greg_V

I'm not in the US but am familiar with some politicians here, and they too have a problem with recognizing that the feed they received is personalized, the comments are not representative, etc.

If you're wondering why politics sometimes seem out of touch, it's because politicians, their media and the commentariat are locked into an echo chamber already.

If I were an actor interested in influencing the policy of another country, why would I spend $$$ on manipulating the voting populace if I can poison the feed of the people who matter for far less?

I had the "pleasure" of working for someone who would take the AI's word over mine in my domain of expertise. It was a hair-ripping experience to say the least and I'm while I'm not there anymore, from what I can see they hadn't improved in that area by an inch...

Jokes on you, I bet there's a good portion of CEOs who just use chatgpt in their day-to-day life instead of reading up on stuff, thinking through it and making decisions

Re: the 30% fraud figure. An interesting book just came out last month that speculates on the amount of fraud / wasted clicks / impressions in the ecosystem

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/6kwmi0qlsq

TL;DR it's pretty damning, but since ultimately advertising is shown to drive revenue, the whole problem is priced in so to speak.

I mean... maybe, but not really. The first problem of the internet was that there wasn't that much content specifically. The first internet companies were the broadband providers who were developing content themselves, like AOL.

Google and the ad ecosystem they acquired was basically the flywheel that spurred content creation at scale. Anyone could jump in, follow a few guidelines and earn a living by producing content on the internet. The Youtube acquisition and monetization followed the same pattern.

Over time the market consolidated and got less and less competitive: less platforms with complete control of traffic and one-sided revenue sharing agreements. The guidelines so to speak on how content should look and feel like were algorithmically made stricter and stricter until everything looks, feels, sounds and reads the same.

The problem right now is that the platforms are still tightening their grip, and it's all tied to the approach of using AI to replace the content creators on the platforms from Google to Spotify to Meta, and carving the spared money to shareholders. And while the web has been shitty for a few years now, we're now seeing a sudden drop in quality because the average user has no recourse or alternative, and neither does the average creator have the means of distribution and monetization (not just publishing, that's been solved) to even find, let alone meet the new kinds of demand.

I'm certain that in a few years this will even out: new search engines, new aggregators and new feeds will emerge, but the content - money - network problem triangle remains as a fundamental problem of the internet.

Wait until Monday and see how the stock reacts

Technically everything an LLM does is hallucination that happens to be on a scale between correct and non-correct. But only humans with knowledge can tell the difference, math alone can't. It's not even a bug: it's the defining feature of the technology!

Oh it gets even better. The public has been hearing about AI this and AI that for over a year, but the existing use cases and deployment was confined to some super special niches like writing or the creative industries and programming.

This is the first nation-scale deployment of the technology, running on Google's biggest and most profitable market in one of the most widely used internet services, and it's a shitshow.

They can try manually fine tuning it, but all of the investors who have been throwing money at AI for the past year are now learning what this tech is like in the day-to-day, beyond just speculations, and it's looking... bad.

The jury will decide on the latter.

At any rate, Altman made clear allusions to hint that they are capable of synthesizing ScarJo's voice as a product feature. The actress retaliated saying she verbally did not consent, and now OpenAI's defense is that they hired a different actress anyway.

...which means they lied to everyone else on the capabilities of the tech, which is y'know, even worse

The inflammation vs. psychiatric disorders link is very interesting. See also some findings about the gut biome, which is also involved in the process: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7830868/

We had this in content writing and marketing last year. A lot of layoffs were going to happen anyway due to the end of ZIRP, AI came just at the right time, and so restructuring came bundled with "..and we are doing it with AI!".

It definitely took out a lot of jobs from the lowest rungs of the market, but on the more specialized / upper end of the ladder wages got actually higher and a lot of companies got burned, and now they have to readjust. It's rolling over slowly still, as there a lot of companies selling AI products and in turn new companies adopting those products. But it tells you a lot that

A) a company selling an AI assistant last year is now totally tied to automating busy work tasks around marketing and sales

B) AI writing companies are some of the busiest in employing human talent for... writing and editorial roles!

It's all very peculiar. I haven't seen anything like this in the past 15 years... maybe the financial crisis and big data was similar, but much much smaller at scale.

Marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum. The creative industries have been having it rough for the past year and a half, and there's practically an internet war going on between AI prompt using artists and real ones. Add to that the writer's strike, the job market, etc.

If they had a proper control screening for the ad, the backlash could be anticipated, as shown by the fact on how the simple act of reversing it would have a much different message/effect.

Worse is how it's completely asymmetric. For example micro-donation based services such as charities are flooded with fraud because they are a prime avenue for card testing.

It's also a volume question. If you have low margins but high volumes, you might run a very sophisticated anti-fraud setup to walk the razor thin line around compliant chargeback and refund rates.

From the consumer POV of course it's all the same and annoying at that. But the plumbing behind the system has some insane blunt tools, some programs held together by excel-sheets and duct tape while others are super complex with blackbox rulesets.

That's absolutely overzealous and usually gets fixed in a day or two.

The worst I've seen was someone blocking entire IP ranges due to fraudulent activity. Once their overall sales started declining, they realized they managed to ban entire university campuses because one fraudsters decided to use the dorm wifi for carding

The 2010-2013 timeline was also when the problem of ad fraud exploded. Google even acquired a company (or multiple, if I recon correctly: https://www.ft.com/content/352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab... ). You had these companies popping up left and right that were snooping on Google and the emerging programmatic advertising environment to see if the websites and the traffic delivered were legit, and there were some scary numbers flying around.

The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.

My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.

The first point is referred to as "criti-hype", when you criticize a thing by claiming it has almost magical powers, which is exactly what the owner would want people to think as they can charge more money for their magical services.

Similar to how the AI apocalypse-talk is hyping up the valuation of OpenAI.

At any rate, if we simplify the question it would sound something like: are the tech giants, notably social media and 24/7 smartphones with internet more efficient at influencing people than say, television or radio or the cinema was?

And the answer would be... kinda? But it's not specific to any of those platforms, rather the way the human brain is influenced when it's constantly in a crowd of their peers, so to speak. Likes, follower counts, reshares, endless feeds etc. are the innovations (over television and radio) that tap into our awareness and turn us hypersensitize. The algorithms are just there to keep hitting the nerves to keep us in that state.

In that sense, the odd feeling of constantly being online is more real than Santa Claus, and no matter how conscious someone is about how everyone is curating their very best, the images effect us all the same.

That's a signal that the tide IS turning. I follow some people who went all-in on AI (consultants mostly) and their tone has changed quite a bit in the last few months.

Cool new tech that was oversold in terms of what it can do for businesses. A correction is in order.

This is the same logic the german government had when they went after the journalist who called out the Wirecard fraud. The free market doesn't work if companies are allowed to cheat the system!

Just mandate all media to be in latin, and maintain a class of experts versed in the language to interpret it to the masses.

AFAIK small states are treated as exceptions because the conscription leaves you with the same amount of men as professional armies of bigger countries. But there has been a lot of talk in the past few years of changing this, but politically it would be immensely unpopular.

That's not complacency, that's a feature. The key to peace in Europe is the unified free trade zone on one hand, but on the other it's also disarmament while relying on NATO. Besides putting territorial questions aside, one of the main requirements of joining NATO was to discontinue the draft! The entire security failure is by design, one that has been made a long time ago when the US force was way more capable and threatening in their stance. The annexation of Crimea was in a way calling that stance a bluff, and now everybody is juggling the question of rearmament like a hot potato. Because we were all calm when the saying was that no two countries which had McDonalds would go to war against one another - and then they did, and now we all have McDonalds but we don't have standing combat capable armies besides NATO operable specialized arms for a good reason.

The real pivot was from operating by growth at all cost to maximizing revenue per employee. The game is still the same - keeping the valuations as high as possible - but now it's measured differently from the POV of investors.

AI is just the buzzword of this hype cycle. Everyone is looking for solutions that have AI in them because FOMO, and it also alleviates fears of productivity loss in relation to layoffs: we can do more with less because something something AI!

The third reason is probably that headcount was bloated in the first place to keep talent locked away from competitors. Now that the market shifted companies don't have to do that as workers have to compete for a shrinking number of positions.

Apple is acting like a state within their domain. Collecting a VAT and requiring compliance that's reserved usually for the national tax office with inspective powers.

Having locked in the richest consumers of the world, they get to say what goes and what doesn't, worldly courts and laws be damned.

It's both hilarious and gruesome at the same time, because we're supposed to be equal under consumer laws or whatever, but there you go!

if he's selling his method to dupes, he must be