rather than a factory. At least interior designers and custom cabinets are impossible to mass produce…so far.

Ngl I think many of those artists’ work deserve to be devalued. As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot.

Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story. The vast majority of digital art was just filled with all these people who mindlessly copied the same styles of vaguely realistic characters in the same action hero poses and then demanded praise/money for it. It’s like I was meant to praise the artistic talent of someone just because their process was laborious… and the truth was it wasn’t ever good art.

IMO AI art is just forcing many of these artists to take a look in the mirror, and they don’t like what they see.

> As someone involved in art, there’s a huge amount of art that’s overly concerned with perfecting technique like a robot.

> Entire movies are made just to be “one single take without any edits” and no one stops to ask themselves whether or not that’s actually the most impactful way to tell the story.

Yeah, craft is an important thing.

I don’t want photorealistic tattoos, personally, but I appreciate that people have the talent and ability to do them.

Craft isn't labor though, and there are plenty of people who think that just doing a laborious task makes their art interesting. It doesn't.

Subjectively, I find that the infusion of AI content makes the general internet experience worse. Have you ever researched something to find a video that is AI generated with an AI generated voice? It is the SEO spam of video. I think that platforms will go through several phases in their relationship to AI: first, they will like the artificially increased "content creator" numbers. Second, they will like the increase in short term engagement. Third, they will very much dislike the sharp decrease in long term engagement as the market finds whoever can filter low-quality results the best.

Pretty much any "top 10" product video on YouTube.

It's that I can't be forced to care about stuff the people that commissioned it, didn't even bother read, review or fact check.

Everything feels like the laziest grind imaginable. For every Harry Potter goes to Berghain, there is an infinite amount of slop making it harder to find good content. Not even mentioning the biases baked into the model and copyright/IP issues and limitations.

To me generated content triggers the same cringy feelings, like those unrequested flash holiday e-cards in your mailbox in 2010. At least those wellmeaning people didn't know better back then.

I distinguish between content and high effort content. I like both! AI generated content is fine, whatever, but slap an AI generated scene into a woodworking video and you bet it matters to me.

I'm surprised you've never heard any explanations. Here are my personal thoughts on the matter (har har):

https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee...

I feel as though people are concerned over a hypothetical.

Can anyone show me AI generated content that has fully replaced the alternative?

If this does exist, what exactly is the value that was lost if the “real” thing was so easily replaced?

I'll tell you why. I think it's fair to say that most of the people who visit this site are technologists.

Most of us love technology. So why are people reacting like this?

Because we know how this will be used. We know of grifters and quick-buck schemes. We know that, unfortunately, the web as we know it is rapidly dying. We know of the scammers calling you with your loved ones' cloned voices.

We know how powerful this tech is, how easy it is, and how it will be misused.

Yeah, I have done some grifting myself but quit doing it but still know a lot of really creative grifters. I know what a tool like this can do in their hands. These people managed to ruin a lot of Google searches with just human labour and some very basic automation. I know what evil they can do with good generative AI.

> And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of intention.

If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that gets generated and thrown away.

Human information networks are also an ecosystem. Having an abundance of slop stops the flow of information and knowledge.

You have to filter everything that is shared to make sure you aren’t being predated upon.

Precisely - the amount of damage that openai and llms have done to human knowledge sharing and discourse is incalculable. Now we not only have to deal with humans manually writing junk due to perverse incentives, we also have to deal with people passing off machine generated junk at scale.

And we're destroying the environment through rapidly increasing resource consumption to do so. This situation is incredibly fucked.

You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because hey can you spot the difference?

Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go back to more comfy fake illusion of reality.

When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to push about how they wanted their experiences to look like. That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same view but luckily its dominant view in this world.

When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved, thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it.

You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very well.

Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.

It is not about the technology being bad. IMO it is just a tool. The problem is that tool enables the pollution of good content because it makes so easy to spam everything. It feels like it will undo all the progress of pagerank and original google, and we will be back to altavista/internet portals days with curation.

> if they use AI and you can't tell the difference

Except you can tell the difference and you will always be able to tell the difference. Its the nature of the beast.

Throwing a bunch of content at AI and telling it to curate it is never going to be the same as a human that intimately knows it.

Its the same with GPT coding. You can always tell the difference between what the machine spat out in 20 seconds and what a knowledgable human would produce.

Artifical Intelligence is by definition artificial.

Yeah there's literally no reason why anyone should be wary at the harmful effects of social media and of AI slop.

Never before has there been a technology that allows one to fake competency to this degree. This is occurring at a time when some people are bemoaning the general state of knowledge, the capacity for institutions to deliver on their goals and their mission, and the overall intelligence of the people supposedly in charge.

Along comes a tool that promises to take some of the hardest, most challenging tasks, like photorealistic art, or high quality code engineering, and replace them with slop.

Experts look at that slop and see garbage. Only people without experience, without a trained eye, without taste in code, will think it's great.

It represents a tyranny of juniors and entryists. Where "fake it until you make it" will never even reach the second part of that phrase.

The main thing that AI does, is make anything that comes out of it worthless. Infinite supply with nobody curating it.

I was thinking exactly that: a coalition of people who refuse to use AI, and who refuse to interact with or support others who do use AI. I actually work for Photography Life, and we have already committed to 100% AI free: no generative AI for articles and no gen AI for photos either. I also have a 100% AI-free commmitment on my YouTube channel. Procreate for iPad believes in no AI as well.

But we need more supporters. Place AI-free banners on your site if you have one and send me the link. Encourage others to declare their support against AI. Writing and art is about communicating what humans make because it transmits experience! We have to come together and refuse as much as possible to support those who use AI! Feel free to contact me if you want to collaborate!

coalition makes it sound like its in the millions all coordinating together like these guys : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I am happy to declare that I am myself, a Luddite in many ways. No problem with that. I like lots of technology, not gonna lie. I'm a programmer and have a PhD in math, but I think it's gone too far in many respects. And if I have to build a coalition into millions, I'll do it one step at a time.

where do I sign up?

early 2000s style amish would do it for me...

Where do I sign?

No problems with that. I don’t even call you luddite. I wouldn’t look down on you and call what I don’t like anti art.

Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.[5]

The outcome of the times. Likewise it is far more likely harmless AI (like adding dumb AI stuff to a family video) will have stronger suppression by current power systems than society suppressing critics of generative AI. Mostly because the latter boils down to cultural preferences and protectionism, not the real sort of harm that would build collective mass to threaten progress. And the former because people are heavily motivated these days by outrage and abstract future threats, well before the tangible evidence exists of widespread harm.

Turning it into a prohibition-style movement where using AI taints you forever unless your confess your sins and pledge total abstinence seems like the opposite for the group that wants to present itself as a return to sanity and moderation. It would be better to say, "Do what you want elsewhere, but we don't do that here."

If you want to go full-radical, bombing a few data centers would probably be more effective than being mean to randos who used Midjourney a few times.

Hey, I am not trying to be mean to anyone. We all are forced to use technology more than we could choose too. Some friends and family of mine use AI and I am not mean to them. I just gently talk about it. Even my Macbook has some AI processor in it though I don't use it.

There's no condemnation whatsoever, except for some who are really pushing AI.

>who refuse to interact with

Zero-tolerance ostracization is mean. If you're not doing that, and simply setting your boundaries - "I don't like the technology, let's talk about something else" - that's one thing. That's not what you were encouraging people to do in GP. I think we should be concise in our rhetoric, because it does have the potential to create needless conflict.

"But you just said-"

I did. People keep saying that AI is an existential threat requiring the most extreme action to stop. So... do people really believe that? Or are they just saying it? The treehuggers have a whole file on their actions[1]; where are the luddites? Is there really conviction, or just people letting off steam at convenient targets.[2]

[1]: https://www.dhs.gov/archive/science-and-technology/publicati...

[2]: I am not encouraging nor do I condone illegal or destructive acts, I'm analogizing a similar movement and its tactics.

I do think there has to be some responsibility taken, rather than being "nice" all the time. And I was speaking of a business sense. If someone uses AI in their own work, I fully support not supporting them. That's not social ostracization, that's just good business sense in not supporting a technology that I don't believe in.

So yeah, let me be clear: I absolutely support boycotting people who use AI when it comes to business decisions, and I absolutely support an economic war of attrition against them.

You know what's mean? Creating a technology that takes other people's jobs en masse like AI. But refusing to do business with those who use AI? I think that's fair play, and if it is at all mean, then it's just karma.

You're conflating the totally sound business decision not to use AI (as it currently exists, in its current legal limbo) in production, with an emotion-driven appeal to normalcy (which itself you have conflated with justice).

Support, boycott, war: these are words when your intent is to not associate with someone at all, not just in a business sense. You're trying to present your argument as soft and hard at the same time, and I'm saying that it's completely disingenuous if you don't choose one or the other: either this is an existential crisis that deserves radical action, or it's not and therefore not worth ruining relationships or unintentionally presenting yourself as hysterical or a less-than-rational bully. I'm asking you to choose for your sake, and for the sake of the argument you end up actually wanting to stand behind.

How do you protect your community from the inevitable arrival of trolls who try to blend in and poison your photo collections with AI generated ones, only so they can say "see? it's so good, they don't even notice!"

The community has to be based on actually knowing people and a progressive level of trust. Just like other things in society: doctors and accreditations make sure that fake doctors don't practice, keeping sensitive information is based on trust, etc. An anti-AI community has to be a real community that is based on knowing and actually working with people, and not some online thing where anyone can sign up.

In other words, it's not a social network or an amusing website with a free account. Nor is it just about photo collections. It's about supporting real people who do not want to support or use AI.

Imagine a herd of AI agents, indistinguishable from real human, are to interact with you and the content you create. Are you ok with it? Would you even care that they are not real people? Or maybe you'd even prefer them sometimes?

Because that's where we are headed.

If the AI agents are indistinguishable from humans then it doesn’t matter how you feel about them.

But wouldn’t you want to know that something you made affected actual people in meaningful ways? I’d hate to have LLM bots drown out real people with actual opinions and experiences, and never know if I was actually reaching anyone.

I’ve heard similar equivalencies in the past and I don’t know what the root cause of someone feeling this way is? Apathy?

I’ve heard coworkers argue that enjoyment from video games is equally valuable to enjoying time with your family or enjoying a walk. I’m a lifelong gamer and it’s still heartbreaking to hear people say the grass outside is no more valuable to them than what’s going on in a digital world.

What is going on with us?

> I’m a lifelong gamer and it’s still heartbreaking to hear people say the grass outside is no more valuable to them than what’s going on in a digital world.

Digital is just another part of the human experience, albeit much further removed from the surviving-in-the-savannah experience most of our ancestors evolved in.

For folks with significant limitations, screen-based experiences can be a huge enhancement and even a lifeline. A balanced life is such a subjective concept. IME it's easy and natural to judge, but not always fair or productive.

By all means, let's encourage people to try a wide variety of experiences in all available mediums. Yet without scolding or pity when they make choices we don't relate to.

Would you say the same about any other drug?

Not experiencing reality is a bit like dreaming no?

We all have a different experience of reality, even if differences are usually small. So the digital realm is an extension of reality. They aren't mutually exclusive. Ask any kid whose been cyber bullied.

Drugs alter ones perspective, so IMO a case can be made that they too are legitimate part of life. Dreaming too.

What people choose to do with the short time they exist is up to them. I hope my kids have a happy and fulfilling life, ideally giving as much as they take and leaving the world better than they found it. Yet it's not my place to dictate what sources of fulfillment are more or less legit, or even what 'better' looks like. (Of course I still teach them some fundamentals, to think critically, to make informed choices, and to try many things.)

What I mean is if you can’t tell then it doesn’t matter because as far as you’re concerned you could believe you’re talking to an AI or believe you’re talking to a human and be right either way.

It’s kind of the like the “brain in the vat” theory. Whether your brain is in a vat or not doesn’t really matter to you. If it is or if it isn’t is meaningless to you because there’s no difference as far your existence is concerned.

Anyhow ... All of us hate lie. Done by real human. But you are okay that something pretend as a human is not a human?

At least until you do something that distinguishes them like try to sell merch or host a meetup.

Well, yes: I prefer interacting with a human person to doing so with a machine. Simply because of the value I assign to one and the other.

Forums linked to real-world activities, with people posting real pictures, are doing fine. For example I'm on several car forums and life is all good there.

Bonus when there are "verified members" zones: for example on a car forum where another owner of a car of the same brand has to vet you in, certifying he saw you in real-life with a car from that brand.

> Curation seems like the next best step.

I don't disagree.

Focus on in real life experiences, stop consuming low effort media.

I feel that there always will be people loving their craft. Maybe their price will go higher but it also means they might work on more interesting projects because the crap ones will be generated by AI. It also means that commercials, ads will be customized for each person with all the informations gathered on that person, maybe every time. Dynamic video Ads, AI will unlock this potential (and I hope AI will also unlock the potential to definitely filter itself)

> I've started to get back into reading books and long form blogs

How do you know the books and blogs you're reading weren't generated by an AI?

Well there's countless books before AI, before the internet, before the computer to read. Blogs are a bit tricky but I just have to trust that the blogs I follow are writers that love writing and don't care about making mass appeal content.

That was unavoidable. Your (and mine, btw.) reaction is healthy. I hope more people start to withdraw more from the virtual world. Once they do, many will recognize that it's become an addiction: The good feelings of discovering new things on the internet is gone long ago. What is left is the bad feeling, when we don't distract ourselves with it. A typical sign for addiction.

Back to the topic: I'm still worried by the huge danger of mass delusion. Commercially, but much more politically. How easy will it be to create fake movies of war scenes. There've been fake photos around for a long time. By setting up real scenarios and of course by "photoshopping". Now, there's not much left we can trust.

The good and only way out of this to learn to not trust anything you see on the internet or television. We need new ways of trusted communication.

You're just getting old, man.

> reading books

The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.

There's an ocean of garbage books basically mass produced by ghost writers, solely targeted at milking a socially hot topic or grifting.

There's an obesity epidemic ? Let's make 3000 new books repackaging classic diets under new catchy titles and see which sticks. AI is coming ? Let's throw money at anyone with a vaguely related blog and expand their 3 hot takes into 300 pages with a nice title and cover.

At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.

There's more than a lifetime of good literature, good non-fiction, good genre fiction to read. No one is making you read dross.

It's the same for every medium though: good stuff will be good, dross will be dross. So why books in particular ?

> The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.

If all you're looking for is any book, then sure. But if you have specific interests in mind, or you actually take the time to get beyond an HBR listicle of the "5 best books for [x] topic", you can find so many good books. Too many too read in a lifetime. It's just insane how many great books there are given how many books there are already and are published every year. Even just subscribing to a pub like the NYRB or LRB and reading the reviews/essays has made my TBR list explode with interesting books. Then you have the smaller academic or niche presses that are publishing some great, serious, academic or weirdo fiction stuff, stuff that has no marketing whatsoever.

> At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.

Those books are very easy to spot. You can safely ignore 99% of Business, Productivity, Nutrition (add fitness), and pop-science, books, as you already noted. A lot of pre-internet books on those topics are fascinating, though, because they're usually written nothing at all like a blog post, and as examples that there has been very little world-changing written in those topics in the last 30-40 years.

You're right. And then the same thing applies to any generic medium: looking beyond the bulk of it and focusing on the good parts will yield life changing discoveries.

I think the main points are whether there's an incentive for communicate, and whether filtering mechanisms can surface the interesting parts. For a long time, book deals and publications were basically the only venue to monetize ideas at scale.

Nowadays monetization can happen differently and more diverse media. Also a well trained algorithm will often be better than having only human curation, all biases included.

All in all, I've learned more and read more research papers starting from online videos and discussions in the last decade than from any of the books I read in my entire life. That's where I see obsessions on a single medium (books) to miss the mark.

> I'm hoping some non AI generative content branch of the internet will be created.

Social media has been filled with disinformation and bot generated slop for well over a decade. AI or not, the internet is turning into shit until we come up with ways to filter it out. Maybe we need to build a section of internet where we use identity verification, the anonymous internet has all been turned suspect by malicious actors.

Sadly, something I've realized is that, as the junk gets more abundant, most people's taste seems to get worse.

It's not only because of AI, it was a pre-existing trend. Just look at music, books, movies (can't really call them films anymore). Humans are becoming as soulless as machines. The machines are shaping us in their image, human consciousness will be extinct long before humanity becomes extinct physically.

Is this a quote from Plato? Sure reads like something every single generation that aged out of the prime time has said.

The cost of 'quality' is going up and people don't fully realize that they can't afford it anymore because it is being hidden from them.

Put another way: Anything that has benefited from Moore's law or the drop in energy prices (which itself benefits from moore's law)has been deflationary while anything that requires humans in the loop has become inflationary.

[1]:https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/...

Music/Movies: In the future, the common person will have endless amount of AI slop to meet whatever they feel like watching. Sounds like abundance right? Well the rich will have real human actors/singers do performances at their behest and only they can afford it.

Books: This is already happening: AI will provide the answer to any question but people will not have the mental fortitude to derive the solution by learning the first principles manually. Its much easier for AI to provide you the direct answer instead of a breakdown of how it got to the answer and why. That requires enormous mental concentration(ie. learning). As a result they will further be enslaved by the AI and the few wealthy people will have access to humans that can truly teach them anything they want. An AI teacher for all is not the same as a human teacher.

Yeah it’s tough. Could get the people to curate the content. Bookmarks used to be a sacred thing. I’m sure if we band together, the best sites are already known to someone, somewhere.

But yeah, read a book. Practice poetry. Go analog. It’s very rewarding!

The drama on this site regarding AI is absolutely hilarious. You'd think this group would be excited about game changing technology but well over half the crowd is crying over it. You deciding the Internet is broken or whatever is a you thing. The rest of humanity will continue to use, enjoy, and create new interesting stuff with it. As if most shit on the Internet hasn't been mostly trash to begin with. Even in the late 90s most of it was useless. Learn to adapt or drop out and cry I guess. Get a hobby. These tears over mind blowing tech is pathetic.

Sounds like they struck a nerve to make you this aggressive... I think the tech is cool. I also think it's making the web worse, because people use that tech to abuse the system.

Indeed, seems like a lot of people are getting old and conservative here ;)

Please try to take a less aggressive tone on HN, lest this become reddit

It's possible to accept that a new tool is incredibly technically impressive while expressing concerns over how it may be deployed. Now feels like the right time to be having those conversations.

It's cool and I use it sometimes. But I am jaded and have seen the next big thing come and go time and time again. I'll partake but I'm not going to be the one that eats the biscuit.

And yet here you are.

There's nothing wrong with using existing platforms to declare the problems of said platforms. To me the "and yet you are using the internet"-type replies sound rather defensive and shallow. The truth is, sometimes it is possible to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. Do we not complain about our governments using the countries we live in or the tools provided by the government?

People who point out the deficiencies of technology sometimes must use said technology. Nothing wrong with that.

Mr Gotcha strikes again.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

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