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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

What prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?

Nothing, and that's fine.

If you are trying to stop monopolization, then having a large organization/government swarm the protocol gives them an effective monopoly. Being able to put a drop of clean water into an ocean of corruption is not really a working system.

If it doesn't have an attention-seeking-for-profit game built into it, there's no motive to flood it. If no one directly follows the bots, or anyone echoing the bots messages, and there's no algorithmically generated feed, there's no problem.

IRC is pretty good, and it survived the Freenode takeover by simply letting everyone know things are moving over to Libera.

Bluesky is awesome if you just ignore the "Discover" tab, I wish they'd just get rid of it. Librem One did something similar with Mastodon, it was peaceful.

After the initial excitement of finding decentralized platforms like that, I personally realized I don't care much for that type of interaction with people, so I don't use any of them very often. Same way I don't use my phone much, but it's there when I want it. Like a utility should be.

The motivation to advertise, track, remarket, and exploit is always there. If I started getting all my news via Bluesky, I would have to allow various businesses to reach out to me. Sure, I can have a separate account for that, but that just segments my comms.

Mind you, we are talking about using these protocols for the general public, not savvy hacker news readers.

cost, and we can create policy (shocker)

also what specifically are you worried about these 100 billion chatgpts doing?

Cost is irrelevant if they get more out of doing it than the processing costs.

Do they get more out of it than it costs, or are they still in the "people are just giving us money in the hopes that one day it turns a profit even though we're not charging nearly enough to make a profit" phase?

You're describing the AI companies and their business model.

I'm answering to that cost being a problem regarding "what prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?" - the context I have in mind for the above being scammers, political manipulators, spam, and people like that using ChatGPT/LLMs to take advantage of various protocols for profit (and the 100 billion figure being a figure of speech meaning "very many").

The comment I was responding to said that protocols would solve the problems with AI. I immediately imagined telling my $10/month unlimited AI to hook itself up to whatever protocol is being discussed here.

They mentioned identity being important here. I'm not sure what that means in this context (some kind of cryptographic verification, maybe?), but the part that seems relevant to me has to do with trust. Either a person is trusted by people I trust, or at least an organization I trust makes some claim about this person (e.g. they're actually human, this is actually their real name etc.)

I think we'll be seeing something like that in the mainstream in the not too distant future, for obvious reasons.

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