I am more optimistic about AI than this post simply because I think it is a better substitute than social media. In some ways, I think AI and institutions are symbiotic
If I made a pitch for a cyberpunk dystopia where knowledge is centralized by a for-profote corporate trillionaire, I'd get a resounding yawn for originality. Yet here we are vouching for that in real time.
Social media has a lot of noise, but people understand not to take poisonshadow_42 as a central hub of general knowledge. That is sadly not the case with Grok, despite its obvious, blatant abuse of such a title.
Go on X. Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.
Compare to, I dunno, the BBC. The video you see might not even be real. If you're watching a conservative politician maybe 50 minutes were spliced out of the middle of a sentence and the splice was hidden. You hear only what they want you to hear and they gatekeep aggressively. Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote, LLMs are not on hand to double check their claims.
AI and social media are working well together. The biggest problem is synthetic video. But TV news has that problem too, it turns out. Just because you hear someone say some words doesn't mean that was what they actually said. So they're doing equally badly in that regard.
The biggest factor of social media is being able to curate personalities you go to for whatever reason. If you care about reason you will find the reasonable writers. This also enables disinformation, but people looking for anything to fit what they want to hear wouldn' fo towards the reasonable writers anyway.
I am sure there are very smart well meaning people working on it but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me. At least I know that’s state media of the UK and when something is published I see the same article as other people.
BBC was cutting-edge for creating and fostering methodologies that went on to become most of the "impartial reporting" practices from journalists. So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!
Anyone who knows about that event and is still watching the BBC afterwards is saying they don't care about the truth of their own beliefs. Dangerous stuff.
The step in the direction of decentralized filter bubbles isoating society? With no channels to hold info accountable and checked/upfated for accuracy?
In a post-Fairness Doctrine world, what else would satisfy you?
I don't think we're in a post fairness doctrine world, for one. So no, I haven't given up on the idea of he 4th estate. Your solution to bias is, as always, to not take any one source for granted. Take time to actually read articles from multiple angles that fall in line with the Fariness Doctrine. Then from there, use your own lived experiences to form your own viewpoint.
Outsourcing that to soundbites from randos on twitter with middle school lieracy is insanity. But let me use a charitable lens here.
Any notion of X being a good faith attempt at being a community-lead fact checker got broken with the introduction of Grok. Then those hopes were shattered to pieces when Grok was shown to be massively compromised by yet another central figure. One who, yes, has the literacy of a middle schooler. We somehow ended up with the worst of both worlds having centralization of a bad knowledge hub and stupidity.
>what else would satisfy you?
if using our brains is out of the equation and lack of censorship is truly the most important metric of "free discussion": let's just bring back 4chan. no names or personalities, 99% free-for-all, it technically has threading support to engage in conversations. There is centralization, but compared to the rest of the internet the moderators and admins stay very quiet.
There's a lot I hate about modern social media, but surprisingly 4chan only has like 2 things I strongly dislike. Big step up from the 20+ reasons I can throw at nearly every other site.
1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics.
2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.
2. The media also amplifies people's interests which is why it focuses on bad news and celebrity gossip. How is this unique to social media? Why is it even bad? I wouldn't want to consume any form of media that deliberately showed me boring and irrelevant things.
Nor could they be. We don't even have the tech for trustworthy electronic elections.
> Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.
Every single sentence in this paragraph is a lie.