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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

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The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world.

And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…

Hard to beat shrimp jesus

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example.

I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.

I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.

Multiple people have the same response, I randomly selected this one for follow up:

Yes, but two things were lost:

1) the need for skill or an accomplice. He _couldn’t_ tweet that image in 2016, not without first asking someone to photoshop it. And that need to engage in human to human communication is something truly fundamental that was changed and lost.

2) Any ambiguity or misunderstanding. Yes bad textual tweets exist for a long time in politics. But there IS something about images that is more powerful than text. The text „I’m Jesus Christ and god sent me to heal the sick“ would probably make the news, but a lot of people would go: „is he quoting the bible? What’s going on?“, not so much with Jesus Picture.

Isn't that kind of good then? It's probably valuable for the public to know that this is how he sees himself.

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?

Both. And even more for people who still defend republican party ... which stands behind and supports Trump 100%

But what does it say about AI?

That it can depict Trump as Jesus? You don’t need AI for that.

School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.

This is not a great example depending on how you frame this.

The solution to the cheating is, as has always been, to have tests conducted in person, on paper without digital technology, under strict supervision.

All of this is moot when the parents complain to the spineless school board when their kid fails the supervised tests.

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI.

You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs.

There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions.

The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platforms are just eating it up because “user activity” is a win for them.

The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers.

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

AI is the same slop but cheaper. Ideally the value of slop approaches zero but the value of quality stays the same.

But what is the social damage? Can you quantify the damage, even roughly?

It's likely nearly impossible to evaluate that in the short term; I think we're looking at generational damage, much of which won't be apparent for years to come.

It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.

How easy it is now to forge data (video, images, etc) will rott society. Cheating for students is now so much easier. There many examples.

Is it really that hard to understand?

one example from today https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewq1w7r0zgo

i'm no fan of the politician, but scams like this one are increasing at a significant rate and are a lot harder for non-technically minded people to spot, think your grandmother etc

also recently https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pl7zj024o

also: grok CSAM; plundering massive swathes of copyrighted material / intellectual property; making electricity more expensive for regular folks; increasing global carbon footprint building massive data centres; destroying a whole swathe of entry level jobs for recent grads (not just software junior roles); circular funding deals to keep the bubble (scam) alive, while positioning the large companies as necessary for govt. work so when the bubble bursts tax payers will have to bail them out; people with mental health issues being left to run riot with the tool; suicides; the degradation of human knowledge workers using their knowledge (the muscle atrophies when you don't use it cos "ai said yes") ...

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