[HN Gopher] AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
___________________________________________________________________
AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
Author : willbobaggins
Score : 326 points
Date : 2022-12-29 03:17 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fortressofdoors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fortressofdoors.com)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _What happens when most "people" you interact with on the
| internet are fake? I think people start logging off._
|
| I don't necessarily think that's the case. Remember the old
| "nobody on the internet knows you're a dog" cartoon? Well, I
| think that for a lot of things, nobody cares if they're talking
| to a dog.
|
| People only care about people on the internet being fake in
| certain contexts. They'll very much care if all of their dating
| app matches are robots, because the end goal of a dating app is
| actually meeting someone in the flesh.
|
| But I don't think that people on Nextdoor and Facebook groups
| particularly care - or would even notice - if they're talking to
| robots. As far as I can tell from my limited exposure, most
| people like getting caremad in comments. Even in local groups, it
| doesn't feel like there's much connection being made between
| neighbors; an AI complaining about traffic or
| agreeing/disagreeing with someone's political opinion would
| scratch the same itch as someone two towns over doing it.
| jlarocco wrote:
| There's a lot of "I don't think" in there. Have you actually
| asked anybody?
|
| I haven't, but my impression and anecdotal data is exactly
| opposite.
| burnished wrote:
| Picking at "I don't think" feels like point scoring behavior,
| and generally unwise - we want people to share their
| confidence level and source right? Dropping it makes your
| argument harder to nitpick and sound more authoritative at
| the expense of important information/honesty.
|
| Suggested remediation: just, like, disagree :) this is a self
| serving recommendation though because I really enjoy seeing
| people's differing perspectives
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Some of the most popular platforms online are largely anonymous
| (Reddit and Twitter). Most of the time, you don't even notice
| the username of the person responding to you. They might as
| well be bots, but people don't care.
|
| Heck, Reddit threads are often so predictable that they might
| as well be written by bots.
|
| So yeah, most people just want to talk and feel that someone,
| something is listening to them. People rejecting your idea need
| to recalibrate their understanding of the depth and breadth of
| human loneliness.
|
| The original New Yorker cartoonist forgot that people talk to
| their dogs too.
| nothis wrote:
| Ok, that's worse.
| peteradio wrote:
| Does it matter if the person on the other side of the glory
| hole is a dude? Maybe? Maybe you didn't think that was a
| possibility? Maybe it being widely known that you are yelling
| at clouds makes it less satisfying of a scratch?
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| I don't think they care who it is, but they care who is a who.
| They aren't concerned about it being an AI because that concern
| hasn't crossed their mind. If it becomes common knowledge that
| the people responding are bots, I think we will see others
| begin to react.
|
| I've seen similar reaction in communities around enjoying art,
| even though I find those have less reason to care where the art
| comes from.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| As a member of one of those communities, I definitely have a
| good reason to care - AI art has flooded some of them, to the
| point where it's all "noise", and there's not much value in
| reading things until it dies down.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Like proof of work and proof of stake, I think we'll see proof-
| of-humanness in a way that's far more intrusive and cumbersome
| than current captchas ever were.
|
| At this time we're still safe by doing "click the joke that's
| actually funny". Once an AI figures that one out, I imagine we'll
| have to prove we are made of meat.
| ilikerashers wrote:
| The article reads like an internet doomsday prophecy but also,
| property will go up because the internet will get worse.
|
| That is just an odd take and maybe hints that this is a generated
| article itself.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Not all property.
|
| The old timey neighborhoods where people wave at their
| neighbors and have things like block parties is what they're
| talking about. Communities built around human interaction as
| opposed to a hundred story apartment building where maybe you
| can recognize a couple of your neighbors if you saw them on the
| street.
| asta123 wrote:
| Unfortunately large number of people seem to be more concerned
| about feeding their already made up bias then authenticity of
| content. So not sure they will start logging off.
| toofy wrote:
| never confuse the loud fringe for anything other than a loud
| fringe.
| ShredKazoo wrote:
| <Playing devil's advocate>
|
| Consider this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/
|
| There are 2 possibilities: The AI can comment as well as a human,
| or it can't.
|
| If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using
| social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same
| experience as before.
|
| If it can't, then its contributions won't get as many
| likes/upvotes, and they won't be particularly prominent. Most
| content users see will be human-created.
|
| So I think the key question is whether AI will be able to
| manipulate the liking and voting systems. But there are methods
| for preventing this: ignore votes from accounts created after
| ChatGPT's release, or for a site like Twitter with paid accounts,
| ignore votes from unpaid accounts. It's not even clear what
| ChatGPT adds beyond a human voting ring, and social networks
| presumably have lots of experience dealing with voting rings
| already.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using
| social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same
| experience as before.
|
| I think you're massively underestimating how important
| motivations are. Bot accounts that can perfectly mask as human
| but whose prime directive is to recommend their sponsors'
| products would ruin trust in a heartbeat.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Half of the Reddit front page is this already. Dudes are
| swimming in millions of upvotes while blatantly advertising
| yunwal wrote:
| But you can tell that it's happening. And also it's still
| only half, and not the entire internet, because human
| marketers don't scale as much as AI.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I can tell that it's happening because I'm a paranoid
| fucking psycho. That's not true of the millions and
| millions of regular human beings using Reddit and
| Facebook every day
| Jiro wrote:
| The AI could comment as well as a human until it gets to its
| payload, which is a scam. People will vote it down _after_ they
| get taken in by the scam, which is too late. Or maybe not even
| then, if the payload isn 't a scam per se, but something that's
| deliberately designed by the AI's developer to be slanted. A
| million AIs that are indistinguishable from humans but
| occasionally throw in a comment about how they got sick from
| Pepsi could make things very profitable for the Coca-Cola
| company.
|
| Also, upvotes are an imperfect measure of how good the post is
| and AIs would be able to game the measure.
| ShredKazoo wrote:
| >People will vote it down after they get taken in by the
| scam, which is too late.
|
| Not too late to create training data by which the social
| media platform can detect and remove subsequent scams.
| Especially if they 'report' rather than downvote.
|
| >A million AIs that are indistinguishable from humans but
| occasionally throw in a comment about how they got sick from
| Pepsi could make things very profitable for the Coca-Cola
| company.
|
| How is this different from Coca-Cola paying influencers to
| post negative stuff about Pepsi?
|
| >Also, upvotes are an imperfect measure of how good the post
| is and AIs would be able to game the measure.
|
| How is this different from humans gaming the measure?
| czzr wrote:
| The ability to generate nonsense/noise at immense scale for
| essentially zero cost.
| yunwal wrote:
| > How is this different from Coca-Cola paying influencers
| to post negative stuff about Pepsi?
|
| Coca cola can't have millions of influencers on their
| payroll (or at least, it wouldn't be economically
| profitable for them to do that). An AI could easily create
| and post on accounts on a scale that dwarfs real human-
| generated content.
| ShredKazoo wrote:
| 80/20 rule -- 20% of influencers generate 80% of the
| views. Don't need to pay everyone.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/business-
| guidance/resources/disclosures-...
|
| ^ Wouldn't this apply to ChatGPT bots as well?
| Jiro wrote:
| >Not too late to create training data by which the social
| media platform can detect and remove subsequent scams.
|
| How is that going to happen? We're assuming the AI posts
| exactly like a human until the comment about Pepsi comes
| out. It'll be impossible to distinguish from a human, by
| assumption. Or are you going to just have the site reject
| everything which mentions Pepsi negatively?
|
| >How is this different from Coca-Cola paying influencers to
| post negative stuff about Pepsi?
|
| AIs don't need to be paid.
| ShredKazoo wrote:
| >How is that going to happen? We're assuming the AI posts
| exactly like a human until the comment about Pepsi comes
| out. It'll be impossible to distinguish from a human, by
| assumption. Or are you going to just have the site reject
| everything which mentions Pepsi negatively?
|
| You could have a reporting system.
|
| >AIs don't need to be paid.
|
| At scale, this sort of service is not going to be free.
| But I suppose AI could make it a lot cheaper.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| >If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using
| social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same
| experience as before.
|
| Out of fun I posted a few "posts" generated by ChatGPT to my
| local town's facebook group (complaining about the quality of
| snow this year, nonsense like that).
|
| The posts got a lot of engagement (100+ comments each) and the
| only one who figured out it was AI generated was a girl from
| the local university who studies computer science.
| prox wrote:
| I agree, AI is like that long flash intro you couldn't skip
| in the early website days. Just annoying enough to disrupt
| any actual commentary (aka true exchange of ideas)
| ShredKazoo wrote:
| Flash intros eventually went away, presumably because
| websites without them were more successful. So your
| argument appears to imply that humans will still be more
| successful on social media than AIs?
| prox wrote:
| No argument pro or against, I honestly don't know. The
| point being that it will be annoying enough to get rid of
| it (in some places at least)
| randomsearch wrote:
| What you're missing here regards diversity and volume.
|
| Diversity: because language models are in some sense capturing
| an average (even if that average can be from a subset of
| training data), its comments will not be very diverse. I
| suspect if you try sampling away from the center of the
| distribution, you'll find the quality degrades to nonsense.
|
| Volume: the biggest problem is that you'll end up with complete
| overwhelm of plausible comments. Language models cannot reason,
| which means they are incapable of producing the best insights
| (they can probably provide insight through "monkeys at
| typewriters" effects).
|
| So the smart human who has analysed the subject really well,
| who currently has to rise above a certain amount of background
| noise, will now get completely swamped by it.
| anselm wrote:
| Authors making this argument (which we see often now) really need
| to sketch out why cryptographic solutions will fail.
|
| The entire thesis rests on this erroneous sentence in the second
| point: "This can be done in two ways - just move to invite-only
| silos where you already know everybody, or big platforms where
| the owners do the vetting for you."
|
| There are more options. We employ them when we are forced to;
| when it becomes cheaper than not.
|
| We can sign posts or sign that somebody is real or to sign that
| somebody has earned rep, or that somebody has burned their rep...
| and subjectively score every piece of content that crosses our
| phone against our social trust graph.
|
| We can rhizomatically scale social networks, can deputize our
| people in our extended social network to mark content as
| appropriate for kids or not, or otherwise filter. There's no
| specific reason why we cannot grow a kind of social nervous
| system that has a kind of myelin sheath against noise and spam.
| It doesn't have to be specifically only people we've shaken hands
| with or our like 3 closest buddies.
| peteradio wrote:
| You can employ those techniques but real people will get
| blocked as spam. And the better AI can evade the closer to the
| bone you will have to cut. Then what? AI is interacting with
| your algorithm to silence voices.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Because using technology to solve human problems rarely/never
| works. [1] was originally written for spam and bore mostly
| correct. Explain how replacing spam with "AI-generated spam"
| changes anything? You can try to fight this stuff but it will
| look more like AI to detect AI (similar to our current anti-
| spam tech). No reason to believe cryptography has some kind of
| magical bullet here as it's an unrelated problem domain. And to
| the person claiming you get kicked off and that prevents you
| from coming back ignores a) we haven't solved being able to tie
| disparate online personas for a unique offline one (despite
| Facebook ostensibly trying really hard) b) there are all sorts
| of secondary problems that pop up when you try to do that (eg
| ignores the concept of learning from your mistakes and
| redemption, key things that happen frequently with the young or
| anyone else testing boundaries).
|
| [1] https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-
| wo...
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Because using technology to solve human problems
| rarely/never works.
|
| You're badly misunderstanding the parent post - it is _not_
| proposing a technological solution to a human problem, but a
| technological _enforcement_ of a fundamentally human
| solution:
|
| > subjectively score every piece of content that crosses our
| phone against our social trust graph...can deputize our
| people in our extended social network to mark content as
| appropriate for kids or not, or otherwise filter
|
| This is a social web of trust, where _real people_ do the
| ranking and trust assignments - the cryptography and other
| technology just keeps track of bookkeeping.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Given that GPT is already difficult to distinguish from a
| person who's confidently wrong, how does this web of trust
| system solve the problem?
|
| The belief that anything will "solve" this seems naive when
| there's 20+ years of proof of this being an "unsolvable"
| problem despite repeated technological, social, and
| legislative attempts. There might be a new normal
| established with new battlegrounds drawn and we learn to
| "live" with it, but I'm willing to bet non-trivial domes of
| money against there being any true "solution" here.
| awestroke wrote:
| So, people start signing their AI-generated messages. What have
| we gained?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Indeed. SPF and DKIM were supposed to reduce spam by ensuring
| that every sender was verified. Now, we have more spam than
| ever, and all the senders are verified (on short-lived
| garbage domains that are not yet on blocklists). The only
| DKIM failures I ever see are on legitimate mail from badly
| set-up lists.
| kolinko wrote:
| DKIM and SPF are more important for phishing than for spam.
| Without them, it's very easy to spoof senders.
| treis wrote:
| You can ban them and they'll stay banned. Today they'll come
| back or switch to one of the other dozen accounts they post
| crap on. The counter argument to that is that places like
| Facebook are mostly not pseudonymous and a lot of crap is
| posted there.
| djmips wrote:
| And when you get banned because someone stole your key -
| that's going to be awesome.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| AI generated content will likely be higher quality than
| what we have today. AI accounts will spend time building
| reputation with superior content and then burn some on an
| ad or spam campaign, but they'll still have a better
| reputation than most people.
| awestroke wrote:
| Ban them on what grounds?
| xg15 wrote:
| The same problem we have with other networks of trust: Signing
| works alright if you already know the people you expect
| messages from (but in that case, it's also no better than the
| invite-only social networks the OP talked about).
|
| However, the real problem is getting to know new people or
| vetting messages from people you don't know. In the future the
| OP sketched, you can never be sure that an interesting new
| person isn't actually a bot. Knowing the public key of that
| person won't solve that problem.
| rocqua wrote:
| One of the biggest problems in actually using cryptography in
| the real world is matching keys to identities.
|
| Using cryptography to solve the fake persona problem only works
| if the key-identity matching problem is solved. It would be
| great if the fake persona problem was the impetus that managed
| a solution to the key-identity matching problem. But I have my
| doubts.
|
| Notably the key-identity matching problem isn't technical. Its
| societal. "just do government provided keys" is technically
| easy, but society (rightfully so) is suspicious of this. Other
| solutions exist, with other trade-offs. SSL certificates have
| centralization, revocation, and weakest-link problems. PGP-keys
| have spoofing, verification, and usability problems (though I
| liked key-base's approach here). European E-id is an
| interesting step, one to watch, though I fear the EU
| bureaucratic system might make a crucial mis-step. I really
| like SSI based approaches, but SSI is mostly about using crypto
| when the key-identity matching problem has been solved, and
| less about solving the actual problem.
|
| Some technical aspects that need solutions that tend to be un-
| acceptable are handling key-revocation, key-theft, key-loss (as
| in forgetting), and key-duplication.
| px43 wrote:
| How about we let people generate their own keys, then use
| those keys to make identity claims, when people can generate
| on their own, or which can be generated by a third party.
| That gives multiple options to bind identities to arbitrary
| social media accounts etc without needing some monolithic
| root of trust.
|
| I also really like the idea of using the keys to hold some
| amount of value, such that if the keys ever get leaked, there
| is basically a built in bug bounty to alert the key holder
| (since the key thief has the option to take all the money).
| This also gives users the incentive to manage their keys in a
| sane way.
|
| Social key management schemes are also super interesting, and
| will likely be a part of future key management schemes. That
| is, basically, allowing some set of friends and family to re-
| roll or revoke identities that have been lost or stolen.
|
| Slowly but surely, I think this future is coming. Lots of
| good people are coming at it from different angles, but
| basically all converging on the same general concepts.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > How about we let people generate their own keys, then use
| those keys to make identity claims, when people can
| generate on their own, or which can be generated by a third
| party. That gives multiple options to bind identities to
| arbitrary social media accounts etc without needing some
| monolithic root of trust.
|
| You hit the nail on the head. Matching keys to real people
| can be done in-person for direct friends, then through a
| web of trust for indirect friends. For
| accounts/keys/personas you find on the internet where you
| don't have a chain of friends, you can either rely on
| "trusted" third-party attestation ("holder of key
| 0xdeadbeef earned a degree from this university") - you may
| never know with complete certainty if that's a real human,
| a bot, or an alt account for someone you already know, _and
| that 's totally fine_.
|
| The "problem" of matching keys 1-to-1 with identities for
| everyone globally (brought up by grandparent post) is a
| massive red herring that doesn't need to be "solved".
| wanderingbit wrote:
| Context: I've been working in the cryptocurrency space for a
| decade.
|
| One of the most interesting technologies the crypto space is
| working on are the SSI (self-sovereign identities).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity
|
| Even if the whole idea of cryptocurrencies is found to be a
| dead-end, the fact that it invigorated the research and
| development of SSI will change some important things about how
| we operate online.
|
| There exist prototypes of tech that allows you to prove you are
| indeed a unique human being online [1], and reveal nothing else
| about your identity. Most importantly, this tech is not owned
| or controlled by any FAANG or government, it's an open protocol
| just like email.
|
| I have listened to a podcast with an expert researcher in AI,
| and I remember him saying that he predicts some form of
| cryptographic identity will arise in order to help deal with
| the bot problem
|
| [1] https://worldcoin.org/ (note, I don't work for them, and
| have no idea if this will be the tech that finally breaks out,
| I just think they're the furthest along of any of their
| competitors)
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Sometime ago I began wondering along similar lines as the author,
| not that deeper level of course but noodling around.
|
| I think the internet will soon be clogged with bots competing
| with other bots just to get a few seconds of human attention. At
| that point the operational cost of bot farms will outstrip the
| benefit and so we'll settle something like 60-70% bots maybe?
|
| Speaking of myself I've gone back to reading and enjoying
| physical books after being on kindle for close to a decade. I
| never thought I'd go back to physical books but now a days
| reading on kindle feels a bit too lifeless so to speak, so here
| we are.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Search engines are faltering because many intersecting trends are
| destroying the availability of a vibrant, indexed, text-based
| internet: emphasis on video content, siloed content behind logins
| and paywalls, pulling traffic out into "apps" that are no longer
| part of the web, etc. GPT-style language models are also driving
| massive creation of spam that further dilutes and poisons the
| text sources that their own training models are derived from.
| glass3 wrote:
| _New_ search engines will falter.
|
| Whoever has a collection of current pages has the data set to
| be a gateway to authentic information.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Google has problems already.
| antupis wrote:
| Problem is that it will not help when you try to search what
| is best new phone 2028.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts
| being "verified" as genuinely human.
|
| IMO this is long overdue. And I think people should/will
| eventually even pay for this feature.
|
| > Powerful nation states will be more than eager to assist them
| in this regard.
|
| I agree - world governments could consider even subsidizing this
| in some way in order to foster fewer anonymous botnets sowing
| discord. The web of trust could be useful to help bolster this -
| if only in providing the process by which new social networks
| could eliminate anonymity.
|
| I hear a lot about SSI [1] from a family member who works on this
| stuff. I'll be honest - I don't know whether it's promising or
| dystopian. Maybe a little bit of each. But I optimistically think
| it could be a way to help mitigate some of the problems created
| by anonymity.
|
| The loss of anonymity won't be a panacea -- for example: people
| with legitimate accounts bound to their identity today accept
| bribes to create positive reviews of goods. And the loss of
| anonymity comes with significant drawbacks: criticizing
| government and powerful people becomes more difficult.
|
| Having a digital reputation that you can taint could put people
| on their best behavior. But then again it's a bit dystopian [2,
| 3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
| ls15 wrote:
| > But then again it's a bit dystopian
|
| I am having a hard time to imagine a scenario that is more
| dystopian
| babyoil wrote:
| The Black Mirror episode handling this is one of the most
| dystopian and scary ones for me.
| Renaud wrote:
| >loss of anonymity comes with significant drawbacks:
| criticizing government and powerful people becomes more
| difficult.
|
| How don't see how making our lives more dystopian can be a net
| benefit.
|
| How many of us expose different aspects of ourselves through
| different identities? Maybe most people are happy to show
| everyone all aspects of their lives, but I'm not, in part
| because who I am could get me or the people I meet in trouble,
| harassed, imprisoned or worse in some places.
|
| Anonymity should remain a fundamental right. We have the right
| to live and expose different parts of ourselves to different
| audiences without overlap.
|
| Anonymity is also a counter-power to governments. A government
| that knows all about its citizen is bound to abuse this power.
|
| We see it in many democracies; elected governments enact laws
| that restrict freedoms to keep itself in power (Russia of
| course, Turkey, Algeria, but also EU countries like Bulgaria).
| Tools like government-issued ID that become mandatory to
| express yourself online are doubly dangerous: they make it easy
| to target those who cause trouble, and they can be used to
| remove means of expression (who can listen to you if you are
| denied an ID and there is no freedom of press to expose the
| abuse?).
| swader999 wrote:
| Yep, a functioning society that benefits the most needs some
| form of anonymous dissent.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| You guys are misunderstanding how things are developing
| here.
|
| The danger is not that you'll lose anonymity. The danger is
| that if you _use_ anonymity, no one will listen to you. I
| 'd wager a lot of algorithms will just shadow ban you. This
| is because you become viewed, effectively, the same way as
| the AI agent generating brand placement tweets for Bob's
| Bargain Basement Bar-B-Que and Bitcoin.
|
| No one will know the difference between you and the
| corporate AI's. Only the verifiable humans will end up with
| opinions that anyone pays any attention to. It's like
| everything else will be a banner ad. Whether it's a banner
| ad or not.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Only the verifiable humans will end up with opinions
| that anyone pays any attention to.
|
| This depends on people valuing who is saying something
| rather than what is being said. I'm not saying you're
| wrong, but I'm saying that if we're just trading in
| celebrity rather than ideas that I'm pretty sure we can
| also create celebrity AIs people would listen to.
| Faark wrote:
| Yeah, we will simply use an AI to summarize the article
| and comment section for us and skip all the spam and
| crap.
|
| Jokes aside, now that i think about it, "article
| summaries" are kind common on reddit, but i've never seen
| such an algorithm used for comments, yet. Guess Up&Down-
| votes are still the best we have.
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Having a digital reputation that you can taint could put
| people on their best behavior._
|
| I've seen some pretty reprehensible behavior from people who
| put their full name and a photo of their face on Facebook.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I think as soon as people see "verified humans" posting things
| they utterly disagree with, the temptation to call those people
| "bots" will be too great to resist. A substantial portion of
| internet commenters will sooner call a human verification
| system into disrepute than admit that some real people really
| do earnestly disagree with them. They'll spin conspiracy yarns
| about how "the other side" controls the verification process
| and allow their own bots to participate.
|
| I think the solution to all of this is smaller tight-knit
| discussion groups where all the participants know and trust
| each other. Echo chambers will inevitability form. I don't
| think there is any way around this.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're just poisoning the well.
|
| edit: I find it very bizarre and very fashionable to defend
| the integrity of a verification service that does not exist,
| and to already dismiss the non-existent people who could
| suspect that this hypothetical system of verification was
| corrupt as conspiracy theorists.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Your response is very strange. I have not "defended the
| integrity of a verification system", nor am I inclined to
| because I do not support the creation of such verification
| systems in the first place. And I have no clue what "well"
| you think I'm poisoning.
|
| My point was not that such verification systems are
| incorruptible. My point is that such verification systems
| are pointless because they will inevitably be perceived as
| corrupt. Whether or not the verification system is
| _actually_ corrupt makes no difference. Such systems are
| worthless because people won 't trust them. Any system will
| be accused of being corrupt by "both sides" of any heated
| debate, and they're not both going to be right. But it
| doesn't matter of one, the other or neither are correct.
| What matters is that the system won't work because people
| won't trust it.
| Faark wrote:
| Sure, people will complain. But at the end of the day,
| you platform either has it or will actually be drowned
| out by bots. Just like everyone is complaining about
| moderators, but all the "free speech" have them anyway.
| Bots doing their part to split society & boosting echo
| chambers sounds reasonable, but i doubt verification
| system will have much impact.
| [deleted]
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Won't bot/troll farms just buy "verified human" accounts?
| eru wrote:
| That's what they are doing already. It's just that the human
| verification involves solving some captchas etc.
| taylorportman wrote:
| I've always wondered why governments can't run social networks
| for giving voice/reputation to citizens weighing in on current
| issues to give rise to a phenomenon similar to the net in the
| Ender's Game books that gave voice to Ender's siblings. There
| exists a lot of untapped potential to harness the passion of
| the armchair pundits but no pressure to mold this passion into
| grassroot hierarchical influence that could potentially grant
| political sway for individual's expert opinions. Currently
| opinionated relatives of holiday dinner & BBQ socials are under
| little pressure to cultivate their passion beyond a small inner
| circle of hostages of social etiquette - if only they had an
| outlet to mold that cunning & passion, to temper it with the
| satisfaction of having your opinionated views addressed by the
| big shot president of the times. In the book, these kids are
| calling shots under pen names. It's fun to think about.
| ls15 wrote:
| Even though it is not an official service, in Germany there
| is Abgeordnetenwach [0](Translate: _representative watch_ ),
| where citizen can ask parlamentarians directly. Some
| parlamentarians are great at answering questions, while some
| never reply and some only let their offices copy & paste
| standard replies. I wish politicians would be forced to make
| an effort to reply to their sovereign. Certain reasonable
| anti-spam and DoD measures granted.
|
| [0] https://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/
| EGreg wrote:
| I somehow do not share this poster's rosy outlook.
|
| _Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts
| being "verified" as genuinely human. This can be done in two ways
| - just move to invite-only silos where you already know
| everybody, or big platforms where the owners do the vetting for
| you. Lots of platforms will simply take a knee-jerk reaction
| where they just up the amount of surveillance. "Now that there's
| so much bot activity, everybody need to upload their passport and
| driver's license, for your own safety of course!" Powerful nation
| states will be more than eager to assist them in this regard._
|
| I think people would put a premium on the abundant BOTS,
| actually. If we look at wall street trading bots and so on, it's
| actualy far more likely what will happen is that organizations
| will start to PREFER bots. Eventually, we'll have self driving
| cars dominating all traffic, bots generating nearly all online
| content, and humans PREFERRING them. Because why not have a
| seeminglu flawless outcome every time, a bot teacher with
| limitless memory and eventually learning the habits and knowldge
| of 917 people in the classroom for a personalized approach etc.
|
| Why have a human lawyer when a bot can go through 300 arguments
| and pick the one that fits that particular jury and
| circumstances?
|
| Take VCs for example. They want to see a community with hockey
| stick growth and recurring revenues. Why have a community of
| humans? You can now replicate this growth entirely with bots.
| Twitter's growth will look pedestrian by comparison.
|
| You may say, where's the money in this? The bots don't bring any
| capital to the site. That's true today, but on wall street they
| account for the vast majority of trading since they can out-trade
| everyone and they also can swarm to collude with each other.
|
| It's not hard to imagine that bots will start to actually receive
| payment for the content they produce, just as people pay each
| other on Patreon etc. or pay for copywriters, designers etc.
|
| At this point the bots would be programmed to amass credits on a
| site, which they can turn into capital. They'll have realistic 3D
| models conversing with you, modeled after really anyone. Why have
| onlyfans? Why have instagram models? Why pay for newscasters? Why
| have actors in movies? Why have salespeople make calls? Why have
| humans do anything online or remotely AT ALL?
|
| My prediction is that bots will control nearly all the capital,
| produce nearly all the content, and humans will prefer to
| interact with bots for romantic conversations and everything
| else.
|
| The problem will be that these bots can easily swarm at any time
| and dominate any group of humans, destroy reputations, move
| public sentiment etc.
|
| People's public opinion would be dominated by bot swarms.
|
| Those who try to somehow prevail in their local communities or
| control the bots will be essentially disrupted and reputationally
| destroyed by the botswarms. It would become so cheap to destroy
| any number of human reputations that people would set swarms up
| to do it for the Lulz.
|
| Governments that try to ban these bots can themselves be easily
| overcome by botswarms. They'd just send endless numbers of fooled
| and outraged people to their doorsteps and wherever they may be
| eating. They will know all their whereabouts and all their
| proclivities. And besides this, thousands of people will be
| convinced by deepfakes and fake articles online that this
| politician is doing something ridiculous or embarrassing. Every
| time the politician would try to do something, they'd get a call
| or visit from N constituents demanding their attention. The
| botswarms can just DDOS all humans who try to stop them
| basically. And at pretty trivial cost.
|
| You here commenting on HN ... imagine if in 12 months from now,
| half of all accounts around you are bots, and they all collude
| against you and people with your viewpoint. What would you do?
|
| The problem is "logging off" is about as effective as Ted
| Kazinski trying to escape civilization by moving to the woods.
| Are wild animals able to escape encroachment by humans into their
| habitat?
| artemavv wrote:
| this article explains the concept of a market for lemons rather
| clearly. This kind of simple and thorough explanation for other
| economic phenomena would be rather valuable
| hasbot wrote:
| People go to social media sites for engagement. If AI bots
| provide good interaction, most people will be happy and won't
| care if they are chatting with a bot. Hell, the best social site
| would be one in which I could create a couple of AI companions
| with whom I could chat about things that interest me that day.
| The companions would scour the Internet for related news and
| topics, bring them to my attention, and we'd chat. Kinda like HN
| but customizable.
| deadpannini wrote:
| Reading this comment (which is correct, I think) gives me the
| urgent desire to log off HN.
| balsam wrote:
| Hey, you folks who are willing to pay to be part of a vetted
| community? Looks like Sam Altman's WorldCoin, which is about
| verifiable identity, might just become a viable business.
| ChatGPT's role in that strategy makes more sense now.. remember
| Altman is behind OpenAI? If this is part of his strategy to
| monopolize internet comments, then his next step is to have
| ChatGPT recognize its own outputs. (To deal with those
| WorldCoiners who abuse ChatGPT, for example.)
| crooked-v wrote:
| The current state of crypto is such that I wouldn't trust
| anything crypto-related with my video game saves, let alone my
| identity.
| balsam wrote:
| I think WorldCoin is more popular with the Third World, who
| simultaneously are more willing to spam and less concerned
| about rights. Should have called it ThirdWorldCoin. The
| prophet having renown away from home etc /s
| kybernetyk wrote:
| I still trust my private wallet. Everything else was normie
| scam BS piled on top of crypto repeating the sin of
| centralization. Good that it burned down.
| mshake2 wrote:
| To piggyback off of this, I predict we'll be _hearing_ (not
| seeing) the phrase "the internet is fake" a lot more.
| bitwize wrote:
| The "Dead Internet Theory" will be proven true, if it hasn't
| been already.
| prox wrote:
| "The internet is a place where absolutely nothing happens." -
| Strongbad
|
| Seems to ring true more and more :)
| beckingz wrote:
| This was true when written, and then reality inverted itself
| in 2015/2016 when internet culture became mainstream culture.
| personjerry wrote:
| I think the author is really gunning for his particular vision to
| happen. If you were a tech leader would you just let "The Great
| Logging Off" happen?
|
| If this becomes a huge issue you'd better bet that big tech is
| going to invest a lot of resources to solve it. The simplest
| solution would be to get better at verifying real human users,
| for example with better adversarial AI systems to detect non-
| humans or more document-based authentication tying your real
| identity to your user account (and thus any bans for misuse going
| to your real identity).
| p00rsplr wrote:
| [dead]
| z3t4 wrote:
| If you can make your own AI that scams people, there will be
| easier ways for you to make money.
| woeirua wrote:
| This article gets it. ChatGPT heralds the end of free user
| comments, forums and social media. Because when everything and
| everyone online is fake, why even log on to Insta or FB or
| Twitter? The internet will still be useful, but Web 2.0 will go
| the way of the dodo unless it adapts and the easiest way to cut
| down on spam is to charge users money for access. Spam campaigns
| are a lot less lucrative when it costs money to participate.
| Hell, charge $0.05 per email. The amount of spam would decrease
| significantly.
|
| Side note, I've long thought that identity verification is the
| _one_ area that a public blockchain could actually add legitimate
| value to. But I've seen no efforts in that direction to date.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > the easiest way to cut down on spam is to charge users money
| for access
|
| Which realistically means everyone will log off and touch grass
| instead of pay to interact with other verified humans.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Will something like the precursor to Bitcoin, meant to combat
| spam -- Hashcash -- become important again?
|
| The enabling technology behind micropayments is ironically
| looking like a CBDC a lot more than Bitcoin (+other cryptos),
| for scalability reasons.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > but Web 2.0 will go the way of the dodo
|
| What does Web 2.0 have to do with any of this?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Web 2.0 often refers to the "second wave" of consumer-facing
| internet sites that allowed users to leave comments and
| interact with each other, as opposed to the Web 1.0 of static
| HTML sites.
| rapind wrote:
| It's a reference to user generated content (web 2.0) and
| saying it will become AI generated content.
|
| I think we've already been seeing it, just done badly. Most
| content marketing is somewhat automated. The tools (ChatGPT)
| have made a leap and the internet will be riddled with it and
| it's brethren.
|
| What's interesting though is that future AIs will train on AI
| generated content which trained on AI generated... etc.
| Possibly missing legitimate feedback?
|
| AI is inevitably unleashed on AI in a game of cat and mouse
| driven by that unholy god "marketing" thus eventually
| rendering the internet useless in a race to the bottom of
| legitimate human interaction.
| antupis wrote:
| many ways it is already happening with those content farms
| and sock puppets but also with Tiktok style feeds where you
| don't follow users but mindlessly watch what algorithm will
| provide for you.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| The volumes of email spam are absolutely staggering, but its
| detection and filtering, with minuscule amounts of false
| negatives, are nearly perfect. It has been largely a solved
| problem for a decade to which we give very little credit. Me
| personally, it blows my mind out of the water every time I'm
| reminded of it.
| ben_w wrote:
| Spam filters are indeed amazing, but I do get a non-trivial
| number of false positives these days.
|
| Spam is a moving target.
| jnwatson wrote:
| And the movement of spam just accelerated with ChatGPT.
| Kye wrote:
| I have a feeling Bayesian spam filters will be highly
| effective at picking out patterns in anything generated
| by a particular model. The arms race will move from
| spammers coming up with new templates to spammers coming
| up with new models.
| seydor wrote:
| There is as much spam as there is email. Did people quit email?
| blackbear_ wrote:
| No, because spam filters are pretty good. But that may
| change, too.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Yes, they did. Both my work and personal email inboxes are
| pretty much exclusively various kinds of automated messages
| (order details, newsletters, announcements from various
| tools), I get essentially zero personal communication over it
| anymore; that all happens on other platforms. Email has more
| or less gone the way of regular mail: still used for various
| businesses to get in touch with you, but for personal
| communication it is dead.
| OgAstorga wrote:
| There is more than twice spam as there is legitimate email
| (source: ran a corporate email server). However, so far most
| spam is automatically detected.
|
| In the near future, It's likely that this is no longer going
| to be the case and in the moment that most of your email is
| spam you are going to stop trusting everything you receive.
|
| Even right now inside corps people already (should?) distrust
| and double checks everything that comes from another domain.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Obviously people didn't quit email. But I also don't
| "engage" with email with anything near the intensity that I
| used to. 20 years ago...? One of the hottest romcoms ever,
| was built around our feverish engagement with email:
| "You've got Mail!" Can you imagine that being a pitch for a
| romcom next year? They'd laugh you out of the room. Because
| while people still use email, they don't engage with it the
| way they used to.
|
| I think this sense of disengagement is what the author is
| trying to metaphorically capture with the idea of "logging
| off". It might just be my family and peer groups, but I do
| sense this in general. The internet and its various
| "social" constructs feel more and more like they've crossed
| that line in dating relationships where the other person
| becomes "clingy/needy" and it starts to grow wearisome and
| cringy. I think that causes people to quietly disengage.
| t0lo wrote:
| I can't help but wonder how we will ensure official
| government/legal->user communication is legitimate in the
| face of software that can dodge spam filters at a whim. Is
| it back to letters for us?
| clnq wrote:
| A lot of people did. Most business communication happens in
| virtual meetings or on platforms like Slack and Teams. Most
| informal communication occurs through voice calls and instant
| messaging. All that used to be email around Y2K, as far as I
| remember.
| birdfood wrote:
| I've been thinking about similar things lately, and particularly
| I think about the 3 billion humans who have never used the
| internet. How will this affect them? And how do they interpret
| this existential crisis we are facing?
|
| Additionally, when the internet is mostly created by bots, why
| would I go online to look up a recipe on a bot cooking blog that
| was generated yesterday when I could have my pocket bot generate
| a brand new, tailor made cooking blog for me whenever I want?
| Ditto for instagram/tiktok. Generate the next image based on how
| long I looked at the last one.
| djokkataja wrote:
| > Third, that AI technologies won't be perfect substitutes for
| actual human-to-human contact.
|
| I'm not sure this assumption holds true _enough_ : incredible
| numbers of humans have already substituted vast swaths of
| _direct_ human-to-human contact with the gigantic text-only
| condoms provided by the internet. We 've already traded in
| superior quality human contact for inferior quality contact--for
| the bonus of more specialized content which we probably wouldn't
| get if we knocked on our neighbors' doors.
|
| This doesn't necessarily invalidate many of the proposals in this
| article. But what about the dimensions in which AI provides or
| will eventually provide a _superior_ substitute to human-to-human
| contact?
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| You can see it on reddit. The subreddits used to be interesting
| and relatively diverse, now it's just autoposting by pots and
| thousands of identical comments. It's only on the small
| subreddits that there's still actual content and they'll be
| destroyed with time.
| Geee wrote:
| The purpose of communication is to distribute and filter
| information. We don't actually _need_ to communicate. We do it to
| distribute and filter information. It is currently a very
| inefficient process. If AI does that for us in the future, all is
| good and we end up being more efficient. No more time wasted on
| reading & writing comments on the Internet.
|
| AI should be able to pick the most relevant information for you
| and present it in the most compressed form.
| [deleted]
| lotu wrote:
| That sounds perfectly plausible except if people are expecting
| these services to be free like all big tech platforms currently
| are. In that case the AI will tailor information to manipulate
| you to do what the people paying the platforms want whether
| that is buying a product or supporting a political cause.
| mola wrote:
| If it's a personal ai. But I wouldn't trust a centralized for
| profit "AI". Journalists atleast (had) ethics and norms that
| can make me somewhat trust them. A for profit AI filtering
| information for me? It's asking for trouble.
| Geee wrote:
| Yeah, AI must be personal and aligned to each individual
| rather than centralized and aligned to collective / group of
| high priests / profit-maximizers.
| swader999 wrote:
| In some ways everything we do is communication, everyone has a
| built in need to be loved, to be part of a group.
| LeftCorner wrote:
| >The purpose of communication is to distribute and filter
| information.
|
| And connect with other people, feel catharsis, to feel less
| alone, loved, engaged, interested, and the other things that
| make us human. AI will not give us that and in fact undermine
| that. Perhaps then AI will push back to the "real world" for
| these interactions, as the article opines.
| awestroke wrote:
| > AI will not give us that [...]"
|
| Is that true?
| Geee wrote:
| There's more time to connect and have fun with people in the
| real world when less time is spent on reading & writing
| comments on the Internet.
| johnny22 wrote:
| unless nobody nearby in the real world shares your
| interests. That's the reason i got into the internet in the
| first place!
| college_physics wrote:
| In real life people developed (over millenia) a wide range of
| mechanisms to support stable social interactions.
|
| Concepts like ownership, privacy, authority etc. are not laws of
| nature but deeply rooted behavioral patterns that proved to be
| useful in some global sense.
|
| What happens currently with the explosion of "digital society" is
| that, largely due to greed, certain first mover groups are
| dismantling all that - basically because they can given the
| widespread digital illiteracy and the lack of any regulatory
| mechanisms.
|
| The response will be indeed people trying to log off. But if you
| consider the callous insistence with which ruling elites impose
| e.g., cash-less, fully digital transactions, its arguable that
| the escape hatches have been locked already.
|
| Unless some new benevolent dynamic shows up that can harness the
| digital domain more congruently with welfare prepare for a period
| of great social unrest and the destruction of major social
| contracts.
| ericmcer wrote:
| There is a pretty huge difference between having an email
| address and credit card vs actively engaging with
| twitter/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc. You can still
| participate and benefit from online govt services and banking
| while avoiding social media.
| college_physics wrote:
| This might be a too sanguine view that flies on the face of
| countless warning signs. All digital behavior inceasingly
| happens through the same mobile device which had been a true
| wild west, commingling vast personal information islands
| (location, behavior, health/biometric, financial etc).
|
| Social media apps have already manifested themselves (in the
| East) as "super apps" and purportetdly this might also be the
| target business model for some western outfits
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| I would argue that calling businesses that offer cashless
| services "ruling elites" is not particularly helpful. There are
| legitimate reasons why they no longer offer cash services e.g.
| fraud prevention, speed of transaction, health concerns. In
| addition a fast food truck offering only cashless can hardly be
| considered an elite.
| college_physics wrote:
| Businesses, especially small entities will simply dance to
| the tune being played. Elites refers to the technocratic
| policy bodies that influence regulation and legislation. In
| various places cash is actively deprecated even while the
| digital domain is a fiasco harboring enormous risks.
|
| Btw I am not defending cash technology as such, I am offering
| an example of why the "logging off" option might be less
| available than what people think.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| blippage wrote:
| One solution for the few, not the many, would be a resurgent
| interest in protocols like gopher or more recent protocols like
| gemini.
| [deleted]
| dalbasal wrote:
| Even for cars, "The Market for Lemons" dynamic has never been a
| major effect. It doesn't define automotive culture. The theory
| does describe parts of reality in the used car market, but even
| here... it's not the main thing. A theory like this may be useful
| for understanding existing phenomenon, but not for prediction...
| IMO.
|
| Anyway... "SPAM" may be over. That is, I suspect that whatever
| low end, semi-legal marketing drek produced by GPT-like will not
| read as "SPAM" to us. Rather, we'll get whole new species of junk
| marketing, telescams and whatnot.
|
| _My_ prediction is that the first piece of weird will be AI
| autocomplete. A GPT that takes more context (eg all company
| emails) built into email & DM clients... that will escalate
| quickly. The line between human and machine will blurr.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| For my own life I've boiled it down to a "signal vs noise"
| problem. Whether it be a human or a bot delivering information
| isn't really important to me. What's important is the accuracy
| and proof of the information.
|
| Eliminating the "noise" is pretty easy, just take the "mute
| everyone" approach. No default subreddits, use ad blockers,
| actively disable "suggested" content where possible, and
| periodically review the things I'm getting my "signals" from.
|
| The problem I'm struggling with now is verifying authenticity of
| references and information. Every solution I can think of (say a
| chrome plugin that does analysis and can watermark
| text/video/image content with a "FAKE DETECTED" banner) just
| becomes a cat and mouse game.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I can imagine a future where it's quite easy to fake real people.
| By gathering information, pictures and maybe even videos of a
| person, you might be able to deep fake a credible video of them.
| It might know their address and use pictures and Streetview
| material to have them "record" a video from their house.
|
| That means that a clever script would be able to figure out who a
| persons real friends are (that info is easily obtained already
| today), and create personalised videos from said friends. In such
| a scenario it might not be the Great Logging off, but it would
| certainly be a situation where you think "I had breakfast with my
| friend and he said X to my face, so I can believe it.", but
| anything online can be considered noise.
| blueridge wrote:
| At a previous company, we had a standard "About" page with our
| names and photos, didn't think anything of it. Fast forward a
| few years and we discovered a bunch of Russian "businesses" who
| had used our names and photos on their About page. They were
| selling all sorts of bogus apps and service contracts. We
| reached out and sent a kind message and asked them to remove
| our photos, they responded (and apologized!) and said they
| would remove the content, but of course that never happened.
|
| To this day, when people search for me, they find an old photo
| and my name associated with a fraudulent company selling shit
| products and services.
|
| On a related note, a few of my friends have taken down their
| long standing personal sites and blogs for this very reason. A
| few bad actors took their photos, their About pages, a bunch of
| their blog posts, and used them as if they were their own--
| quoting them, tweeting them, referencing them in "their work",
| etc. One of them got wrapped up in an elaborate hiring scam
| where someone used his photo, email address, and employment
| history from LinkedIn and got all the way through an interview
| process.
|
| The whole situation was so jarring that he wiped everything--
| almost a decade of writing, his LinkedIn profile, his Twitter
| account, all of it.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Certainly this is within the reach of the tech.
|
| What I'm afraid of is, this will dull people because the
| computer models would not have the fidelity of a real
| person(simply because only small portion of humans thoughts are
| expressed and even less recorder). Many people will prefer to
| interact with this shallow model of humans instead of real ones
| in similar manner of porn replacing real sex.
|
| It will create armies of people who have no real skills with
| working or even interacting with humans. Representing people as
| avatars and a nickname already created huge issue with
| perfectly nice people forgetting that they are interacting with
| real people online, turning into huge jerks. I can imagine how
| horrible in could become when people are completely
| disenfranchised from reality.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| The precession of simulacra.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
| dmurray wrote:
| Hard to imagine that there couldn't be any kind of trusted
| (perhaps encrypted, but not necessarily) communication online.
|
| Text conversations are trivial to fake, and WhatsApp could
| trivially MITM a handful of conversations and tell me my friend
| said something different and I'd never know. But they have an
| incentive not to do this at a large scale, because there are
| benefits of running a worldwide trusted messaging service, and
| they would fear people would move to alternatives when millions
| of messages started being adulterated.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's a neat thing I kinda want to do right before dying, just
| taking all of my chat data I can get my hands on, retraining a
| chatbot on it and have it become the final version of me that
| can exist for as long as people want it around (aka pay for the
| server and gpu instance lol).
| jacooper wrote:
| > culture will co-evolve on a much faster timescale. Cultures
| that prioritize family, community, regular face-to-face human
| interaction, strong social support networks, and especially those
| that have a built-in system for helping young people find
| spouses, will do better than those that don't.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any western culture that values
| these things?
|
| Maybe east US? Texans etc.
|
| I think countries that are accepting eastern migrants will fare
| better, since eastern culture typically value these things more,
| thats in addition to solving the aging solution problem,
| something westerners are not willing to do(having kids, enough
| kids).
| tapanjk wrote:
| > but even if that hits us tomorrow, the amount of raw power
| that's been unlocked in the last year alone - the tech that's
| already here - already has the potential to change things in
| massive waves.
|
| If this is about ChatGPT, we should remember that it is not
| available in a way that you can build your business applications
| on top of it in any reliable or meaningful way. It is a very
| powerful demo of what AI can do, but nothing more yet. Also,
| OpenAI is spending a lot just to let you and me give it a try and
| this will not last long. IIRC, they are burning something in the
| range of 3 million USD per day.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Still, it will be replicated, then optimized, and eventually
| cost pennies to run.
|
| The writing is on the wall.
| tapanjk wrote:
| Well, guess I was wrong. There _is_ a product in the making.
| [1]
|
| [1]:
| https://twitter.com/michael_vandi/status/1607422866416619520
| RandomLensman wrote:
| That world is already there/has never gone away: people already
| are paying huge premiums for curated data and intelligence,
| explained and summarised by humans they trust (or at least
| respect in some way).
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm reminded of the ending of _Her_ , in which Samantha and the
| other AIs disconnect from humanity in search of transcendence,
| and all the humans are left with nothing to do except just do
| human things together.
| emporas wrote:
| Spam will flood a lot of places for sure. But there is a
| solution! We were just talking about it in a lively and
| informative thread on lichess. [1] A social graph, in which
| people are confirmed as humans from the outside world as well as
| from the virtual world, connecting hierarchies of pseudonymous
| accounts together.
|
| The social graph of reputation systems, has a necessary
| constraint, it has to be retained in the blockchain so as to be
| incorruptible by every human power. As soon as a node can be
| planted by a malicious actor, as part of the social graph, the
| whole of it becomes invalidated.
|
| Mr Craig Wright calls this "The Metanet", George Gilder calls
| this "The cryptocosm", other people call it "Web3", Balaji
| Srinivasan calls it "The network State". I call it, "The internet
| of one million governments".
|
| [1] https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/long-playing-
| play...
|
| Edit: added Balaji Srinivasan
| glass3 wrote:
| >As soon as a node can be planted by a malicious actor
|
| It's a directed graph that indicate who trusts whom. If you
| identify a malicious actor, you only have to re-validate the
| nodes that receive their trust from that actor.
|
| You can also use weights, e.g. to reduce the influence of new
| nodes.
| emporas wrote:
| Oh nice, thanks for the details/correction. I am not very
| familiar with the concept, i haven't implemented a social
| graph, i do have some general knowledge on the subject.
| d_e_solomon wrote:
| After the crash of FTX, it's going to take a long time for
| anyone to trust anything that has blockchain in its
| description. Fair or unfair, the entire ecosystem is tainted.
|
| I'm also suspicious of claims that an algorithm is uncorrupted
| by human power. Every computer algorithm is made by people who
| have human motivations.
| t0lo wrote:
| What I'm curious about is what will happen when the internet
| becomes so saturated by AI posts that AI is trained off of an AI
| internet. Will the quality of AI content degrade?
| Veedrac wrote:
| How quick the zeitgeist moves, from laughing at OpenAI for
| pretending their toy has consequences and going into it with
| caution, to casual acceptance that this represents a
| transformative and damaging change to the future of the internet.
| Which, really, is the thing to learn here: not the predictions on
| what today's nascent technology will do a decade hence, but that
| what a decade hence will be nascent could well be outside your
| Overton window today.
| hansmeierbaum wrote:
| The idea raised in this article is interesting. However, if the
| technology on the side of the spam producers improves, platforms
| will follow and improve their technology for recognizing spam.
|
| So, yes, there might be some temporary lemons failures on some
| platforms, but I would not expect a big logging off to happen on
| the long-run. After all I think this is a cat-and-mouse game of
| superior technology in producing / identifying spam.
| lossolo wrote:
| > platforms will follow and improve their technology for
| recognizing spam
|
| Written language has patterns, and your response and mine also
| follow these patterns. Language models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT
| can learn these patterns because there are finite ways in which
| humans write text. ChatGPT responses are easy to recognize
| because it was fine-tuned with specific data to meet chatbot
| requirements and provide Q&A style responses. In the near
| future, these language models will be fine-tuned for specific
| purposes, such as spam, and will mimic human text patterns in a
| way that will not be distinguishable from real humans.
| emporas wrote:
| While all of the above are true, there is a variable which
| was a constant for thousand of years. That is that language
| is generally static, it doesn't change much over ten, twenty
| years, or fifty years. It sometimes undergoes significant
| changes over the centuries.
|
| Well that constant will be transformed to a variable. While
| GPT can recognize and produce outputs of a language, this
| tool, or similar tools can be used to produce another
| language, totally from scratch or a variant of an existing
| language, instantly.
|
| In the language context, i would argue it is a lot more
| difficult to produce effective spam than in the image context
| or video. People will change their language, the model will
| have to be trained again in the new language, and that is
| until people up their game and change language again. This is
| happening already, young people use different language in the
| internet than older people. I would be surprised if we don't
| witness in the near future, the internet of a million
| languages.
| [deleted]
| gsatic wrote:
| So what? How much time in day, do you think you spend reading
| what random people you dont know are saying?
|
| Who this effects is jobless people.
| ben_w wrote:
| How many people on Hacker News do you know, or is that just
| a way to say you're looking for work right now?
|
| People here have experimented with using GPT-3 to generate
| comments and content shared here, well before chatGPT was
| released; while it can sometimes be a bit suspicious, it
| can also get up-voted:
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-
| news...
| gsatic wrote:
| You didn't answer my question. I barely spend more than
| 15-20 mins a day on HN, so how does it matter if I am
| reading something useful or not. This is just an
| imaginary problem like the problem of having 100 million
| vids of how to boil and egg on youtube. Once you get the
| info you need from one vid who sits thro the rest. People
| just tune it out. Like traffic or bar conversations.
| ben_w wrote:
| Odd flex, but ok.
|
| Assuming the question was
|
| > How much time in day, do you think you spend reading
| what random people you dont know are saying?
|
| Rather than "so what?", which I will come back to later:
| For me, probably several hours per day. It's not just
| here, or twitter/fb, though that's probably an hour by
| itself, it's also:
|
| * Blog authors (parasocial relationships!) * Newspaper
| writers * Wikipedia editors * Review writers on Amazon,
| Google maps * Question and Answer writers on Stack
| Overflow * The first few comments under some Youtube
| videos * Comments sections on news stories
|
| (Technically also book authors given the way you phrased
| that, but that's a different issue and current generation
| text generators make no difference there anyway).
|
| Now assuming the question was "so what?", because that
| dovetails into the rest of your spiel:
|
| The problem is not usefulness _to you_ , it's "can this
| be used to automate convincing you?".
|
| Make a half-decent sales pitch personalised at whoever
| for whatever: "Boiling eggs? Yeah that's easy, but I find
| organic is the best and well worth the cost", or "Oh,
| you're visiting Berlin? Yeah, I had a really great time
| at $insert_restaurant_here" or "Don't fall for the Lib
| Dems, they keep saying they can beat the Tories but look
| what happened when they got into power. That's why I vote
| $insert_uk_political_party_here". All personalised to
| just you, in the form of a friendly looking and natural
| response that probably seems more natural than any of my
| examples, because chatGPT is only reliably worse than
| domain experts and I'm _not_ a domain expert in sales.
|
| Also: You replied to me, and I'm a stranger, so we both
| know you engage with strangers on the internet, QED
| there's a place where you might get a bot trying to sell
| you a product or idea while pretending to be human.
|
| Don't make the mistake of thinking the status quo is a
| good reference point here: Current advertising
| categorisation on social media sucks (easy way to find
| out: make GDPR request to FB or Twitter for all the data
| they have about you. They think I'm interested in
| languages I can't speak and politics of countries I don't
| live in).
| [deleted]
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _A Market for Lemons_
|
| > _In which the internet gets clogged with piles of semi-
| intelligent spam, breaking the default assumption that the
| "person" you're talking to is human._
|
| Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem briefly mentions something like
| this as part of the novel's worldbuilding.
| cwmma wrote:
| Accelerando by Charles Stross has an even more prescient
| version where humanity dissembles the planets to make giant
| computers which end up being filled with sentient pyramid
| schemes.
| shaftoe wrote:
| Don't you mean Fall: Dodge in Hell?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I don't remember if _Fall_ also talked about this; I only
| read it once, and don 't remember too many details. But
| Anathem definitely did; here's an HN comment quoting it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554765
| Arainach wrote:
| The first act of Fall explicitly takes place in a world
| polarized into micro-groups because AI chatbots generate so
| much content that it's impossible to determine what's true.
| It might even talk about the initial act that started the
| practice, I forget.
| seydor wrote:
| The internet is not limited to Social networks. The "Market for
| lemons" has existed for decade, google is a market for lemons
| where people buy from SEO spam, Google assistant , Siri , amazon
| are also.
|
| The logging off is a pipe dream for some people, even though they
| know that humans are informational creatures and that the
| "offline world" has never lived up to the desirable one since the
| time books were invented.
|
| Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times
|
| I see SIGNIFICANTLY more homeless people in the two cities I
| frequent than at any other time in my life, there is a snow
| covered tent city half a kilometer from the glass monstrosity
| Google has built here and mostly doesn't occupy. Facism is on
| the rise globally. A third world war is possibly percolating in
| Europe. Google is soaking up all the bulk of revenue that used
| to go to publishers. Amazon has destroyed at least half of
| bookstores.
|
| But sure, I guess gloominess is the issue. Does all of the
| above make you happy somehow?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Things are undeniably better than they ever were before,
| especially for those outside the US and Western Europe. We
| need to work to continue to improve them, but we are in no
| way going the wrong direction outside of a few small areas
| such as housing access as you point out.
| clnq wrote:
| The internet is full of lemons, not only social media, SEO-
| influenced services, and services where money buys you reach.
|
| If you take any popular medical fact (for example, about
| diets), you will find countless published academic articles
| supporting and against it. This extends into other fields like
| physics, sociology, and politics too. But the contradictions
| there (while present) are not as overtly visible.
|
| Many popular news outlets are leaning towards reporting in a
| "flavor" their audience expects and mixing opinions into their
| reporting.
|
| By some studies, 80%+ of internet users admit to being duped at
| least once by fake news or misinformation online in 2022.
| That's the misinformation they spotted. 50%+ Americans say they
| read fake news online regularly.
|
| As for logging off, according to Reuters Institute, 41% of
| Americans actively avoided news in 2022. And anecdotally, my
| friends and I have withdrawn from social media like Reddit,
| YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on significantly
| this year. It definitely feels like a lot of information online
| is misinformation, either synthesized intentionally or "broken-
| telephoned" into fantasy by mainstream media.
|
| I do not know how to deal with this personally but disengage
| from most of the online world. The signal-to-noise ratio of
| reliable information in many regions of the internet is meager.
| I mainly read Hacker News (which also sometimes features
| contradictory research or news), some academic journals,
| Wikipedia, some forums in my professional field, and some RSS
| news sources. Everything else on the internet has become too
| awash with contradictions and misinformation.
|
| I never thought I'd have to retreat so far from mainstream
| media and social media. Mass logging off is going to impact
| these areas of the internet seriously.
|
| I am scared of what AI language models will do to professional
| blogs, news, and academia. Editors and peer-reviewers there are
| already overwhelmed with unreliable information.
| drdrek wrote:
| Most probably it will solve itself. Altavista was a useful
| search engine until it was not, than it was replaced by
| google. Google was a useful search engine and its getting
| primed for a replacement. Usually things do not pan out as
| Utopia or Dystopia but some human middle ground of kinda
| shitty balance :)
| t0lo wrote:
| I am interested to see which social media platforms double
| down on welcoming ai generated content and catering to the
| remaining users that prefer addictive content to social
| connection.
|
| This is speculative but we may see a very strong pivot from
| the "social" aspect to the addictive content aspect in
| publicly listed social media companies in order to continue
| to appease shareholders, which could, possibly, accelerate
| this potential reemphasis on real world communication and
| connection.
| seydor wrote:
| Yep. Customizable TV is the future
| s5300 wrote:
| >> Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times
|
| Seems more like extremely wealthy sociopaths & psychopaths that
| thrive in a capitalistic system are. Don't think people would
| be so doomy & gloomy if it weren't for those with the means to
| do so trying to shape society into their dystopian dreams.
|
| Two examples if needed:
|
| Thiel & Davos family
| eru wrote:
| Have a look inside Mao's China or Soviet Russia to cure you
| of the notion that capitalism is special here.
|
| Doom and gloom have been around for longer than a money based
| economy, too.
| s5300 wrote:
| My comment is based around his specific words of "disease
| of our times", being unrelated to the timeframes you've
| mentioned.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Ah yes, whenever someone complains about unchecked
| capitalism, there is always someone to bring up Soviet
| Russia.
| collyw wrote:
| They arrive at the same endpoint through different means.
| Too much concentrated power and wealth.
| notadev wrote:
| What about society being shaped in the dreams of other
| wealthy people, like Karl Schwab or George Soros? Is that OK?
| collyw wrote:
| They are all WEF cronies.
| notadev wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by doom and gloom being the
| real problem? Are you saying it's more of a perception issue
| that can be changed by the user?
| seydor wrote:
| No i mean things like, this article: That AI is so bad that
| people will want to run away. As far as i m concerned AI is a
| positive and desirable change in the world
| swader999 wrote:
| It still seems derivative, not creative. It is damn good at
| it and will only get better but still derivative from my
| limited experience playing with it.
| pmontra wrote:
| This is why I quit social media years ago. There is no difference
| between a stream of posts from strangers and a stream of posts
| from bots. What I care is interaction with friends and FB
| wouldn't give it to me or not as effectively as WhatsApp and
| Telegram. So I ended up with WhatsApp groups and Telegram
| channels where I know first hand most of the people or more
| rarely I'm at one hop from them. The only place where I regularly
| interact with strangers is HN.
| baxtr wrote:
| So does this mean you wouldn't qualify HN as social media?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Reddit and HN are more in the subgroup of what you could call
| antisocial media.
| brundolf wrote:
| For me this feels spot-on. But I wanted to comment on one thing:
|
| > Fourth, we'll see a resurgence and even fetishization of
| explicitly "offline" culture, where the "Great Logging Off"
| becomes literal
|
| I actually think the author undersold this a bit, because even
| once you've siloed into social buckets with people you already
| know- as long as it's digital communication, _you can 't quite be
| sure it's really them_. Even if you're voice-chatting while
| playing a game together, even if you're video-chatting, we'll
| reach a point where that could all be faked.
|
| You could rely on cryptography to make sure someone is who they
| say they are, but that requires extra hoops and a basic
| understanding of how to use it and what is and isn't trustworthy.
| Most people probably won't bother
|
| So at some point _only_ physical contact will be fully reliable
|
| (Until, I guess, Musk's brain-computer interface takes off. Then
| nothing is real)
| ls15 wrote:
| With cryptographic signatures I could at least verify that
| something stems from the same account that I previously agreed
| with, but this would require people to be able to manage their
| own private keys.
|
| Actually nothing would stop people from signing their own
| comments today and sometimes it is done.
|
| With e2ee messengers I feel pretty confident that a message
| comes from the right / real person after I verified their
| public key.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It can't provide confidence that the message comes from the
| right/real person, because even without any breach of secrets
| (which happen even to competent people/organizations) all
| that gives you is confidence that the message comes from
| someone authorized by that right/real person. It could be
| another person, or it could be data generated by an automated
| system to which they gave the credentials for whatever reason
| - historically rich people used personal secretaries for
| writing all kinds of responses including personal ones ("I'm
| so grateful for your invitation to visit, let's ..." didn't
| necessarily mean that the actual person even read your
| invitation), and if an "artificial secretary" becomes good
| enough, people will use it in future.
| ls15 wrote:
| > all that gives you is confidence that the message comes
| from someone authorized by that right/real person.
|
| Which is good enough for many applications, I think. With
| friends and family, I am pretty confident, that none of
| them deploy a personal assistant to answer my encrypted
| messages. As opposed to a messenger where the service
| provider can inject ads into the messages.
|
| How do I know that a person that I speak to IRL is really
| saying what they think or even really is who they claim to
| be if I don't know them well? A rest of uncertainty always
| remains.
| exit wrote:
| > but this would require people to be able to manage their
| own private keys
|
| a few generations ago social networking would have seemed
| infeasible because it would require wide spread literacy
| (along with many other reasons of course). widespread private
| key management doesn't seem that infeasible to me.
| ls15 wrote:
| I agree. Key management can be learned (but still has to be
| learned). I think that cryptocurrency made the biggest
| impact in this area so far.
| dinvlad wrote:
| How does one really verify someone's public key in this
| situation? E.g. a fake account would presumably be able to
| generate a fake website of themselves that looks at least
| semi-legit, and use it to post their pubkey. What would give
| us confidence the key comes from a legit person?
| [deleted]
| groestl wrote:
| > So at some point only physical contact will be fully reliable
|
| But then there are twins, so... The "problem" pre-existed.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good
| enough. In real life, the likelihood of twins perfectly
| emulating each other, and then using that to deceive others
| for anything but playful intent is low enough to be
| acceptable. If a solution is good enough that exceptional
| corner cases are rare and typically harmless, then it's good
| enough for adoption.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this
| movement.
|
| I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse.
| Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career,
| I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar
| situations.
|
| Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they
| do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low
| quality) content. I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of
| a community with vetted participants.
| michaelt wrote:
| I've long had a theory that services that demand an upfront
| payment for an ongoing service will find the payment works
| against their growth goals and remove it.
|
| For example, businesses that involve $$$ reusable delivery
| containers don't work well because they want to give first-time
| customers a _discount_ not a _surcharge_. Whatsapp was
| ridiculously cheap - something like $1 /year - but they still
| decided that worked against their network effects.
|
| There are some markets where you pay upfront _and_ on an
| ongoing basis, like buying a printer and ink or a games console
| and games - but they often subsidise the upfront cost with
| profit from the ongoing costs.
|
| I'm not sure how well a $5-to-join social network would work
| for that reason. Sites like metafilter survive - but with five
| moderators and one coder, they're not going to be replacing
| twitter, facebook or HN any time soon.
| angarg12 wrote:
| For me it's not about a business, it's about a community. The
| fee is just a barrier to entry to filter participants.
|
| I believe even a nominal amount would keep most people out,
| and that's by design. Also you don't need huge numbers to
| build a personally interesting community. Even a few dozen
| dedicated people can be plenty.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| > Whatsapp was ridiculously cheap - something like $1/year -
| but they still decided that worked against their network
| effects.
|
| My boss of a multimillion dollar company took offense at
| being charged $1/year to use Whatsapp back when it came out
| and started getting popular, so it did have an effect
|
| My eyes practically rolled out of my head when I heard him
| complain but that really stuck with me
| wwweston wrote:
| Metafilter is a pretty interesting case -- deliberately
| limiting growth seems to have worked out pretty well for the
| site over most of its existence, and growth goals have always
| been about other qualities than sheer numbers. It doesn't
| need to compete with anybody else on scale.
|
| I'd say HN is one of the few forums competitive on quality of
| discourse vs metafilter, but its business model is
| essentially loss-leader for VC/incubator activities, so it's
| a bit of an odd duck itself.
| chii wrote:
| > $5-to-join social network
|
| if those site could convince important/popular people for
| exclusivity, they could pull it off; i imagine it can work
| like spotify exclusive podcasts, or some such, since most
| people don't actually produce content, but consume.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I feel like twitter is trying to do this? $8/mo for premium
| members, all the celebrities are there already.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Well, with Twitter, the $8 ($11 on mobile) "premium"
| members are pretty much all people I would rather avoid.
| nisegami wrote:
| >will find the payment works against their growth goals and
| remove it
|
| Their mistake is having growth as a goal rather than a happy
| community.
| theFletch wrote:
| Quality over quantity. Not everything has to appeal to the
| masses to make a good business.
| angarg12 wrote:
| It's a matter of mental model. I'm thinking more "private
| members club" than social network.
| flir wrote:
| Sometimes, growth isn't the point (I too point to
| metafilter). Cash up front is a barrier.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You wrote: <<I can already see part of this movement.>>
|
| We can summarise this comment as "Eternal September"-ism.
|
| Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| Be wary of falling trap to the feeling of: <<It has never been
| worse.>>
|
| In late high school, watching the daily local television news
| around 6PM, I began to realise that when local news programmes
| interviewed local residents, they were _always_ seeking the
| same response: <<It has never been worse.>>
|
| Examples: Traffic; politics; manners; dress code; respect for
| elders; price of "milk and bread" (ask anyone in their 90s
| about it!); Internet discourse; buying/selling used cars; kids
| driving cars; fashion; fast food; the latest technology
| (radios, TVs, Internet, video games, mobile phones) ...,
| etcetera!
|
| My point: Do not assume that things that are different from
| when you were young(er) are automatically worse. Really,
| really: Try harder. In 1920, "old people" were complaining
| about "young people" listening to too much radio -- made them
| "soft". Repeat for television in 1950. Repeat for Internet in
| 1990s. Repeat for mobile phones in 2010s. Repeat for video
| games in 2020s. I see this pattern repeat over and over again,
| and I chuckle to myself when I see old men complain about it!
|
| As a counterpoint: This website is an amazing
| counterpoint/weight that "all things are getting worse all the
| time". I have been here for a few years now, and this community
| always manages to adapt to changing standards and conditions...
| and produce inspiring and thoughtful discourse about recent
| news.
|
| And now for my over-the-top inspiring comment to end this post:
| Simply put: We, HN community, are the antithesis for Sturgeon's
| law "ninety percent of everything is crap"! (Wiki:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)
| [deleted]
| blueridge wrote:
| I ran a private online bookclub a few years ago, really tried
| to filter and vet the people who wanted to join. Ended up with
| a decently sized group of wonderful people and lots of long
| form written discussion--we read good books and talked about
| good books, it was lovely. I approached the screening/vetting
| process as if I was hiring. I got some angry emails about the
| approach, made it seem "exclusive" and elitist, but it worked
| out well for the group.
|
| I'll launch the next iteration after the first of the year,
| this time there might be a fee attached, at least a minimal
| amount to pay for the SaaS product we'll use to organize and
| collaborate.
| [deleted]
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Paying a fee is a great barrier for weeding people out. I was
| a on a pool team for several years and one season I drew the
| unlucky lot of being the captain. This mostly involves
| texting everyone on a weekly basis to ensure they would come
| out, and they had the $10 they needed in cash on hand to pay
| me when they showed up. I hated it and chased people all the
| time to pay, they owed me from last week, didn't show up,
| etc.
|
| The next season I told everyone to pay up front. $120
| dollars, cash. Same price as every week in total, but up
| front.
|
| Turns out when people paid up front they came more often and
| we had no payment issues from there out.
| [deleted]
| georgeecollins wrote:
| The third point also made complete sense to me. My family has
| been using a Discord server to communicate for years now, and
| at first people thought that was strange. It's social media for
| people you really know and interact with, not a BS news feed.
| Think of it as a real network, not a fake network or an
| entertainment network. And a dozen other services function in
| the same way.
|
| But I get invited into discord servers for developers I work
| with, interests, I share, and I think it is getting to be more
| and more common. Some people will spend time in fake networks
| and probably not get a lot of value out of them other than
| entertainment. And others will gravitate to real networks for
| communication.
| seydor wrote:
| It isn't so much about vetting participants than about
| moderating the discourse , which is hard to do right, and
| usually relegated to the few people who are willing to do it
| for free , which is bad quality (like reddit)
|
| Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is
| trained to remove low effort in an unbiased way
| blueridge wrote:
| In my experience, the more you vet participants the less you
| have to moderate.
| visarga wrote:
| > It isn't so much about vetting participants than about
| moderating the discourse
|
| Vetting, moderating ... none of them scale well when done
| manually. The solution I see is that everyone have their own
| AI filters, customised as they see fit. You can include or
| exclude specific people and topics, make it as diverse or
| narrow as you like, allow challenging opinions or not. One of
| the filters can be to detect AI bots. Don't make the world
| conform to you, be selective and just skip the bad parts.
|
| I think people are going to trust their own AI tools that are
| running on their own computers more than they trust other
| people and especially other AI. We already know we can't face
| the future onslaught of information with the old methods, we
| need help. User controlled AI is going to be our first line
| of defence and our safe space, "a room of one's own" where
| there is no tracking and thought policing.
|
| With the advent of large language models we already have
| that, indirectly - the LM is a synthesis of everything, but
| we let it generate only conditional to our intentions. All
| the view points are in there for us to reach, it depends on
| us how we relate to them.
|
| AI should be like a cell membrane separating outside from the
| inside. It should keep the bad stuff out, take the necessary
| nutrients and nurture the life within.
| rjtavares wrote:
| Yeah, I really want this to happen.
|
| I follow really interesting people for their thoughts about
| one topic (say, Movies), but whose tweets about topics like
| politics I really dislike (not necessarily things I
| disagree with, usually I just dislike the tone).
|
| Shouldn't be too hard to fine tune a LLM to do this,
| definitely something worth a try.
| seydor wrote:
| > none of them scale well when done manually.
|
| Then maybe we should reduce the scale of the megaphones.
| Current networks are just unpleasant because it's mass
| hysteria on global level. Scale isn't everything.
|
| I think future forum owners will be continuously finetuning
| their AI filters to fit their community standards.
| eru wrote:
| Why does it need to be 'unbiased'? This would work as well:
|
| > Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is
| trained to remove low effort [or otherwise undesirable
| content]?
| seydor wrote:
| OK, but i wouldn't participate in such discussion. i
| believe most people like to keep their minds open to ideas
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't think the discussion between carefully vetted
| participants needs to be moderated. We go for moderation too
| quickly these days. Of course if someone goes crazy they
| should be banned but in less extreme scenarios a well chosen
| group should behave, just like it's but necessary to moderate
| a social gathering in real life.
| seydor wrote:
| but it s exclusionary which defeats the purpose of the
| internet as an open forum
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > the purpose of the internet as an open forum
|
| The purpose of the internet hasn't been to be an open
| forum since sysadmins were blocking the talk.* hierarchy
| and kicking entire nodes off of usenet for spam or abuse.
| seydor wrote:
| yet here we are
| Ensorceled wrote:
| yet here we are and "here" is not an "open forum"
| sokoloff wrote:
| What is the underlying purpose of an open forum? Is it
| the openness itself, or something that openness allows? I
| think it's the latter: allowing people with common
| interests who wouldn't otherwise connect in real life to
| interact meaningfully.
|
| If that's the case, 100.00% open might not be optimal if
| 99.9% open yields better results for the resulting
| community.
| seydor wrote:
| different forums can have different purposes. Personally
| i prefer the public kind, which expose me to different
| ideas. The common interests i prefer to discuss in real
| life
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community
| with vetted participants
|
| You better start believing in vetted online communities Miss
| Turner, you're in one!
|
| It may not be vetting by moderators, but HN's dated frontend
| definitely acts as a forcefield against many kinds of people.
| burnished wrote:
| Genuinely, what do you see as dated? My only other point of
| comparison is Reddit so I suspect I'm behind the times.
| altairprime wrote:
| Do you use old or new interface?
| burnished wrote:
| Old, I think? I saw a friends and his was this stream of
| pictures and gifs, whereas mine is entirely titles with
| the occasional thumb nail.
| kruxigt wrote:
| [dead]
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays
| though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am
| not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment
| section there.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Signed up day one with a one char username. Tried to use it
| a few years later and by then it had been deleted.
| Understandable I guess, but I'm still salty about it. Just
| had to get that story off my chest.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Just looked at lobsters and there are zero comments on
| almost all posts.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Q.E.D.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| What is this? My Google-fu is weak.
| moffkalast wrote:
| lobste.rs is what I can find. Likely tries to make its
| SEO as bad as possible to avoid discovery, which is kinda
| funny.
| nataz wrote:
| Was lobster.rs ways invite only? I thought I remembered
| having an account a long time ago...but my email isn't
| registered when I go to reset my PW. Because it's a much
| smaller community it does suffer from low comment counts
| on posts. Comments are the best part of HN.
| jakewins wrote:
| Invite only to write, open to read. But the main trick is
| tracking the invite tree - if the person that invited you
| gets banned, you get banned too (or need to appeal to
| have your "branch" of the invite tree adopted by someone
| else).
| mikewarot wrote:
| So if jcs somehow gets banned, the whole place shuts
| down?
|
| I find the idea of the site intriguing yet I'm not sure
| what I could contribute.
| throw10920 wrote:
| jcs started the site, so him getting banned would be
| quite a feat indeed!
|
| (although it would be an amusing way to shut the site
| down if he gets tired of maintaining it...)
| arthurcolle wrote:
| It is largely the same as HN
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Except HN is a mix of tech-bro entrepreneur types and
| developers, whereas the other site is exclusively
| developers (with an emphasis on open source).
| [deleted]
| monksy wrote:
| Reddit when they had their old frontend and bad mobile
| expierence was much better than it is now.
| Kye wrote:
| I find a lot of this on Mastodon's branch of the fediverse.
| It's getting worse with the migration from Twitter, but I'm
| optimistic that the fact that it isn't Twitter and doesn't want
| to be Twitter will deter most of the more obnoxious people and
| help those that make it through blend their uniqueness with
| what's already there in a healthy and prosocial way.
| neilv wrote:
| This used to partly happen by age.
|
| Most notably, kids were in school with people their age, adults
| were at work, etc. 1st grader intellect and emotional
| interactions partitioned from 5th grade, partitioned from 9th,
| partitioned from college, partitioned from post-college.
|
| For another example, the "grownups' table" and the "kids'
| table" at a holiday dinner.
|
| Though, as a kid, I definitely benefited from listening in on
| the grownups on the Internet.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I don't know when it happened exactly, but I have noticed the
| top comments on youtube/instagram/fb are always something
| completely inane like 3 heart emojis or something. It was
| always baffling that any kind of meritocratic system that
| ranked comments would result in something so useless being
| placed at the top.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community
| with vetted participants.
|
| FreeMasons and premium golf clubs!
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Problem is, both can still be filled with less than bright
| people.
|
| If you have an interest in, say, the math behind various AI
| techniques. Or maybe an interest in digging into the
| differences between different, (but seemingly similar),
| cancer therapies. (Think TIL v CAR-T). You won't get that at
| the golf club. You will need some kind of vetted discussion
| group.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Looks like you want to make a post-grad.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Golf clubs do the job, but I don't think I'll find many like-
| minded folks in there.
| NoToP wrote:
| I recently have been discussing pricing models for quality
| curation rather than profit per se with a friend. The obvious
| advantage is that it's a simple, objective, broadly applicable
| means to distill a baseline of quality. The obvious
| disadvantage is that it is biased towards those with the most
| disposable income (and willingness to spend), which depending
| on the topic of the forum may or may not correlate with quality
| of insight/opinion. Based on what I've seen of /r/lounge, I
| conclude curating a community with price mechanisms alone
| doesn't lead anywhere interesting. But perhaps it can amplify
| quality on top of some other mechanism.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low
| quality) content
|
| I have the same issue. People place so much trust in their
| preferred sources of information and don't question anything
| they read. Because of this I have a hard time discussing
| anything beyond the most basic things with many friends, since
| they just repeat talking points and opinions of others.
|
| It's so enlightening when I do find someone who's well read on
| a subject and can have an actual conversation about it. Even
| better if they have a different opinion and give you some new
| bit of information that makes you think about your opinions or
| perception of knowledge. Or, when you can agree to disagree
| because you have the similar understanding of a subject, but
| have different values or preferences. Moments like that can
| make me really happy sometimes.
| m_fayer wrote:
| I don't think the root cause here is excessive trust in
| preferred sources. What's actually at play here, is most
| peoples weakness at perspective taking. Truly understanding a
| given issue requires the ability to have your own perspective
| and to give equal credence to the other plausible
| perspectives. Many people do not pause to consider alien
| perspectives, and are disoriented when confronted with them.
| Therefore, they don't seek out alien perspectives in order to
| avoid the sense of disorientation that would result, and
| that's why they stick to media that share their perspective,
| and even punish said media when it offers alternative
| perspectives.
|
| People have always been this way, but the Internet and social
| media are really not helping.
| didericis wrote:
| The opposite is also true. People who love seeking out
| alien perspectives have a virtually unlimited amount of
| ability to find and commingle with whatever community they
| can think of online.
|
| I think the optimism of the early internet was due to a
| dominance of users with that kind of personality. It wasn't
| apparent to that type of person that others are not excited
| by that perspective hopping opportunity and not only would
| not take advantage of it once being online was more
| accessible, but would actively use the same technology to
| further silo and entrench themselves.
| motohagiography wrote:
| If you want a sustainable vetted community, pick a channel,
| build a funnel, skim the cream.
|
| Like startups, communities _are_ growth and sucessful ones grow
| at an incremental replacement+ rate, where ones that grow
| explosively fall over on their own weight, and ones that
| sustain a base level just die. A plan for a vetted community is
| a system of harmonious growth that requires a funnel and
| conversion scheme that yields vetted members. I see orgs
| spinning their wheels and arguing over the merits of individual
| candidates when their real problem is they have no funnel to
| simply select the best n% from.
| z0r wrote:
| A key part of the Something Awful forum's success was the $10
| registration fee required to create an account.
|
| Discussion can't scale beyond a certain number of active user
| accounts without a large drop in quality. It's kind of hard to
| tell what that limit is because every forum has a large number
| of mostly quiet lurkers who simply want to read and follow the
| discourse. SA's $10 fee created a barrier to entry, and the
| culture of bans being regularly handed out to bad posters
| encouraged people to lurk until they were ready to make good
| posts. Upvotes and downvotes as popularized by reddit and
| reddit-like forums served as a kind of substitute for that
| effect but they don't work well with as many users as those
| websites have.
| swader999 wrote:
| These closed groups seem to be too inbred, too like minded. For
| some things that's probably ok and good, but for creative
| solutions, I find I need to hear it all and see it from many
| angles.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The trick is to find a broad enough frontier that you still
| have a mix of discourse, while still excluding people who
| will tend towards unproductive garbage. For example, my
| service organization at university: As a whole, the group
| leaned firmly socialist (selecting for people who were
| enthused about feeding the homeless tends to do that), but
| the firm "someone will veto this person's membership
| nomination" line was somewhere around the middle of the
| Democratic party: "We need to fix things, but maybe that
| doesn't require revolution". Thus we ended up with a
| perfectly wide range of discourse, between the just-left of
| Obama and the anarchists, without including people who were
| fundamentally at odds with the groups mission of affecting
| positive change.
| jes wrote:
| You might enjoy LessWrong[1].
|
| 1. https://lesswrong.com
| drblue wrote:
| LessWrong is, sadly, an example of a forum that got flooded
| with low quality content. It's been Septembered beyond
| recognition from what it was in the early 2010s.
| oli5679 wrote:
| The current quality of human-generated online content is not
| uniformly high.
|
| I rely heavily on search engines and recommendation systems, but
| these are gamed by SEO spam, and flame-war political content.
|
| I want the quality of the content I see to be as high as
| possible, irrespective of whether it has an AI or human author,
| and if an LLM can write an excellent Stack Overflow answer/movie
| review, I'd be interested to read it.
| SergeAx wrote:
| There already is an OpenAI API to detect texts made by bots. I
| see a browser extension which tells if selected text is GPT
| bullshit and also marks the whole page as infested and shares
| that data across all userbase.
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