Isn’t it also destroying the internet with low-quality content and affecting content creation in general? Can LLMs still rely on data from the open internet for training?
We over medicate people, especially the elderly, because each new med has side effects and they're dying eventually anyway. We print more and more debt to paper over massive budget surpluses because the unspoken reality is that we're financially screwed either way. We pile more and more regulations on because we'd rather further grow the government and kick the can a few more times. We bolt one new emissions system after another on our diesel engines because they're already unreliable, who cares.
We don't consider how we got here, only what the next step we take should be. And don't even ask where a step should be taken, progress requires changing things constantly and we rarely give ourselves time to look back and retrace our steps.
This is entirely opposite from accelerationism, which would advocate for less medication so that sick people die quicker, and less regulation so that society would be exploited faster and collapse faster.
Let me re-use your analogy. We were already driving off a cliff, and we are trying to blame the fact that we're pushing on the gas and accelerating however we're ignoring that we were already heading that way and brake lines were cut.
Devil's advocate: folks will take that wall a lot more seriously at 1,000 km/h.
"At Jena and Auerstedt the backwardness of the Prussian Army became apparent. By 1806, Prussian military doctrines have been unchanged for more than 50 years—tactics were monotonous, and the wagon system was obsolete" [1]. They had been obsolete for some time. But they didn't break until they hit Napoleon's army.
Similarly, we have a lot of social plumbing that became–with the benefit of hindsight–obsolete with social media. It was possible to ignore, however, because the rate of change was slow. Now it isn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jena%E2%80%93Auerste...
like what? because weve been able to send messages to each other on a computer since the 50s... or do you mean tiktok and twitter specifically?
Not what we colloquially refer to as social media.
its common usage is confused, the same as the common usage of trolling has strayed from its original meaning because normies picked it up and started using it to mean anyone abusing someone from an online account.
My first partner was born in the 70s and didn't even have a landline growing up.
Here's some stuff I think counts as "plumbing" (i.e. infrastructure) of social connections, which has been lost since the 50s:
• Local newspapers (everywhere, I think?), where an actual editor could (and to a limited extent was held responsible if they didn't) filter out the conspiracy theories.
• Village churches (that might be mainly a UK-specific thing, IDK?) and other similar local community groups, where your local decisions couldn't be brigaded and overwhelmed by fans of a billionaire living on a yacht, as those fans would need to travel to your village personally and most people couldn't be bothered. Now, even when the groups still exist and meet, they can be brigaded.
• Yellow pages getting replaced with Facebook et al insisting that their ad system is the only way any small business could possibly get their name out, when a significant fraction of ads are outright scams.
Check the names, for all I know JumpCrisscross did mean something else. :)
> my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great.
I'm not claiming the old way was perfect (IIRC my gran was a generation that thought it scandalous to change denomination), just that it wasn't so easily manipulated from different continents. Back then it took a lot of effort over an extended period to do what can now be had for a few dollars of LLM tokens, and 5 years ago could've been had for tens of thousands of dollar-pound-euros spent on people gig-economy-ing tweets while they work at something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
we are just prone to hysteria id say, predating the invention of internet, phones or even print media (though they certainly exasperate the issue)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria remember the US daycare/satanism scare... it made its way to england via TV, no mechanical turks required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism the common person manipulated by lies in print. old as print itself
Yellow journalism was when we had not yet adapted to print.
The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.
We're in the "yellow journalism" phase of social media.
And there was nobody to push back against the satanism scare (straw men are so very easy to fight against, and it was at the time a straw man); a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott in the region because it had become more difficult to get away with stuff like that than the newspaper itself could manage, and conversely the limited coverage of mistreatment of Mau Mau era Kenyans in UK press because their treatment was a national embarrassment and the highest levels didn't want that embarrassment.
people still believe whatever shit is in the daily mail even today. there are just far less yellow journals now... its in the collective memory that papers print shit for profit. maybe. i cant fully explain why it stopped
> The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.
it was the late 80s wasnt it?
> a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott
national newspaper. could still happen now.
> The difference I point to the effort required to pull it off, and adaption to it, not of existence.
yes. the printing press had similar effects. IE lies could now travel much faster than before, much easier. im sure people made similar grumblings about gutenburg as you have done about AI. are you slagging the printing press the same way though?
I didn't say this was a good thing, I only said things were already fucked. And Trump is also a symptom of a deeper rot in our system. He just happens to be the asshole who took advantage of it.
If you don't fix the deeper issues, it doesn't matter what's going to happen. Blaming AI is blaming a symptom, not the cause.
Stating that we need to fix the deeper problem isn't even close to the same thing as whatever this nonsense is you responded with.
The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.
AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
Sure… so far.
The difference between AI slop and the existing large tech corps is that the large corps you list never strayed into the lane occupied by OSS.
The entire OSS "cloud native" ecosystem is an on-ramp to expensive managed cloud. It's intentionally designed to be complicated and arcane to sell managed services. Sure you "can" run it yourself, but wouldn't you rather Google or Amazon run it for you?
The main role of OSS in the ecosystem is as a parts yard to support SaaS. SaaS is the most closed model of software development and sales, far more closed than closed-source commercial software you run on your own system.
The OSS mindset is generally stuck in the 1990s and has not updated its understanding of the world since then.
There are definitely challenges, but I've been around long enough now that we'll adapt, and muddle through.
The trouble will come from humans' reaction to the changes, less from the changes themselves
Isn't that the complaint to which you're responding? the SUPPLY side of the equation is the problem, so reading encyclopedias wouldn't impact that. Funny enough the criticism of Wikipedia was that a bunch of amateurs couldn't beat the quality from a small group of experts curating a controlled collection, and we saw that wasn't true. Maybe AI has pushed this to a new level where we need to tighten access and attention once again?