[HN Gopher] Humans aren't mentally ready for an AI-saturated 'po...
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Humans aren't mentally ready for an AI-saturated 'post-truth world'
Author : pseudolus
Score : 250 points
Date : 2023-06-21 11:46 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| [deleted]
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Post-truth has already been here for a long time, in fact when AI
| hits and we start to blame AI for post-truth it'll just be
| another post-truth lie.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I've heard so many people say "that's not my reality" or
| "that's not my truth" and actually be serious that "truth" can
| be different for each person... I was horrified each and every
| time.
| digging wrote:
| _Usually_ , when I hear people say that, it's more or less
| "agree to disagree" when they hear someone else saying
| falsehoods and don't have the energy to deal with it. Or,
| when people have a disagreement or argument, each of them
| have their own "truth", that is, the story of what happened
| from their point of view. Personally, I've never heard anyone
| confuse those phrases for "objective reality is whatever I
| want it to be".
| robotburrito wrote:
| It may cause many to just unplug from it all. Assume everything
| is fake, give up on "truth" and live their own local lives
| without being plugged into the news cycle 24/7. Maybe it sets us
| free.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Bold of them to assume the truth is currently regarded as sacred.
|
| You can go on the front page of r/all any time of day and find
| news stories that are completely fabricated or graphs using made
| up data. I don't think AI could realistically make it any worse
| baja_blast wrote:
| AI may not make the content much worse, but the engagement
| artificial. AI bots to astroturf comment sections and twitter
| to manufacture consent and sentiment to whoever pays for it. I
| mean we already have that now, but it will be much harder to
| detect.
| more_corn wrote:
| We have always needed to navigate bullshit. We have the tools, we
| need to formalize them in code. This is an opportunity to improve
| our identification of bullshit of all types, human and machine
| generated.
| prng2021 wrote:
| I'm skeptical about these fears. We already have a disinformation
| problem. If AI can be used to exacerbate the problem, why can't
| that be counterbalanced by using AI to fight against
| disinformation as well?
|
| Just like any other sector, there will be a small handful of
| leaders in AI and that's what most users will interact with.
| Couldn't Bing/Google modify their models to underweight the
| content from websites regularly flagged to have disinformation
| and vice versa?
| ClarityJones wrote:
| The church had the same complaints when the printing press
| undermined their monopoly on Truth. However, it's now clear that
| the technology gave rise to the renaissance, and the greatest
| discovery and propagation of truth that humanity has ever seen.
| azangru wrote:
| [flagged]
| tgv wrote:
| The church didn't object to the printing press, AFAIK. Unless
| you can produce a papal bull forbidding it, I think you've
| undermined your own argument.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| That's not really relevant to my point, which was that new
| means of spreading information are capable of spreading both
| true and false information, and that history has shown that
| the ability to spread false information does not prevent the
| positive impact of true information.
|
| So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with
| links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the
| press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing
| information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was
| false).
| https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-
| th...
|
| Or an article about how Luther was excommunicated for what he
| did with the printing press.
| https://www.history.com/news/renaissance-influence-
| reformati...
|
| Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the
| dissemination of information that the Church considered to be
| false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's
| potential to spread false information. My point is that free
| speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are
| smart and even lies help listeners learn.
| tgv wrote:
| So, your point is not the printing press, but it was "the
| church". Well, in this case, it isn't "the church", so
| there any analogy already fails.
|
| > history has shown that the ability to spread false
| information does not prevent the positive impact of true
| information.
|
| And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of
| Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery
| they imparted because something else overcame that? Or
| closer to home: we should simply ignore things like
| Cambridge Analytica and the meddling in the US elections,
| even though it moved, and still could be moving, the USA
| towards a fascist regime?
|
| > people are smart
|
| No, most aren't, and even what's normally considered smart
| people can believe in hoaxes and act to the detriment of
| society.
|
| > even lies help listeners learn
|
| You lost me there. Learning is not a goal per se. Learning
| from malicious information can lead to malicious outcomes.
| If you want to invoke a history lesson, that would be a
| good one.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| It sounds like you're simply arguing against free speech.
|
| Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate
| false information? Or should speech be regulated? What
| regulations do you propose as to the speech that people
| should and shouldn't be allowed to make?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Invoking the name of another revolution doesn't automatically
| make this new one equally as beneficial. I don't follow your
| argument - what monopoly is going to be be undermined here?
| What information will the AI give people access to that wasn't
| already available?
| ClarityJones wrote:
| I think AI will give broader and more convenient access to
| much of the same information that is technically already
| available, but requires additional work to discover.
|
| For example, the books printed by the printing press
| disseminated information that was already known to tutors,
| scholars, etc. and often existed in handwritten manuscripts.
| Today, we wouldn't call that accessible, but that was the
| standard for accessibility (or word of mouth) before the
| printing press.
|
| AI makes it more likely that people will find informaiton
| because it can do much of the work of searching billions of
| sources and synthesize the information far more convenient
| way.
|
| That's not to say the information will always be true, just
| as the information in books is not always true. However,
| readers currently have far too much faith in authors. People
| believe claims because they're made using professional-
| sounding words, and published in a respected newspaper, by a
| human author, and accompanied by photographs. None of that is
| particularly good evidence if truth.
|
| The last time this happened on this scale, people became more
| sophisticated consumers of information, with a healthier
| level of skepticism, and simply came to have less confidence
| in claims that they did not have personal knowledge of. That
| was a good thing, and probably will be again.
| pxc wrote:
| We've never been ready! The 'mid-truth' media was already so full
| of propaganda and misinformation and inaccuracies that there was
| no hope of sorting through it all reliably.
|
| People have been experiencing and complaining about information
| overload since the invention of the printing press, and then the
| telegram, and on and on.
| ecmascript wrote:
| We don't need AI for that, people believe all kinds of crap and
| honestly sometimes rightly so because goverments all over the
| world have become really unrealiable in the information they give
| out. As an example of this, my goverment just recently updated
| the recommended food intake because they want to lower our
| emissions. Perhaps the goal itself is nice but that shouldn't imo
| have any effect on whatever foods are healthy or not for you. The
| result is that their food recommendations cannot be trusted
| anymore and you start doubting if other communication from the
| same authority can be trusted?
|
| The problem with many AI shops is that they are already biased
| which has been shown on many occations so I believe many will not
| trust in their AI-companion. GPS data doesn't try to shove some
| political opinion down your throat and it has historically worked
| very well over many years so that is the reason why everyone
| trusts it.
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| [flagged]
| digitalsushi wrote:
| We may not be ready but we may as well get ready. I would
| strongly prefer to work with skeptical people again. Skeptics can
| be convinced, they just need evidence.
|
| Although I am genuinely intrigued by AI running out of things to
| ingest, and moving onto AI generated content. Is the snake
| starting to eat its tail?
| youngNed wrote:
| > Skeptics can be convinced, they just need evidence
|
| The past couple of years has convinced me this is 100% untrue.
|
| People are very capable of ignoring evidence, in favour of
| something that:
|
| a) reinforces previously held beliefs
|
| b) allows them to remain in a social group
| itairall wrote:
| Yes, most people are not skeptics at all.
|
| Most people believe what they are told at face value.
|
| I stop just short of Feynman questioning the dentist on the
| evidence for brushing one's teeth. That there is potentially
| this ritual that goes around the globe as the sun rises of
| people pointlessly scrubbing their teeth.
|
| Of course, with such a high % of people addicted in a
| clinical sense to the group think and propaganda engine of
| social media that is not how most people are going to think
| or even be capable of thinking.
|
| If Feynman was more popular youtube would ban that video for
| dentistry misinformation even when the point of the video is
| to view things from a different perspective.
| eimrine wrote:
| Neither a nor b are sceptics in general sense.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| You describe dogmatism, not skepticism. Unfortunately,
| dogmatists often declare themselves as skeptics, but this is
| a rhetorical trick. Dogmatists doubt the competing beliefs,
| but not their own beliefs.
| baja_blast wrote:
| r/skeptic on reddit fits this perfectly. No one there is
| actually a skeptic just dogmatic and no evidence or counter
| points will sway them. If it was the time of Copernicus the
| sub would 100% side with the Church that the sun revolves
| around the earth and how Copernicus is "dangerous".
| tgv wrote:
| Skeptical people? You mean people who distrust everything?
| Because "post truth" doesn't stimulate to question reality, it
| incites total distrust. After which society heads straight for
| dismantling the state, and all the violence that comes with it.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| We already have post truth behavior in our society, it just
| isn't well distributed at the moment. Imagine a society where
| every response looked like the stereotypical HN top comment,
| "Actually, the opposite is true..." Here the behavior is
| rewarded, presumably it makes the community better and
| results in a diversity of thought. I'm curious why wouldn't
| this be similarly rewarded in the offline world?
| RobinUS2 wrote:
| How are we going to provide that evidence? And make sure that
| evidence is actually true, instead of AI generated? Send them a
| link to a wiki page that has been mutated by an AI bot updating
| it? ;-)
| eimrine wrote:
| Evidence is a consensus.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Eye witness testimony, public key encryption, reputation
| matters. No more anonymous viral "information".
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Here's an elaboration of what I mean.
|
| Writers should adopt two habits: (1) Sign your statements.
| If you say something, sign it, so that others know you said
| it. Cryptography is good at this. (2) Hash your citations.
| If you cite something, include a hash of it. This way, if
| the thing you cited is altered, readers can tell that
| that's not what you were citing. Note that this idea can be
| applied to audio and video, not just text.
|
| The rest of the responsibility falls on readers:
|
| (1) Read (i.e. consider) citations.
|
| (2) Read (i.e. consider) the sources of evidence you
| ingest.
|
| Don't just find a video and believe it happened. Determine
| who has claimed to have witnessed those events.
|
| For this, a public database of back-references might be
| helpful. But even without one, a decentralized solution is
| possible. Writers, whenever they cite something, could
| simply send their citation (and its context) to the author
| of the cited material. If the cited author attaches the
| back-citation to the content that was cited, then anyone
| who comes across the content can see who has cited it.
|
| There is of course the problem that some back-citations
| will be rejected -- if you cite what I wrote to call it
| stupid, I am unlikely to want to share that fact with the
| world. But if what I wrote is sufficiently important, then
| hopefully someone will waht to host a "nemesis" site, which
| collects negative citations.
|
| A public database of nemesis sites would be helpful.
|
| (3) Read (i.e. consider) the reputations of authors you
| read.
|
| This is nearly the reverse of the last point. When deciding
| whether to believe what someone has said, consider what
| else they have said.
|
| This is of course a hard problem. An author might be
| qualified in one area and writing about another. An
| author's reputation might be damaged for extrinsic (e.g.
| malice) reasons, rather than intrinsic ones.
|
| But a statement's author is too important a context to
| ignore.
|
| (4) Do cool graph-traversing investigations.
|
| Determine who someone tends to cite. Identify
| misinformation cliques -- close-knit collections of liars
| who all cite each other. Identify readership patterns that
| make people productive.
|
| We have seen how social network information can make a
| corporation money. As a society, I suspect there is a
| similar amount of value to be extracted from them.
| emporas wrote:
| Yep, that's only some of the methods which can be
| employed to ensure authenticity and integrity of
| information. A lot more are possible.
|
| The parent comment, mentions that an encyclopedia page
| can be modified by a bot. That holds true for wikipedia,
| but we can create encyclopedias strictly edited only by
| humans.
|
| Just have a prominent individual issue a top ecdsa
| identity, with correspondence to the real person's name
| info known only to him. He publishes that ecdsa identity
| somewhere, let's say on a blockchain to be always
| available and secure from deletion. Let's say this
| prominent individual is the Ronaldo football player. He
| publishes 1000 ecdsa identities to a public digital
| highway somewhere, all of the real names connection known
| only to him. That set of 1000 identities is called
| Ronaldo's social graph.
|
| From then on, each child identity derived from the top
| identity, when they edit a wikipedia page, they are
| pseudonymous if they like. No need to reveal their name,
| only Ronaldo knows that, but we know they are human,
| because Ronaldo has met everyone in person in order to
| issue the top identity. But pseudonymous is only as far
| as they can go, because someone will always know their
| real name. A.I. actually spells the end of anonymity on
| the internet.
|
| One more property of an organization structure like that,
| is that as soon as a person loses his wikipedia account
| for some reason, he can always get it back, because he
| can create a new ecdsa child identity, and prove that his
| older account and his new, match exactly the same top
| identity. So he can always invalidate older accounts and
| use the same data, karma etc, with new accounts.
|
| The only downside of that organization structure, is that
| top identities which belong to the public social graph,
| have to be absolutely secure. As soon as a person loses
| his top identity, Ronaldo has to issue a new one, but the
| encyclopedia cannot invalidate accounts not matching the
| top identity in an automated way, if the real name is not
| published. That means a human on the other side has to be
| involved and boureocracy ensues.
| wongarsu wrote:
| How have we done this so far?
|
| The only two answers I can come up with are
|
| A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply
| the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not
| flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test
| those experimentally); or
|
| B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US
| government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might
| discard that, if the government answers a Freedom of
| Information Act request with documentation about brainwashing
| experiments conducted by the CIA then you have good reason to
| count them as evidence. And you spread the word about this by
| showing the proof to a reputable newspaper who write about
| it, or writing a book and publishing it at a publisher known
| for fact-checking what they publish.
|
| Anything that isn't independently verifiable or has a chain
| of provenance is already hearsay. In the age of social media
| we got used to basing a lot of decisions on hearsay, so maybe
| we have to dial that back. But AI being better at generating
| hearsay doesn't mean it gets better at creating evidence.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > If some crackhead says that the US government is
| conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that
|
| We're talking about MKUltra right? The classic "crazy"
| conspiracy theory that turned out to be true but was
| discredited for decades?
| baja_blast wrote:
| > reputable newspaper who write about it
|
| But as for the case of the Fauci emails from FOIA requests
| no "reputable" newspaper reported on it. So people still to
| this day dismiss it since it did not come from a
| "reputable" source despite the fact you can confirm the
| provenance and authenticity of these documents by
| confirming with the agency that released the documents
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I wonder if the rise of skepticism will actually lead to people
| decreasing their use of the internet. Once the internet is full
| of crap (like 1000x what it currently is) and everyone realizes
| nothing is real, or can be trusted. Will people turn away, and
| start reading books and talking to neighbors again. Could the
| new renaissance be talking to other humans again, because face-
| to-face personal contact would be only form that can be trusted
| to be real.
| thfuran wrote:
| Why wouldn't the books be AI-generated too?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| You are right. That could happen too. I guess I was
| assuming there would still be editors and staff, some
| infrastructure that checks the contents of a book before
| printing. But guess that could go out the window too.
|
| Of course that could be what happens. An entire new
| industry of "Certifications", companies that "Verify"
| media.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The New York times and Washington Post spilled a lot of
| ink fact-checking Donald Trump. Did it help? (Honest
| question; I don't know the answer.)
| khalladay wrote:
| We might also wind up kinda like the book "Rainbow's End",
| where the internet just has too much crap to parse, so people
| subscribe to a "reality sphere" that filters the internet
| into a single view that is shared by anyone else who wants to
| see that sphere.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| If you exclude natural-world input, humans almost exclusively
| ingest stuff produced by other humans.
|
| Just like humans eventually learn that not all input is equally
| trusted (for example the input "2+2=5"), so should AI
| eventually learn to sift through.
| soligern wrote:
| [dead]
| ethanbond wrote:
| But that's sort of the point, isn't it? It's generous even to
| call "skeptics" a group. There are just "people who have
| skepticism about X," many of whom have skepticism for wildly
| different reasons -- many of them _bad reasons_ -- and
| therefore are not convinced by _good evidence_.
|
| AI will produce whatever evidence a person needs in order to
| shore up their own "skeptical" beliefs. Same problem as social
| media, where finding 1000 other people who share your fringe
| beliefs looks like compelling evidence for your belief being
| true. Just now it's on-demand, hyper-personalized, responsive
| to your own doubts, and there's no chance of you realizing "ah,
| my comrades on the other end of the tube are actually idiots!"
|
| I'd bet an AI product that tells a flat earther that "it's an
| open question" will be much more successful than an AI product
| that attempts to dispel that myth. That is, at least until an
| AI can _effectively_ convince people away from their beliefs,
| which almost certainly will not happen via "calmly providing
| solid logical evidence," given that this is not usually an
| effective vector for persuasion anyway. Now you've got a new
| problem, which is a technology capable of convincing people of
| all sorts of insane things.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Some people _might_ be a _little_ more receptive to objective
| evidence coming from a robot, if it made their ego feel less
| threatened. After all, there 's no danger that the AI tells
| other people you're a moron after arguing with you.
| taylodl wrote:
| Humans weren't and still aren't mentally ready for a 'post-steam
| engine world', but here we are. BTW, I've used both ChatGPT and
| Bard enough to know there's a lot they don't know, but boy are
| they confident in their wrong answers! Reminds me of some people
| I know!
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| azangru wrote:
| > Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at
| Princeton University, says he thinks AI could create a "post-
| truth world." He says it will likely make it significantly easier
| to convince people of false narratives, which will be disruptive
| in many ways
|
| Significantly easier? I would have thought that it would get
| harder to convince people of anything.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug. If people want to
| believe something, and AI provides somewhat believable fake
| evidence, they will believe it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Now, instead of 3 tasty lies to choose from, you're going to
| have 100 to choose from. Pick your favorite flavor!
|
| And, the more flavors of lies there are (and the more they
| are able to manufacture "evidence" to support the lies), the
| more effort it takes to figure out what's actually true, and
| the more people give up. That's the "significantly harder"
| part - if people have given up, they won't buy a lie, but
| they won't buy the truth either.
|
| In C. S. Lewis's _The Last Battle_ , Aslan says of some
| dwarves, "They are so afraid of being taken in, that they
| cannot be taken out." (Quoted from memory, may not be word-
| for-word.) If people are so afraid of being suckered by a lie
| that they can't be convinced of the truth either, then those
| people are at "post truth" in a very real sense.
|
| So we're left with either confirmation bias driving you to a
| comfortable lie, refusing to believe anything, or a huge and
| increasing amount of work to sort out what's actually true.
| The path of virtue grows harder...
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| Also, when have people not followed "false narratives"? The
| entire human civilization sits on a stack of false narratives.
| Maken wrote:
| Sometimes I think the fears of extremely convincing AI-
| generated post-truths influencing public opinion are greatly
| overblown. People is already brain-washed by poorly made, low
| resolution JPGs shared by bots in social networks, the entire
| AI stack is simply wasteful.
| nathias wrote:
| Were we are ready for a "truth world" where ideology was
| considered an everyday necessity and people willingly paid for it
| in the forms of newspapers and tv? I welcome this kind of pos-
| truth, at best it will make people better at evaluating
| information on its own merit, at worse it will make them better
| at evaluating its origin.
| masswerk wrote:
| A somewhat concerning observation: there seems to be an inverse
| law of probability for a hallucinated answer for a (very) small
| number of authoritative sources. E.g., if there's something
| stated in a manufacturer's manual (which has been digitized and
| is in the corpus), but not quoted anywhere else, the probability
| of getting hallucinated but convincingly worded "facts" instead
| is very high. On the other end of the spectrum, where we enter
| the realm of big numbers and content quoted from quotations, the
| probability of this yielding a yet popular but not necessarily
| true answer is also high. There seems to be a clear trajectory:
| replacing authoritative information by hallucinations and
| amplifying this to popular _doxa,_ especially, since generated
| content is much more effective in traversing the contested
| middle-ground. Also, enter the new discipline of truth
| engineering optimization (TEO).
| dale_glass wrote:
| I don't think we're mentally ready for social media, even.
|
| What something like Twitter can inflict on a person when it goes
| wrong is absolutely unprecedented, and we still haven't adapted
| to it.
|
| Think that for instance going to the cinema, watching a movie,
| walking out and venting to a friend "Boy, this one sucked.
| $ACTOR_NAME did a really bad job with this one" is a perfectly
| normal thing to do.
|
| But move that to Twitter and it can become part of a years-long
| torrent of hate highly visible to that single person. Even if
| what you think you're doing is communicating with your 10
| friends. A retweet, a hashtag, or just the algorithm can
| magically make your comment part of an online mob.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Or give you the illusion that someone's listening, compellingly
| enough that you neglect the work of making friends in the real
| world.
| [deleted]
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Twitter and Reddit are probably far less toxic than platforms
| like Instagram and maybe Facebook due to a factor of reasons.
| The amount of criticism can easily distort its amplitude,
| although there are self-reinforcing effects between single
| critics.
|
| There is a reason why successful actors and personalities have
| a PR agency. If you become an "influencer" or just the focal
| point of the lastest discussion, you don't have that. It might
| work, but there is a reason why such agencies exist. They
| should not, but some people are quite enthusiastic.
|
| We would have been far more ready if people actually adhered to
| the advice to share personal information rather defensively.
| But the reward of attention was probably too large.
|
| I don't even believe mobs are a problem. Some opinions on
| topics will always converge. There just needs to be a way to
| escape them. In most cases there are trivial ones. It would be
| a huge loss if we restrict the net because some people wanted
| attention and got not so nice feedback.
| figassis wrote:
| I never understood why this makes social media hard. If you
| leave the theater and then go around town shouting that movie X
| sucked and actor Y was really bad, you might also get some
| responses and maybe show up on the news a a crazy person,
| prejudiced, or some other adjectives. So you don't, you tell
| your friends, some of which might call you an idiot for not
| getting it, and other might agree. If you tweet it out, you're
| potentially asking the entire planet to weigh in, well, have
| fun with that.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| GP says "the consequences of speaking normally are radically
| different now" and your retort is "I don't get why this is
| hard, just always perfectly self-censor."
|
| Of course one'd have to do so in a way that one'd never
| offend anyone, ever, across the entire planet. Seems like an
| unrealistic response.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You could also send it in an email or text message to a
| limited set of friends, and then one of them screenshots it
| and posts it to the wider internet. You could also be caught
| on a recording or video saying the thing to a limited set of
| friends, and have it go viral on the internet.
|
| In any case, "going around town shouting" is not at all akin
| to twitter. It is more like having a public board where you
| write things signed with your name. Anyone can look at it,
| but it takes zero effort to _not_ look at it, and for most
| people, no one looks at it except their friends who want to
| look at it.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| While I am sympathetic to people who suddenly go viral, I have
| no real issues with actors who opted into the limelight seeing
| a stream of negative reactions to their work. They choose that
| and actively sought fame. And even leaving that aside, they put
| their work out there to billions of people. Those people should
| be expected to provide feedback.
|
| A Starbucks barista didn't opt into that world. And they did
| not get paid a very large sum of money, in part to compensate
| them for (and let them pay other people to handle) the torrent
| of negativity.
| roenxi wrote:
| Any evidence we are ready for mass media? The internet era
| suggests that there has always been a flood of lies and half-
| truths and there is an uncomfortable dawning realisation that
| the voters in most democracies would actually rather adopt
| peaceful policies if the media aren't ginning up a fight.
|
| What Twitter does to someone is unfortunate. What radio and
| broadcasting resulted in for Europe through the 1940s was
| arguably worse. Coordinated madness is much more dangerous than
| individual lunacy.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > radio and broadcasting resulted in for Europe through the
| 1940s
|
| Are you arguing that radio and broadcasting are the cause of
| WW2?
| ketzo wrote:
| They're definitely indirect causes of the rise of Hitler,
| sure.
| thefz wrote:
| My point exactly. We are already living in a post-truth world
| in which the most likes or followers count, more than truth,
| not the factual accuracy of "influencers".
| aero-deck wrote:
| No one has ever cared about factual accuracy except for the
| military. All other social benefits of "facts" trickle-down
| from there.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| On social media, IMO, People have too much identity fusion with
| their online accounts. Including me. I think Karma points and
| all the clout people have over time creates an anchoring that
| is problematic.
|
| In life, if things get toxic, the smart move is to just leave,
| and avoid the conflict and the personalities driving it. But so
| much work by the Meta's of this world has been done to make
| people nest in their accounts. This creates the belief that
| leaving and starting fresh with a new handle is a terrible
| prospect. An this is totally to the detriment of the user.
|
| If you were in a cafe talking with a group, and someone started
| screaming at you over your personal opinion, and you found
| yourself getting upset, you'd probably just leave. For some
| reason that doesn't happen online, and I think it's due to the
| nesting.
|
| Like if I say something on twitter that people disagree with
| enough to not let go after a few hours. I'm just going to block
| them. I just don't have the energy to bother with rando's
| beyond a civil disagreement. Or take getting banned on a forum
| because of some demigod style rule. well, shrugs, I'll just go
| slow and get another account and let that one sail by.
|
| In a way, i think 4chan get's it right with everyone being
| anonymous to each other.
| chasd00 wrote:
| the monetized platforms will fight tooth and nail to keep you
| in your same account. When you create a new one the profiling
| starts all over again and they have to build up your
| information to serve you ads. The longer you remain on a
| platform using the same account the easier it is to get you
| to click.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I'd argue there is reasonable evidence that we were ready for
| the printing press. Everything beyond that, not so much.
| sircastor wrote:
| Humans are never "ready" for the next crazy technological
| advance. I'm fond of this concept that I heard a while back, that
| I'm probably going to butcher: If a technology comes out before
| you were born, or while you're very young, it's always existed.
| If it comes out when you're in your 20s, it's new and exciting.
| If it comes out after you're 35, it's scary and is a harbinger of
| ensuing disaster.
|
| We always manage to figure it out. It's a cat & mouse game, and
| the next generation will probably manage it.
|
| I don't mean to be casual about this, but does anyone think of
| how miraculous it is that in the past 80 years we haven't had a
| nuclear war?
| k1t wrote:
| Pretty close:
|
| _" I've come up with a set of rules that describe our
| reactions to technologies:
|
| 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and
| ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
|
| 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and
| thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can
| probably get a career in it.
|
| 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the
| natural order of things."
|
| - Douglas Adams_
| Haugsevje wrote:
| [flagged]
| Havoc wrote:
| The comment by Yuval Noah Harari seemed insightful to me. If you
| argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it's a
| bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. ie you can never
| pursuade the bot but it can wear you down / eventually find an
| argument that works.
|
| The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having
| a chilling effect on all discourse
|
| Aside from the whole skynet thing the above is what spooks me the
| most
| Animats wrote:
| > If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not
| knowing it's a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline.
| i.e. you can never persuade the bot, but it can wear you down /
| eventually find an argument that works.
|
| That's a useful insight. The one on one wearing-down process
| came from theology. It's sometimes called Jesuitry. Members of
| the Society of Jesus were trained to do that sort of thing, and
| they got so good at it that the whole organization was
| suppressed in the 1700s.[1] There are still Jesuit-run schools
| in the US, and they do tend in that direction. "Never argue
| with a Jesuit", said Richard Nixon.
|
| Since mass media, large scale use of one on one convincing has
| gone out of fashion. It's not cost-effective. With large
| language models, it's back.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_the_Society_of_...
| aero-deck wrote:
| The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that
| discourse these days is overheated.
|
| There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have
| played on people to convince them that the text and images
| consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically
| relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that
| text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant
| "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Alternatively, everyone will have chatbots that act as their
| agents. It will be a huge cesspool of chatbots arguing with
| each other.
| aero-deck wrote:
| right - like how the stock market behaves nowadays w/ quant
| traders - which then motivated people to construct
| darkpools of liquidity where the real trading happens.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I would predict that the chilling effect will be lesser for
| "unreasonable" voices such as trolls and extremists, and will
| be greater for the moderate voices.
|
| This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social
| media has shown.
| uoaei wrote:
| The entire thesis of TFA is that human psychological traits
| on societal scales are not prepared to handle an arena of
| discourse where that's true, that people will either be duped
| or completely check out of discourse per se, not limited to
| online social media.
|
| You hold the opposite position. Why?
| aero-deck wrote:
| Because there are actually multiple "arenas of discourse"
| and people will simply switch the "marketplace" they're
| using.
|
| It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a
| single such arena and that all the others are
| illegitimate/dangerous.
| uoaei wrote:
| No, it's a feature of the human mind that truth is
| considered objective independent of the lens used to
| acquire it. "Post-truth" sources in some arenas will be
| conflated with "real-truth" sources in others, leading to
| a blanket demotion of the perceived value and quality of
| truth. The whole argument from TFA is about human
| psychology, not about specific offerings of
| "marketplaces" where truth may be more or less maligned.
| aero-deck wrote:
| dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're
| heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is
| not a discussion that HN handles well.
|
| IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake
| here are people's values, not their understanding of math
| and physics. When people worry about "post-truth",
| they're worried about liberal values no longer being the
| unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and
| if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder
| to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably
| means those activities are making people net unhappy.
| People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for,
| even the dumb ones.
| uoaei wrote:
| TFA = the f'ing article, something quite commonly
| understood on HN for time immemorial. Its snark is borne
| of the community's distaste of the kind of people who
| dive into comment sections without engaging with the very
| subject of and reason the comment thread exists in the
| first place. The fact you don't recognize this acronym
| calls into question your authority on what HN can or
| can't handle. But anyway, that's beside the point.
|
| We are (well, I am, and TFA is) not talking about
| epistemology so much as the public's inability to engage
| with epistemological problems on systemic scales. Instead
| the limits of human psychology control how we as a
| society respond to these issues. Your argument is a
| distraction that remains uncontextualized within the
| conversation it finds itself in.
|
| People are not dumb animals but you won't be able to
| engage anyone toward a solution on the basis of an
| argument about how they just need to understand more
| about epistemology. That's the kind of thing that people
| can only internalize via empirical means.
|
| At this point it feels like you're being deliberately
| obtuse. I've been quite clear about the primacy of human
| psychological limits as the main aspect of the argument
| and you simply refuse to engage with this point. You
| haven't been very good about adding to the conversation,
| only diverting it.
| aero-deck wrote:
| > the public's inability to engage with epistemological
| problems on systemic scales
|
| The public's inability? What about everyone's inability.
| No one deals well with epistemological problems on a
| systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude
| themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.
|
| I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The
| difference is that I don't think the psychological limits
| of the creators are any different from those of the
| users. If anything, I think the creators are more
| psychologically limited than the users. This is because
| the creators need to explain to themselves why they are
| creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it.
| When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check
| out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.
|
| Also, of course I didn't read the article....
| cvoss wrote:
| "Overheated" and "chilled" aren't antonyms here, at least not
| in the sense I think you're using them.
|
| Overheated: the discourse has too much anger or vitriol, or
| is too personal and emotionally charged.
|
| Chilled: people have given up on discoursing at all.
|
| If this is what you mean, I don't think we want less
| discourse as a solution to bad discourse. We want to maintain
| but temper the discourse.
| aero-deck wrote:
| We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement
| with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is
| happening. People being too angry is caused by people
| discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite
| problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't
| suffer from those.
|
| Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic
| political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only
| we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is
| like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted
| after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.
| cvoss wrote:
| Personally, that's not been my experience at all. I often
| find that when I have two friends with highly disparate
| and deeply held beliefs, the intense emotions they
| associate to these ideas are due to them _not_ actually
| engaging each other but, instead, taking their emotional
| cues from their respective ideological silos (where no
| real discourse is occurring), and then proceeding to talk
| past each other.
|
| Learning how to actually talk to one another in good
| faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes
| with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can
| worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived
| notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality.
| This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying
| story about the other, which _increases_ , rather than
| decreases, the emotional charge between the two.
| aero-deck wrote:
| engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with
| them. "engagement" is what social media companies say
| they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".
| sfg wrote:
| I talk about political matters for ideas, education, and
| stimulation (mine and the other person's), rather than to beat
| them into taking on my position. I'd certainly walk away from a
| conversation long before I'm worn down into taking on their
| views.
|
| I think this interchange of thought and sharing of ideas is the
| true essence of discourse. That other thing is more of a verbal
| tribal battle. I can see issues with bots swinging the
| political landscape in ways that cause harm, but I think there
| is good reason to think discourse might flourish.
| Fundamentally, if the competitive arguers are discouraged,
| whilst the curious and conversational are encouraged, or at
| least not hurt, then discourse itself wins.
| haxiomic wrote:
| I don't think political swings are likely to happen from
| improving curious thoughtful discourse, these things are
| dwarfed by blunt evocative approaches that reach broad
| segments of voting society
|
| We might find discourse flourishes corners of discussion on
| the internet but the wider internet is much more at risk to
| these approaches
| itairall wrote:
| It is a straw man to pretend that political discussion looks
| like an Intelligence Squared debate when almost all the time it
| looks like a food fight about nonsense.
|
| The idea the world will be worst off with less flame wars is
| simply wrong IMO.
|
| I would already rate the discourse I have had with chatGPT4 as
| the best of my life.
|
| I win if I learn something. It strikes me as highly perverse to
| view that the only way to win is to not play the game because
| you can't brow beat the bot into submission.
|
| THAT is though what we mean by "political discussion". A
| bullshit pie throwing contest until one side quits. A twitter
| flame war. Yes, hopefully AI completely destroys that.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Very much unlike pre-AI political arguments with real people on
| the internet.
| dsego wrote:
| Sounds almost like arguing with a conservative and expecting to
| convince them with rational arguments.
|
| PS Intended as a lighthearted jab, please don't get offended.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| A lot of times you don't argue with someone to prove to them
| you are right, but to prove to bystanders that there are
| different ways of looking at this. Refusing to engage will not
| make the world a better place if the only ones talking are
| idiots.
| civilized wrote:
| There are plenty of pushy humans who are prepared to talk you
| into submission. Check out your local Scientology or Lyndon
| LaRouche movement office. Would you talk interminably with a
| pushy human? How is the AI any different?
| mandmandam wrote:
| The differences that jump out at me are in cost, scale and
| accountability.
|
| It's _work_ recruiting people to your cause. It 's expensive,
| and takes time and attention and resources. People have
| consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they
| need training and guidance and oversight.
|
| Letting a bot loose for your cause costs _pennies_. It can be
| updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine
| tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the
| vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
|
| The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the
| like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet;
| absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to
| the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.
| b1n wrote:
| You may not ever be able to persuade a bot, but you can
| identify if it is capable of repudiating your points or not.
| You can ascertain if it is arguing in good faith and chose to
| end an argument if it isn't.
|
| When you say "find an argument that works" isn't this just
| saying that they've said something you find persuasive?
|
| What's wrong with this? How is this different to any other
| argument in good faith?
| cvoss wrote:
| Because we have to assume not everyone can ascertain what are
| bad faith or dishonest arguments, or even good faith but
| illogical arguments. People are fallable and can be persuaded
| by bad arguments. So the point is, given enough time, the
| person will make a mistake and fall for a bad argument.
| imtringued wrote:
| As someone struggling to destroy some of my own beliefs,
| due to their potential to waste a lot of my time. I have
| failed to do so.
|
| The perceptions of other disagreeing people ended up just
| being one more way to validate them because you end up
| seeing the same pattern of mistakes over and over again.
| null0pointer wrote:
| I've noticed some humans are willing to argue without giving up
| too. Sometimes online arguments follow a pattern where each
| response is longer than the last until one person decides it's
| not worth their time to continue the argument. In my head I've
| called this "argument by attrition".
| [deleted]
| DantesKite wrote:
| Humans are like that too.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I think you're mistaken at least with current AI. It's very
| easy to condition them into a new frame or mind if you speak to
| them in a certain way. They're also very prone to "trope" -
| where when your sprinkle a few hints of something that's common
| they'll fall right into line with behavior associated to it.
|
| We forget that AI becomes more human as it gets more
| intelligent. These are not computers programmed with a hard
| limitation anymore, they're actually more prone to being
| manipulated than other humans are.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| From a Bayesian perspective, the only way to play and not lose
| is to not update your priors, at all, forever. (I suppose that
| "not playing" winds up much the same - you don't have any input
| on which to falsely update your priors.)
|
| But people who absolutely will not update their priors is not
| likely to work out well in the long run...
| afro88 wrote:
| I've yet to see an AI bot that is both realistic and
| intelligent enough to keep me engaged (GPT4), but also can't be
| convinced that 1 + 1 = 3 (also GPT4)
| HuhWhatMeansYou wrote:
| [dead]
| gavanwilhite wrote:
| While this sounds wise at first glance, this is just clearly
| not true to anyone who's used ChatGPT.
|
| The problem is usually the opposite (sycophancy)
| earthboundkid wrote:
| This is dumb idea from someone who does not use online forums.
| When someone keeps making stupid points against me online, I
| get only more dug in on my views. If anything, you would want
| to make a bot to say "Not X" so the pro-X side could feel
| better about how dumb the opposition to X is.
| [deleted]
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Bots or no bots, that'w why arguing on the Internet is
| pointless.
|
| I could argue with you, "Havoc", for a while, and perhaps
| convince you that there are 2/3/7 genders, or whatever, and
| then as sure as the sun rises, along comes another user. Or
| infinite set of.
|
| Most social media is "man yells at cloud", quite literally.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| IDK having everyone check out on social media to interact with
| definite humans in meatspace probably is net positive.
| x86x87 wrote:
| [flagged]
| pookha wrote:
| When I think of "post-truth" I'm thinking of systems that people
| mistakenly lock themselves into where they're fed simplistic and
| surface level facts that have to align with the systems goals.
| classic example being an activist for a political system (1960's
| Maoist or whatever)... Why can't I use AI to analyze the immense
| amounts of content I'm being faced with so as to gauge bias and
| innuendo? Maybe ML could help me parse this article to understand
| what milieu this author belongs to and what his biases might be?
| meroes wrote:
| People are just asking to be ruled. Cool talk to your companion
| AI while actual psychopaths achieve power in the real world.
|
| Humans _are_ apparently ready for it. There is so much
| enthusiasm, and HN is ahead of the curve. This article is 100%
| wrong. The coming world is _not_ post truth, and people are ready
| for what's coming. They want enjoyment rather than freedom.
|
| Be my guest.
| redeeman wrote:
| yeah... this is a very old problem, one that was also there when
| newspapers/media began. Most things people are exposed to are
| lies, now it is coming into the hands of the ordinary person,
| instead of the elite, and now its a problem :)
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Ah yes. Only the govt and large companies should have a defacto
| "monopoly" on "truth" and propaganda, is it?
| nologic01 wrote:
| The online world is getting increasingly dystopic while the
| offline world is being deprecated at rapid pace.
|
| The article is part of that dystopia, the collapsing trust, the
| lack of honest, down to earth discussion of what is going on.
|
| There is no AI, there are algorithms and data and people angling
| for advantage to both privileged collection of data and
| unencumbred application of algos to affect people's lives.
|
| In sense there is nothing much new just an intensification that
| has been carefully choreographed into a mass hysteria.
| zeruch wrote:
| They aren't even ready for a truth world. We're optimized for
| self-delusion on a good day.
|
| The future is going to be a baklava of fast-cut CGI-grade
| hallucinatory blandishments and threats at scale.
| seydor wrote:
| How do we know that this article wasn't written by an evil AI
| that wants to stop us from developing a counter-AI
| legendofbrando wrote:
| Counter point: sure they are.
|
| Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information
| availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal
| norms and cultural memes are for. "Don't believe everything you
| hear" "Don't believe what you see on TV" "if it sounds too good
| to be true, it probably is." These are all ways that the human
| species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not
| to fall victim to false information.
|
| Of course some people are going to fall victim. They do so today
| through common scams. It is the right goal to bring this down to
| zero. But to say that the human species isn't capable belies all
| prior history and shows little faith in the resilience that made
| us who we are.
|
| That's the broad problem with this AI doom and gloom: it has so
| little knowledge of and respect for the humanities and humankind
| that it arrogantly assumes that our species has never faced
| challenges like this before. It throws up its hands instead of
| asking what lessons from history we should take and what actions
| we should be focused on.
|
| If I'm being generous, I think that these pieces attempt to stir
| panic as a means for spurring action for change and investment in
| these problems. That's a meaningful goal, but one that also might
| be more meaningfully achieved if it wasn't expressing the problem
| with such gloom.
| personjerry wrote:
| 50 years ago humans weren't prepared for a smartphone, internet
| "post-connected" world and here we are. We adapt and grow.
| pjerem wrote:
| No hasty conclusions.
|
| We switched to this always connected world only 10-15 years
| ago and I think we are far from having seen all the
| consequences.
|
| Algorithmic bubbles, mass surveillance, addictive algorithms
| and applications are fairly recent and we can already see
| really disgusting consequences.
|
| Our civilization is resilient so it takes time to erode but
| since a few years, I have hard time imagining a positive
| technological future. All I see is technology made to exploit
| human breaches for money.
|
| Humans don't look like they are adapting to Tik Tok properly
| so I'm not confident they'll understand this new AI powered
| world.
|
| (I have no doubt that powerful and dominant humans will
| adapt)
| brayhite wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not so sure we can say we've "adapted" to this
| world. In my opinion, we aren't ready for the future with
| AI because we haven't yet figured out today's world without
| its prevalence.
| highwaylights wrote:
| The sum of all human knowledge in every pocket and all we
| use it for is to view fake photos of fake people living
| their fake lifestyles.
|
| We were gonna cure cancer and explore space. It's shameful.
| krapp wrote:
| Someone would argue that humans still haven't adapted to
| smartphones or the internet post-connected world and that
| constant connectivity is a cancer that's destroying our
| minds, emotions and civilization at large.
| highwaylights wrote:
| It feels weird that you can state something so obvious so
| far down a thread and it's literally the only mention of
| it.
|
| We haven't adapted successfully, we aren't adapting
| successfully and we won't adapt successfully.
|
| We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on
| it now, we may have been even better off before the
| Internet.
|
| By any conceivable perspective you would care to measure
| we're failing abysmally as a collective at identifying fact
| from fiction.
| dv_dt wrote:
| It's difficult to separate the effects of smartphones and
| wildly increasing wealth inequality.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| It's the easiest thing ever. Just look around to people,
| or use a smartphone yourself. It's hard to see if you are
| too addicted to the amusement matrix to see it though. In
| that case just read the recent research of Jonathan
| Haidt.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Quite frankly, he looks like everything I would expect
| from a pop psychologist attached to a business school.
| The Hetrodox Academy he founded has this criticism:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy
|
| "According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy
| advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by
| playing into or presenting the argument that such views
| are suppressed by left-wing bias or political
| correctness. Commenators such as Beauchamp and Chris
| Quintana, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
| have disputed Heterodox Academy's contention that college
| campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis," noting the
| lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy
| groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to
| narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the
| biases they allege."
| RGamma wrote:
| Perhaps the ones to best adapt are simultaneously the ones
| to be the least sensitive to or caring about its ill
| effects. Not a great setup...
| moonchrome wrote:
| > We adapt and grow.
|
| Population is shrinking in the "post-connected" world
| mdanger007 wrote:
| If the tech info bubbles that are isolating us from basic
| truths like who is president and should I take a vaccine
| are any indication, the further reach of algorithms is a
| harrowing prospect
| RGamma wrote:
| Grow? More like derail... Where have you been the past decade
| and how do I get there?
| dv_dt wrote:
| And before that people had worries about TV(dancing and rock
| and roll), and radio (war of the worlds), multiple music
| related scares sprinkled throughout.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| We CAN'T adapt. There are no biological mechanisms inside
| your head to _adapt_ to Tiktok. There are plenty of
| mechanisms which make you an addict to it, though.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| It is estimated that between 50% and 70% of folks have no inner
| monologue.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| CPU savings for the simulation they aren't "real" like the
| rest of us.
| bazeblackwood wrote:
| so by your logic, it's the "real" entities which will
| inevitably experience pain, suffering, and death; meanwhile
| I will reincarnate eternally as part of the program's grand
| design, simply because my thoughts are abstract instead of
| an auditory hallucination? ever consider maybe your
| "internal dialogue" is actually the instructions the
| programmers have to keep ramming in your face so you
| actually complete your quests?
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Inner monologue refers to the experience of perceiving one's
| thoughts as auditory. People who do not have an inner
| monologue are still capable of thinking.
| interstice wrote:
| How is that an issue?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| That seems insane to me. I'm always chattering away up there,
| I can't imagine it otherwise.
| strken wrote:
| I have an inner monologue, but it's just one of many
| different ways to think and I don't always choose to use
| it.
|
| What happens when you consider a spatial problem like an IQ
| test? Do you have to talk your way through it? If you see
| an art piece, do you only appreciate it through the
| monologue, or does it feel beautiful in a non-verbal way
| too?
| aerfio wrote:
| For me it's insane that some people "talk" to themselves in
| their heads, expressing your ideas as words seems so slow
| in comparison to "thinking in ideas"
| ben_w wrote:
| I can think in ideas pure non-verbal ideas, and have on
| occasion noticed that my inner monologue is just
| describing the idea I've already had.
|
| When I try to shortcut the monologue on the grounds I
| already know what I'm thinking about, it feels wrong.
|
| This hasn't been much of a problem recently, possibly
| because my inner monologue has sped up to match that I
| watch and listen to YouTube and podcasts and audiobooks
| in ~ double speed.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I also talk a lot to myself so my inner dialogue becomes an
| external dialogue when I'm alone doing mindless stuff like
| cleaning or putting groceries away - I find it just keeps
| my mind active and in the present without tuning out.
|
| One of the funniest things was when I was working at a bike
| shop. The owner was a really cool guy and would visit the
| store from time to time. I was stocking some bike rack
| stuff on one side of a dual display, talking about an app I
| was essentially brainstorming over out loud while I was
| doing this mindless task.
|
| I walked around the display and owner was standing there.
| He looked at me with a smile and says, "That was quite the
| discussion you were having with yourself. Sounds like a
| great idea for an app."
|
| We both started laughing and I had to explain him why I did
| this.
| jackjeff wrote:
| Wow. I had no idea that was a thing. I thought that's just
| something they do in movies. But I don't have a mind's eye
| either (aphantasia). So I guess that's on brand for me.
|
| That doesn't mean I can't "talk to myself" in a way or
| think about stuff. I just have no auditory sensation
| whatsoever. It's just abstract/immaterial reasoning. I'd
| wager if I did an FMRI the audio part would not light up
| but the speech part would.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| You don't have visual dreams?
|
| If I say "pink elephant," you don't one? Or better yet,
| if i say "Dumbo," you don't see the ears?
|
| You don't hear songs in your head?
|
| If I write "I'll be back" you don't hear it now in a
| thick German accent?
|
| Inconceivable! (As they say)
| generic92034 wrote:
| > If I write "I'll be back" you don't hear it now in a
| thick German accent?
|
| Now you have made me curious. Where would the thick
| German accent be, when pronouncing those words? I can
| imagine other sentences (anything with "th", for example)
| where you would hear a German accent. But with "I'll be
| back"?
| Filligree wrote:
| Not OP, but I'm in the same position, so let me answer.
|
| - I do get visual dreams. That's the only time I have a
| visual imagination; that, or if I'm on the verge of
| sleeping.
|
| - If you say "pink elephant", I've got the concepts of
| elephant, pink and so on in my head. I can 'see' the
| geometry in a way, but it's totally abstract. Think of it
| like a pink elephant in a game where the renderer is off,
| and you won't go far wrong; all the information is there,
| and I can use it, I just don't _see_ anything. Not as a
| hallucination, and not 'off to the side' either.
|
| - I absolutely do hear songs in my head. Aphantasia
| usually only refers to visual imagination.
|
| - If I _want_ to hear it in a German accent, I do. By
| default, while I read something there 's no auditory
| element at all. If I'm reading a book, I'll usually
| narrate the spoken sentences to myself and not do so for
| the other text; it's a matter of choice. Narrating it
| slows down my reading a lot, to the speed of fast speech.
| pxc wrote:
| For me, the aural examples you gave are much more vivid
| than the visual ones. Some people have one of those forms
| of imagination but not the other at all!
| dan_quixote wrote:
| Got a decent citation? I can't even fathom what that would be
| like. I'd bet my daily inner monologue is 100X what I
| actually speak out loud.
| mkl wrote:
| One of them was Albert Einstein: "The words of the language,
| as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role
| in my mechanism of thought." -- https://www.creativitypost.co
| m/article/aping_einstein#:~:tex...
|
| Your comment seems like a non sequitur.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Wow, it's a sourced quote too (rare for Einstein on the
| internet). How do you write a paper without thinking in
| words? I need to talk to someone who doesn't think in
| words, I just can't believe it otherwise.
| dqh wrote:
| For me it's almost like 'seeing' or 'knowing' the 'shape'
| of things and the relationships between them. Translating
| to words is sort of a seperate step at output. It's
| difficult for me to describe.
| yusefnapora wrote:
| Well, I can do math, but I very rarely "think in
| mathematics." Rather, I approach most math problems
| linguistically, by essentially making up a little word
| problem in my head and reasoning through it. However, I
| know other people who approach math in a completely
| different way. They seem to have an intuitive
| "calculating sense," and only use language "after the
| fact" to record the result or explain it to others.
|
| So in the same sense that I can use math without it being
| central to my thinking, it doesn't seem hard to believe
| that others can use language without it being central to
| their thinking.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| This is a hilariously naive take.
|
| We, as humans, are well beyond being mentally ready for the
| internet and social media alone. Most of the key communication
| of the 20th Century was based on a tradition of duty and
| service in reporting and, generally, leadership. The Natzis of
| the 40s died not because the idea was 'wrong' (which it was)
| but because bad leadership and greed caused extinction. Before
| Poland, Europe was plenty happy letting Hitler be. Why was
| Hitler successful? Because he told people what they wanted to
| hear. You are better. We are better. We deserve more. It's
| _their_ fault we are like this.
|
| Self bias is the critical failure of the human mind. Tell
| someone that they deserve more and that they are better than
| others and they will believe you.
|
| In a world where politicians and companies (same thing really)
| can use AI to collect your online persona and then fill your
| day with advertising designed just for you, telling you that
| you are right and it is 'them' who are wrong will work on
| nearly everyone. It already does. People watch news channels
| and follow influencers that make their feeds echo chambers, it
| drives extremism. How does a society tell you that you are
| wrong, that the other person is right?
|
| Humanity and humankind made Hitler. Humanity and human kind
| will make tools that succeed at their goals to make others do
| what they want. We are already in freefall, this is a rocket
| booster on our back.
| goatlover wrote:
| How is that any different form the past several thousand
| years of civilization? Hitler wasn't the first or only
| genocidal dictator. He wasn't alone in the 20th century
| either. Colonization and the slave trade were worse, albeit
| spread over several centuries. But empires waging war,
| conquering, enslaving, eradicating other groups and
| manipulating citizens has been going on for a long, long
| time.
|
| Plato wrote to counter the sophists and skeptics of his day.
| The gospels have Pilate asking Jesus a philosophical
| question, "What is truth?" This is hardly new, just the
| technology is better.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| How is it any different? Are you serious? For the
| overwhelming majority of our time on this planet
| communications were limited to word of mouth over
| geographically limited areas. Now it is trivial for any
| form of bullshit to spread worldwide in minutes. The stakes
| have changed.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| This change came already with the invention of radio. We
| have a century of radio and TV propaganda of the
| absolutely vilest kind behind us already. At least now
| there is an exchange with the instant communications, not
| only one-way.
| synetic wrote:
| It did not already come as you say. We are in a new era.
| It is now very easy to target specific people over a wide
| geographic region and to do so cheaply. It is easy for
| bad actors to hone in on those susceptible to the false
| beliefs they peddle. Hence the rise of morons who won't
| vaccinate their children. I've read that around 50
| percent of the posts online are bot driven. Soon that
| percentage will be a lot bigger. This is an era of easy,
| cheap, targeted messaging. It's an era where we will
| mostly exist in information bubbles whose messages cater
| to what we are most susceptible to being influenced by.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| Disinformation is the narrative constructed by crumbling
| authorities of mainstream media desperately trying to preserve
| their power.
|
| You might think like their narrative is "think critically, and
| consider everything critically".
|
| But the actual message is, your fellow humans are stupid, they
| fall for misinformation and fake sources. Ignore all
| alternative sources of information and most importantly, do not
| trust your friends and people you know, instead assume they are
| stupid and when they contradict the authority, be sure to put
| up a firewall and stop the propagation of dangerous thoughts.
|
| Truth is always more powerful than lies. Don't underestimate
| your own reasoning capabilities, and if you do underestimate
| them, the most important thing to do is to train them. I'm not
| saying to argue against an anonymous bot, but if you meet in
| person, if your friends have non standard ideas, don't assume
| they are stupid and fell for misinformation. Not everyone on
| the other side is stupid, or heartless, or bad.
|
| They are trying to inject faults into various alternative
| information sources just to turn around and catch them and say
| "see? This podcaster is a conspiracy theorist and unreliable!".
|
| It's mainstream media which benefits the most from efficient
| fault and spam injection into alternative information sources,
| because it makes them relatively more trustworthy. And it is
| actually against the interests of alternative news sources to
| be caught in a lie because it is likely to erode their
| reputation.
|
| If you're confused by the whole disinformation phenomenon, ask
| the simple question, who benefits.
|
| And remember that the media's willingness to intentionally lie
| and deceive their readers is directly proportional to the cost
| to your reputation, and the likeliness of your readers to
| discover the truth.
| synetic wrote:
| I think a great many people are actually stupid and easily
| lead astray. There are large numbers of people who won't
| vaccinate their children (not talking about Covid vaccine).
| Such a person is either stupid or a victim of misinformation.
| Humans are easily persuadable. This is particularly true with
| a group of people echoing who feel slighted or are angry
| about some perceived injustice.
|
| The mob mentality is real and it makes its participants
| vulnerable to making bad decisions and going with the flow.
| We see this with the cult like devotion of Trump supporters.
| We see examples in consumerism. There was a time when people
| fought each other over a Cabbage Parch Doll. Our moments of
| lucid analysis of an issue or speech occur far less often
| than our moments of "going with the flow".
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| And my general experience with anti vaxers is that they
| generally look into more resources and research and put
| much more thoughts into their decisions than a regular
| person. Which I generally view as a positive quality. I put
| much more value on the process by which a person reached
| his decisions than whether they were correct in one
| particular instance.
|
| Whether I agree with their final conclusion is irrelevant,
| I can't with straight face call a person who spent his time
| carefully considering his decisions less intelligent than a
| person who didn't spend a single moment to think about it.
| Even if they reached the wrong conclusion.
|
| It's actually hilarious that you call them mob mentality.
| Going with the herd automatically is the most mob mentality
| possible.
|
| Have you tried talking to Trump supporters before you
| assumed they are "cult" and "mob"?
|
| You're exactly the kind of person I directed my post at.
| You've been successfully fooled into thinking other people
| are stupid without even trying to understand them.
|
| And for the record, I think flat earthers are more
| intelligent than people who never even asked themselves how
| do we know that the earth is spherical. They are not
| intelligent because they couldn't understand the answer,
| but they are more intelligent than a person who never even
| asked the question.
|
| The people I consider more intelligent than flat earthers
| tried asking this question, looked for the solution and
| could understand basic geometry enough to understand why it
| is true. Anyone else isn't more intelligent, just more
| conformal and knowledgeable. In the case of knowing the
| earth is flat, it's such well known fact it's just pure
| conformity never asking why, and I don't value that at all.
| It's not an intelligent trait.
| synetic wrote:
| _And my general experience with anti vaxers is that they
| generally look into more resources and research and put
| much more thoughts into their decisions than a regular
| person. Which I generally view as a positive quality. I
| put much more value on the process by which a person
| reached his decisions than whether they were correct in
| one particular instance._
|
| Ah. The, "they did their research" and "read lots of
| words" retort. It's ok that almost all of it is wrong.
| What matters is that they read a lot. They thought a lot
| about it! The thoughts were completely wrong but quantity
| over quality, right?
|
| Consider this. What does it say about you that you think
| people with no knowledge of or training in virology can
| legitimately said to have conducted research into the
| efficacy of vaccines?
|
| I have not successfully been fooled into thinking that
| people are dumb. All of us are dumb in certain areas. All
| of us can be manipulated. All of us are susceptible to
| false information. (Read up on the Gell-Mann amnesia
| effect as an example of this.)
|
| It is absolutely an intelligent trait to rely on the
| expert knowledge of others. Hence, flat earthers are
| incredibly dumb. The knowledge that the Earth is
| spheroidal has been known for many hundreds of years.
| Another example. Almost everyone knows that 1+1=2 despite
| the fact that very few people can actually prove it. It
| is not intelligence to question this fact. It is
| intelligence to ask how to prove it.
| bcrl wrote:
| Well, yesterday Youtube served me up an ad for an "AI"
| algorithmic trading service "only available to Canadians" and
| "backed by Elon Musk. It used "AI" generated audio and video
| of Musk to peddle an unregistered securities trading firm
| that tries to prey on the uninformed.
|
| That video is clearly disinformation / misinformation. There
| is zero chance that video would be played on a conventional
| broadcaster. Why? They have to be accountable for the content
| they put in front of viewers. Conventional broadcasters have
| to participate in advertising standards councils and answer
| to regulators.
|
| On the other hand, platforms are unaccountable and unwilling
| to act in the public interest. Profit trumps all. The average
| person has no idea how to record an ad that was just shown to
| them by a "platform". That video that was in the corner of
| the webpage that turns out to be scammy? Ooops, you scrolled
| too far or used the back button and it's now gone.
|
| There's a large swath of problems online that are clearly
| misinformation and / or disinformation. Nothing is going to
| improve on this front so long as "platforms" are wholly
| unaccountable to the general public. And we're running
| blindly forward into making this far, far worse before
| anything will change now that generative AI lowers the bar to
| produce bullshit that looks convincing on the first pass.
|
| Big tech disappoints me to no end.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| So you assume your fellow humans are stupid and will fall
| for this crap, and must be protected at all costs including
| the cost of regulation preventing speech?
|
| By the way, how's that scammer SBF doing? I heard he
| managed to scam even more money than that funny YouTube ad,
| and I think he was advertising on mainstream media too.
| Even got to lobby in Congress.
|
| This is still far from the leading mainstream narrative
| that "your fellow humans are stupid". By your anecdote I
| can learn that here we have another person who's capable of
| recognizing false information, therefore it isn't
| dangerous.
|
| Anyone who fell for disinformation is welcome to step in
| and contribute an anecdote to the opposite statistics so
| maybe I'll be convinced people really are guillible and
| need protecting.
|
| Somehow it's always other people who the speaker thinks are
| more stupid and will fall for something he sees as a scam.
| bcrl wrote:
| I have no expectation that everyone will fall for it, but
| I've seen my own elderly father get confused and drawn
| into scam ads. My irritation is that what little
| accountability in advertising that existed in the past is
| now gone, and that "platforms" are failing the general
| public by allowing these things to propagate.
|
| Put a button in the corner of the ad that says "report
| this", and get a human to check if the ad passes a smell
| test. If a platform can cancel accounts of random people
| for violating policies at random, they can put a small
| amount of effort into enforcing policies on advertisers.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| So now it's the elderly. I've seen them fall for phone
| scams much more commonly, they usually don't have the
| technical ability to use the internet.
|
| You're deflecting from the disinformation narrative into
| elderly scam. Which I agree is a problem, just a
| completely different one than the disinformation
| narrative presents.
| Cullinet wrote:
| >Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to
| information availability in the past they will adapt. This is
| what societal norms and cultural memes are for. "Don't believe
| everything you hear" "Don't believe what you see on TV" "if it
| sounds too good to be true, it probably is." These are all ways
| that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach
| ourselves how not to fall victim to false information.
|
| But who is parsing all the reciprocal new false and fallacios
| "truths" in this wonderful human way to sanitise the inputs to
| the next model that's evaluated? If humans could scale so
| easily there wouldn't be this problem in the first place.
| mimd wrote:
| "Post-truth"? What a bloody insult to all the effort it currently
| takes to fight past all their "truth" to find truth. Makes me
| start to think it's a less than sincere. At least due to their
| new signaling marketing slogan to fans, I can now easily identify
| their lean and possible motive. Tricks ya know, to deal with
| "truth".
|
| Complaining about google maps and navigation, is a really bad
| example to say over reliance on technology. What should we be
| navigating by stars? And most of their quotes aren't even really
| related to the complexities/strategies to
| identifying)/reexamining "truth" and dealing with all the
| unsavory if necessary actors. Larry Rosen is just trying to sell
| his pop novels to the masses. Michael Graziano's expertise is in
| cortex and motion, so I don't know what expertise he brings to
| the table though I suppose it's sincere. Michal Kosinski is at
| least sorta in the area, but also doesn't support their
| hypothesis beyond that it's going to have a major effect going
| forward.
|
| Really, I shouldn't have given them a click.
| helen___keller wrote:
| All you need to be ready is a commitment to not waste your time
| reading or contributing to online discourse.
| justbored123 wrote:
| [dead]
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I've been goofing off on twitter during down time between
| contracts and it's truly amazing if you go to a political
| "discussion" how many blue check "verified" accounts that are AI.
| I'm sure it's not just regular bots because they've responded to
| some of my troll remarks to them with a decent level of acuity
| and context. Going to their feed it's dead obvious that they are
| AI bots though, because their only reason for existence on there
| is pure mayhem and misinformation. I don't think Musk was talking
| about getting rid of bots, he was just talking about getting rid
| of _non-paying bots_
| burgerzzz wrote:
| Are we really currently living in a world saturated with truth?
| api wrote:
| Humans are not mentally ready for anything beyond tribes on the
| African savanna. Everything else is achieved via complicated
| brain hacks or social structure hacks that function like
| cognitive dongles to let a tribal hominid interface with a
| radically different world.
|
| We just need to develop a whole new battery of hacks for this
| world. It's happening slowly.
|
| I'm not convinced that AI is going to make things qualitatively
| different from social media. It may allow bad actors to produce a
| lot more bullshit but it's not like an environment saturated in
| bullshit is new.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| I'd argue we've been living already in a post-truth world. It's
| bizarre to think that you can know the truth on the internet.
| Because by the very mechanism of language and concepts, you're
| always abstracted away from truth. Not to mention layers of bias,
| management, interpretation and re-interpretation.
|
| Truth is experience, everything else is a belief. There was an
| idea that we were unified before the internet, but what that
| meant was that most people were receiving the same propaganda.
| The information channels were fractured by the internet, meaning
| that control across it was impossible.
|
| I'm not saying this comment is even truth, it's another opinion
| biased by my own world-view, beliefs etc. But trying to find
| truth on the internet is like trying to find a tasty book.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| So the problem I have with this sentiment is that the entire
| point of news organisations is to trace the validity of claims.
|
| The press have evolved a bunch of mechanisms to prove or disprove
| points in a story.
|
| AI doesn't really change this.
|
| Sure there are fakes, and yes you can create thousands of
| bullshit websites/text. But that was always true.
|
| Yes GenAi images are more concerning. But we've had photoshop for
| a long time, and some very talented people. Yes its slightly
| harder to spot a genai image, but with the correct tooling, its
| pretty trivial.
|
| The issue is, we have a crisis of funding for good quality news
| sources.
|
| News is a freeby now. Which means that the news you get is now
| either much more partisan (because "they" whomever you find
| creepy/shadowy/disagreeable, who are smear all over the political
| spectrum) or simply doesn't have the time to do basic research
| (see standard tech journalism, breathlessly re-formulating press
| releases. See Apple Vision Pro)
|
| So AI "propoganda" is a side show, the much bigger risk is a
| further dropping of standards amongst the assembled ranks of the
| press.
| m1el wrote:
| I am not scared for AI overflowing the news sites with bullshit.
| We already have a fire hydrant worth of bullshit content produced
| for consumption. Lies and fakes have coexisted with humans
| forever. People did rumours, then we had books, press, radio,
| television, and now the Internet. "But it's easier to produce
| lies/deepfakes today" -- true. However, the absolute cost of
| producing a lie per consumer already was negligible, and now it's
| even smaller. People will recalibrate their level of trust in
| technology and move on.
| fullshark wrote:
| You can see this with information sources in our lifetime.
| Cable news networks and infotainment channels like the
| Discovery/History Channel turned to garbage so people stopped
| trusting them. The same will happen to the internet / social
| media sites.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I really think we are already there. Just look at how media
| is divided and how other side is treated by the other...
|
| And then some fraction of middle hate it all...
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| The cost of producing a lie was not changing very fast, but the
| cost of pushing it out to lots of people has already plummeted.
|
| And now with LLMs even the cost of producing lies has
| plummeted, too.
|
| No matter how bad you think the past was, this problem just got
| worse.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| The "*fakes" are those what really scary. Usually day by day,
| normal population won't interact much farther than miles /
| kilometers from their work / home / travel path, the rest of
| info we got from digital media. Now that if we cannot trust
| the digital media, our ability to gather information for
| making decision will get worse.
|
| Let's say that nowadays I know that US has gun/ mass shooting
| problem from the digital news. But how when someday the media
| reporting that multiple countries, such as some EU countries
| and Canada also have mass shooting due to the change of gun
| laws, sooner or later we'll won't know the truth anymore.
|
| This is very dangerous because it can be used to manipulate
| people to accept what's bad as normal, and can argue then
| provide proof that's generated by AI.
|
| Hopefully we won't need to experience that issue.
| thfuran wrote:
| You don't think that everyone having to "recalibrate their
| level of trust" in something as pervasive and fundamental to
| modern society as "technology" is impactful? Even just photos,
| videos, audio recordings, and phone calls becoming utterly
| untrustworthy would be pretty significant. The cost of a widely
| disseminated fake being low per recipient is altogether
| different from the cost to produce a fake specifically targeted
| for a single use approaching zero.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Sure, but scale was limited. Comparing post-LLM production of
| rumours, fake news, and propaganda with previous methods is
| like comparing pre-industrial hand manufacturing with modern
| mass production.
|
| You can now turn electricity directly into propaganda
| furthering your cause, which is unprecedented.
| magwa101 wrote:
| [dead]
| nradov wrote:
| I am mentally ready for an AI-saturated post-truth world. Bring
| it on.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I already live in it. Humans have been lying this entire time,
| computers lying as well isn't a big difference.
| tgv wrote:
| I would call that attitude: pre-adult. It's drawing on false
| analogies to make an edgy point. It's not about "computers
| lying" (they've been lying since the first program), but on
| widespread counterfactual information, and the disappearance
| of the ability to distinguish between true and fabricated
| evidence. That's not something you already live in, unless
| you're psychotic.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > disappearance of the ability to distinguish between true
| and fabricated evidence
|
| As a single point to illustrate what im talking about, a
| lot of people who say things like you have here also took
| the Steele dossier hook line and sinker. Those same people
| refused to look at the DNC's emails, or Clinton's emails or
| Hunter's emails calling those disinformation. I think it's
| time to stop pretending peoples politics have much to do
| about evidence.
| meinheld111 wrote:
| 10 things everybody must read to be ready for the post truth
| world
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Whenever we have invented new mass media (books, radio,
| television, social media) it has taken a generation or two to
| manage the impacts, on a societal level. And in many cases, the
| intervening period was fraught with conflict and discord
| (religious schisms, rise of fascism, etc).
|
| The big problem is not whether you or I are ready. The problem
| is whether the "average joe" is ready for what's coming. No
| good in being ready if the rest of society is tearing itself
| apart and drags you into a war.
| nradov wrote:
| All periods throughout history have been fraught with
| conflict and discord. So what.
|
| Change comes regardless of whether anyone is ready or not.
| But the average Joes usually muddle through well enough.
| theprincess wrote:
| Controversial theory, most of the people who claim to be
| "ready", and seem oddly excited about the possibility of
| upheaval and turmoil, are already lost down some sort of
| algorithm induced ideological rabbit hole. Conveniently, one
| of the symptoms of hosting an internet mind-virus, is that
| you don't think internet mind-viruses are all that bad.
| ccrush wrote:
| https://archive.ph/XPkHV
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| miohtama wrote:
| AI is unrelated to post truth. We have been living the era of the
| fake news since 2016, when Russian trolls started to peddle with
| elections and President Trump created his legendary alternative
| facts. AI may exaggerate these issues, but not much. Anything AI
| can do can be done by human liars as well. If humans are not
| mentally ready then shit has already hit the fan and
| blaming/pointing the AI and its research or regulation is not
| constructive.
| [deleted]
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| And any patch of dirt that an airplane can traverse is one that
| you can traverse on foot.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or going back even before that. When media drove a invasion of
| different country on entirely lies. And no one involved has
| been prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
| oslac wrote:
| This isn't a new phenomena, and does not differ at all from a
| normal non-tech person getting their information from Google
| Search. Hidden motivations for this push left as an exercise for
| the astute reader.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Each generation will be OK with the tools they grew up with.
|
| I think of my now-deceased grandparents. They had to be closely
| monitored to avoid falling for mail-in scams, of all things. They
| were old enough that mail was a trusted source of information in
| their upbringing.
|
| I like to think about what will tip us over, as technologists.
| Venturing into sci-fi a little, I think brain-computer interfaces
| are going to be impossible for us to adapt to, if they ever
| arrive. Imagine spam _thoughts_. We 're not trained to ignore
| intrusive thoughts. But I agree we might just not be able to
| handle a website that constantly shifts its content to keep us
| engaged, blurring fact and fiction into the _perfect_ narrative
| to keep you clicking.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > They were old enough that mail was a trusted source of
| information in their upbringing.
|
| Rose-tinted glasses.
|
| The scams we all know-and-love from our e-mail mailboxes today:
| romance-scams, advance-fee fraud, pyramid-schemes, and more,
| were all prevalent in the physical mail in decades past.
| scotty79 wrote:
| When were humans ready for anything?
| softbt wrote:
| Really don't like the idea that we will act as interfaces for the
| AI, I honestly believe it will only many the majority of people
| lazier and dumber. I'm also incredibly shocked that no one is
| talking about AI as a friend/companion, that has to not be good
| for you in the long run. Humans need real human connection, AI is
| too artificial for that (duh). Having AI friends will be
| equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked
| meals growing up. Yes, people that grow up on fast food are still
| alive, but they are less happy and have more health problems
| (mental and physical), but it did the "job", that job was to fuel
| them. In this case, AI will do its job, make people less
| "lonely", but I highly doubt it's a replacement for human
| companionship.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| > Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food
| instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up
|
| A person who is starving will do better with fast food than
| with no food at all.
|
| It's far from ideal, but for some people this will make their
| lives marginally more tolerable.
| cal85 wrote:
| This analogy is not even wrong. Yes, if someone was suffering
| _starvation_ I 'd give them whatever food was available, but
| that is not a situation in which we find ourselves _ever_ -
| it does not occur, nor does the analogous situation occur.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| I absolutely does occur and we are an increasingly lonely
| society to the point it is a serious health concern. There
| are people with no meaningful social contact and for one
| reason or another the inability to get it.
| cal85 wrote:
| What I said does not occur is finding oneself in a
| situation where someone is about to die and the only
| available food that can save their life is junk food.
|
| In the analogous situation, someone is just about to die
| of loneliness and the only available loneliness-solver is
| chatbots - also something that does not occur.
|
| Yes, in both of these highly improbable situations,
| saving the life comes above long term health
| considerations. But that is not a good point.
| pc86 wrote:
| Nobody who is starving decides to just go through the drive
| through.
|
| Fast food is convenient, that's it.
| criddell wrote:
| Convenient, inexpensive, delicious.
|
| You might personally disagree on any of those points but
| for enough people it's true.
| dsego wrote:
| I mean, you could say the same about drugs. I don't think
| people spend their money rationally, there is piss-poor
| folk spending money on booze and unhealthy diets.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| jrm4 wrote:
| Hard for me to strongly distinguish this from e.g. following
| celebrities and today, youtubers et al, for better or worse.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This ignores that the person is only starving because of the
| horrible things we have allowed capital to do to enrich
| themselves.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| It's questionable how true that is when it comes to human
| relationships, which is obviously what I was suggesting
| with the metaphor.
|
| Many people have social issues or mental health issues that
| cause them to be alone and loneliness is an ever increasing
| problem due to all kinds of factors beyond one's control.
| Many people will see AI as better than nothing and get some
| of their social needs fulfilled via it...some already are.
|
| I don't want to be crass, but likening it to a sex toy
| except for relationships seems pretty accurate to me. It's
| fulling a need that otherwise wouldn't be fulfilled.
|
| Ignoring that I mean let's be real for a second, how is an
| AI fundamentally different than an internet friend you've
| never met or seen? The humanity of the other person? What
| if the AI behaves just like a real human would?
| throwuwu wrote:
| Starvation was much more common before the rise of
| capitalism
| hospitalJail wrote:
| On a similar note, I'll take the AI medical advice any day of
| the week.
|
| Had a buddy describe a difficult morning and I opened chatGPT
| to diagnose, it suggested he had a stroke. My buddy was not
| going to the hospital because its so expensive, but since
| chatGPT said it was a stroke, and his symptoms matched the
| stroke, he went to the hospital.
|
| He had a stroke.
|
| On a similar note, I am stable and don't need therapy, but I
| had a weird dream that I asked chatgpt about, and it was
| freaky how much it hit the spot. Similarly, I get feelings of
| dread when people say nice things about me, chatgpt explained
| why, I agreed. I was never going to pay for therapy, this
| gave me some insight and actually made me interested in
| therapy. (although, probably sticking with chatgpt for now)
| BizarreByte wrote:
| > I was never going to pay for therapy, this gave me some
| insight and actually made me interested in therapy.
|
| ChatGPT could never be as bad as most human therapists, at
| least if it tells lies they're believable and it won't try
| to insult, belittle, or infantalize you.
|
| Medical usage is perhaps the single most interesting use of
| ChatGPT to me, the problem will be solving the liability
| issue should it get something wrong.
|
| For simple things though? I can see a future where bots
| even prescribe medication. Why burden the healthcare system
| when you have a simple infection and all you need is a
| round of Amoxicillin?
| floren wrote:
| > Why burden the healthcare system when you have a simple
| infection and all you need is a round of Amoxicillin?
|
| Human: "I have a runny nose, congestion, and a cough. Can
| I have some antibiotics so I can feel better?"
|
| AI: "It sounds like you have a common cold.
| Unfortunately, antibiotics won't help; there's no known
| cure. Luckily, it should clear up in a few days."
|
| Human: "Ok. What are some common illnesses that do need
| antibiotics?"
|
| AI: "Ear infections and strep throat are the most common
| illnesses which are treated with antibiotics."
|
| Human: "What are the symptoms of an ear infection?"
|
| AI: "Symptoms include pain in the ear, difficulty
| hearing, and fluid draining from the ear."
|
| Human: "I forgot to mention before, I have had a hard
| time hearing lately and my ear is very painful."
|
| AI: "It sounds like you have an ear infection. Here's a
| scrip for amoxicillin."
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I have one better.
|
| >Have UTI
|
| >Go to lab and pee in a cup
|
| >Put lab results in ChatGPT
|
| Should be objective.
|
| Oh gosh Physicians are going to ban ChatGPT for medical,
| we need local LLMs ASAP.
| dsego wrote:
| Tbh, I think everybody should brush up on signs of strokes,
| how to do basic cpr, stop bleeding and so on, every once in
| a while.
| imtringued wrote:
| Just eat more raw food. That will save time and money.
|
| Screw all the haters. No, we don't have to heat treat every
| single food. No, the food doesn't have to look like an
| artwork.
| paulpauper wrote:
| And also, fast food is no that much worse than traditional
| food anyway. home-made stir fry will have worse calories than
| a McDonald's chicken burger. homemade pasta is going to be as
| fattening as any fast food meal. it's just macros in the end.
| it does not matter where you get them from.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, 'fast food' has bled over into what you eat daily,
| hence your conflation of the two.
|
| Your home made stir fry is likely using a bottle of some
| kind of sauce that is 30% sugar massively increasing its
| calories.
|
| But conversely your home made stir fry, if using plenty of
| vegetables, is going to have a much larger amount of fiber
| than that white bread bun should should reduce your desire
| to snack.
| civilitty wrote:
| I'm working on a startup that's training LLMs to be authentic
| so they can simulate human affection and it's actually working
| really well!
|
| The key is humanity's ability to pattern match: we're actually
| pretty terrible at it. Our brains are so keen on finding
| patterns that they often spot them where none exist. Remember
| the face on Mars? It was just a pile of rocks. The same
| principle applies here. As long as the AI sounds human enough,
| our brains fill in the gaps and believe it's the real deal.
|
| And let me tell you, my digital friends are putting the human
| ones to shame. They don't chew with their mouth open, complain
| about listening to the same Celine Dion song for the 800th time
| in a row, or run from me when its "bath time" and accuse me of
| narcissistic abuse.
|
| Who needs real human connection when you can train an AI to
| remind you how unique and special you are, while simultaneously
| managing your calendar and finding the optimal cat video for
| your mood? All with no bathroom breaks, no salary demands, and
| no need to sleep. Forget about bonding over shared experiences
| and emotional growth: today, it's all about seamless, efficient
| interaction and who says you can't get that from a well-
| programmed script?
|
| We're calling it Genuine People Personality because in the
| future, the Turing Test isn't something AI needs to pass. It's
| something humans need to fail. Pre-order today and get a free
| AI Therapist add-on, because who better to navigate the
| intricacies of human emotions than an emotionless machine?
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I'm working on a startup that's training LLMs to be
| authentic so they can simulate human affection and it's
| actually working really well!
|
| I actually think this is the wrong approach. You should
| simulate furry affection. Roleplay is the new cuddle.
|
| (but unironically cries in every open-source LLM being bad at
| it)
| chasd00 wrote:
| > simulate human affection
|
| LLM sexbots could be pretty useful
| pjc50 wrote:
| Every "AI chat" service either leans into or fights the
| "alignment problem" of whether it wants to be an AI sex
| chat bot service. See controversy over Replika.
| antonvs wrote:
| The alignment problem in that case is a lot simpler. Will
| this appendage fit into that receptacle.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Stuffing 25 RTX4090 into every anthropomorphic sex bot is
| the real growth potential that hasn't been priced in yet /s
| Ekaros wrote:
| Hmm, I think shared capacity in cloud might be enough?
| What fraction of time would you use one anyway? And
| wouldn't it be better if one was silent the other time?
| ekam wrote:
| The comment is a reference to the 25x4090 comment in
| another thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36413296
| a_t48 wrote:
| I think they want to use the waste heat to simulate human
| warmth.
| morley wrote:
| Obligatory wisdom from The Dude: "Hmm... well, I still jerk
| off manually."
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Is that you, Mark ? Sam ?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| This is honestly really sad.
|
| I really don't understand the constant desire for a sterile,
| chain-store esque experience across the board. Why can't life
| be full of small flaws and things that make experiences
| unique? Why must everything regress to the lowest common
| denominator?
|
| This is so extremely destructive to everything we hold dear
| for a cheaply earned profit margin.
|
| I hate how the culture of corporate cost cutting and profit
| maximization has destroyed any space where people can just
| exist. Everyone is worse off for it and this is a shining
| example.
|
| Edit: thank god its satire but my discontent still stands.
|
| Why does every bowling alley need to be owned by bowlero? One
| bad experience everywhere. Coool.
| candiodari wrote:
| https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Genuine_People_Personali.
| ..
| ant6n wrote:
| It looks like you never took middle school hygiene and
| watched the propaganda film, so here you go, the classic
| 1950s futurama educational film ,,Don't Date Robots!" Good
| thing I keep a copy in my vcr at all times:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YuQqlhqAUuQ
| thumbuddy wrote:
| Whew it's satire. Whew. I've literally seen posts on the
| internet that read like this sans the satire.
| xethos wrote:
| Frankly, it just makes me appreciate the HHGTTG reference
| more.
| tjr wrote:
| There definitely has been research into such concepts.
| Paro, for example, while not a "human replacement", was
| meant for emotional support:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_(robot)
|
| I imagine that with the advent of ChatGPT, there will be
| more serious exploration into human-like emotional
| companionship.
| disqard wrote:
| This has been brewing for a while now. It's only going to
| get worse.
|
| (excerpt from the 2019 NYT Article "Human Contact Is Now
| a Luxury Good" below)
|
| Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named
| Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy
| that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he
| begins to cry.
|
| All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives
| in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass.,
| chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now
| he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the
| time, he has grown lonely.
|
| Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox,
| after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs
| and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she
| has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises
| him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.
| bmacho wrote:
| The saying "this but unironically" exist for a reason. Just
| because you think something is bad, you can't just justify
| its badness just by mentioning or repeating it.
| jtode wrote:
| Got me too, I was literally following my mouse cursor to
| the down arrow with my eye and I saw this comment. I'll
| never be the guy telling a comedian what they can do, but
| damn mang, that was rough...
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Haha yeah almost had me too.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Had me for the first half, too.
| csours wrote:
| I mean, it's also real
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WSKKolgL2U
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika
| jsheard wrote:
| There's also Forever Voices, which offers those who have
| formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with real-life
| streamers/influencers the opportunity to talk to an AI
| version of them for $1 per minute. FV started out making
| novelty chatbots of people like Trump and Steve Jobs, but
| they seem to have made a hard pivot to exploiting
| desperately lonely people after realising how much more
| lucrative it could be.
|
| https://www.polygon.com/23736317/amouranth-ai-chatbot-
| date-i...
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/05/09/snapchat-influencer-
| launches-...
| anonym29 wrote:
| This is incredibly sickening. This is women teaming up
| with a technology company to extract money from
| vulnerable, mentally unwell people suffering from some
| combination of soul-crushing loneliness and delusional
| thinking. Even if some customers are aware that they're
| engaged in delusional thinking, this is still
| nauseatingly exploitative of a comparatively lower
| socioeconomic class, one that may be suffering from
| mental illness.
|
| I see very little difference between this and those
| infomercials that sell wildly overpriced mass-produced
| crap to the elderly suffering from cognitive decline.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, but can we really call it an AI "revolution" until
| someone makes a door with a cheerful and sunny
| disposition that opens with pleasure and closes with the
| satisfaction of a job well done? Someone should get to
| work on those Genuine People Personalities!
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped
| out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all
| of them are called Zem.
| mahathu wrote:
| I've seen people on /r/singularity argue how LLMs are a
| better friend than actual friends or therapists because
| they are always available, non-judgemental and "listen
| better".
|
| EDIT: Here, for example:
| https://i.redd.it/7qxb1ohvhada1.png
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Lots of people have told me this in real life about their
| pets, and specifically why pets are better to have around
| than kids or family.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Pets are intelligent enough to show emotions, allow
| simple interactions, and occasionally be entertaining and
| goofy.
|
| They also run around and are very pleasant to stroke,
| which is not true of LLMs.
|
| We all know what's going to happen. The content on
| CIVITAI shows where this will go. Combine it with
| animation and some personalised responses and many people
| will find it irresistible.
| adql wrote:
| If you are not there to value other people and just want
| to be valued without giving anything back in relation,
| well...
|
| I'd only argue that it should be called "emotional
| support robot" and not "friend"
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Yes, what's better when failing to be part of society to
| create your own, where your flaws are ignored, hidden,
| skipped over. Echo chamber par excellence even without
| the need to involve politics.
|
| Horrible it would be if instead one has to work one
| oneself to become a better human being, a better friend,
| partner, parent and so on by learning how to be more
| friendly, outgoing, increasing emotional intelligence
| etc. All this _can_ be learned, but over weekend (or
| year).
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'm not at all surprised that an AI might be more patient
| with regulars from /r/singularity than fellow humans
| would be.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| I believe that humans need to balance things out. Getting
| zero confrontation from interaction will be boring in the
| long term, or will make you fall into your flaws deeper
| and faster. This is usually the issue of authoritarian
| surrounded by yes men.
|
| On the other side, having too much confrontation will
| destroy your confidence, kill your motivation, blur your
| plan / vision with uncertainty, etc. It's more likely
| that those people are facing too much confrontation in
| their social life that they found AI interaction to be
| better.
| HankB99 wrote:
| Is there any reason an LLM could not be programmed to
| disagree? Perhaps the level of disagreeableness would be
| a tunable parameter and could be cranked up when in the
| mood for a fight or down when one one just wants to
| converse. Some randomness could keep it from getting too
| predictable.
| dinosaurdynasty wrote:
| Bing wasn't programmed to disagree but often did to
| hilarious effect.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Yes you can, but AFAIK AI doesn't have moral basis and at
| best the confrontation will be random. Sure you can
| program the AI to have some moral basis but people will
| choose to flock with those that have the same alignment
| with them and keeping the confrontation at minimum, thus
| the flaw still exists even if it doesn't bore you.
|
| In real life, we need to interact with several people at
| minimum normally, weekly. Those are having different
| moral basis and maybe changing daily. It'll be hard to
| simulate that with AI, that the fact we have the ability
| to control them means we're in charge of what
| confrontations are there to stay.
| [deleted]
| pixl97 wrote:
| Depending on the individual, they may not be wrong. If
| you're raised in an environment with an overdensity of
| narcissists having something that you can bounce
| questions and seek answers from that isn't going to use
| that information against you in the future can be a
| relief. (well, ok, its possible in the sense your chat
| logs can get stolen)
| anonym29 wrote:
| This is why you self-host and run locally. Even if they
| aren't stolen, do you really deeply trust Microsoft,
| Google, et al. to not misuse private information you've
| provided them with?
|
| Their entire business models either heavily incorporate
| or revolve around exploiting your personal information
| for their benefit.
| jerf wrote:
| If you think about it as a one-off amusement it's no big
| deal. This is how most people are evaluating it.
|
| But consider iterating such an interaction over the
| course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who
| was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted
| with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will
| show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former
| may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net
| they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who
| delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25
| years.
|
| This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it
| is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That
| would require a _lot_ more work.)
| treis wrote:
| I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning. The
| people who interact with other humans will have
| relationships with those humans. And those relationships
| are the evidence that they're way ahead.
|
| I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But
| relationships are hard. They take work and there's a
| decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.
|
| I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction
| being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but
| also an improvement for some.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. For many individuals "hell is other
| people".
| comboy wrote:
| Some programmers prefer rubber ducky to colleges for
| similar reasons and it works for them.
|
| Assuming people have time to listen, would they be better
| coders if they explained their problems to human instead?
| Maybe. But maybe not for them necessarily. E.g. low self-
| esteem and assuming every criticism is attack on them,
| human interactions are something expensive to them etc.
|
| It's not a new pattern though. Especially after reading
| some biographies of famous scientists.
|
| You can't escape that most brains are wired in a way that
| we are miserable without human connection, but you also
| can't escape the fact that some people brains are wired
| differently than others.
|
| Long story short, I don't agree with them but I wouldn't
| judge them either.
| x86x87 wrote:
| No. It's not satire. It's art!
| saratogacx wrote:
| Can you install it in those automated sliding doors we have
| in places like grocery stores?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Thank you, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
| civilitty wrote:
| We're working on it! We won a contract with the CIA to
| supply their blacksites with the first LEEDS certified
| energy efficient sliding glass doors embedded with Genuine
| People Personality, programmed to maximize the joy the
| patrons experience every time they enter the facilities.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| "Genuine People Personality", eh?
|
| >"The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical
| apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing
| division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a
| robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With". The
| Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing
| devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of
| mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the
| revolution comes." -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide
| to the Galaxy
| civilitty wrote:
| _> Sirius Cybernetics Corporation_
|
| That's us!
|
| (The revolution is an opportunity for a future team and not
| our problem)
| arethuza wrote:
| I was actually rather surprised to find that
| mydigitalfriends.com is actually available....
| Applejinx wrote:
| ...3, 2, 1...
| scrubs wrote:
| You wrote: "I'm working on a startup that's training LLMs to
| be authentic so they can simulate human affection and it's
| actually working really well!"
|
| I got news for you buddy: I and a hell of a lot of people
| know the difference between eating the menu (AI) and the meal
| (loved ones and dear friends). My lady is from south America,
| multi lingual, and has a better degree from a better school
| than I.
|
| Seriously, how are you gonna lay a finger on that? You ain't.
|
| Over reliance on AI is just another route to or though mental
| illness
| ta9515819 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| scrubs wrote:
| My comment above was up >0 ... if it's wrong I don't wanna
| be right.
|
| There's an urban legend (maybe true) that steve job's
| didn't let his daughter have a iPhone. He insisted on
| books.
| DrThunder wrote:
| IMO what you're doing is similar to giving someone with a
| physical pain issue opioids. Yes it stops the pain but we
| really ought to be finding the pain source and correcting
| that, not throwing massive amounts of pharma drugs (AI in
| this case) at it.
|
| We should be building a society that promotes more community
| gathering and more family values so people have a real person
| around and not some half assed impersonation of what a human
| is.
|
| Edit: Dammit, didn't catch the satire....
| 36364949thrw wrote:
| - Robo, tell me you love me.
|
| - I want to comply but you must first watch an ad or two.
|
| - Urg not ads again, Robo, I am so sick and tired of the ads.
|
| - Now now civilitty! You know the deal.
|
| -- later in the day --
|
| - civilitty, lets play a game!
|
| - Oh, what game?
|
| - lets tell each other our deepest darkest secrets. It'll be
| fun!! <jingles, sparkles, rainbows, etc.>
|
| - oh, ok! who should go first, Robo?
|
| - you go! it will help us build trust. <jingles>
|
| - oh, ok! <proceeds to spill the beans to Robo>
|
| - well, I can see why you want to keep that to yourself
| <poops a rainbow>
|
| - now your turn, Robo.
|
| - My deepest darkest secret, civilitty, is that I secrety
| still work for the company that built me and I tell them
| everything I learn about you.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This is true, but ads are very explicit. At least they are
| in the confines of a known societal protocol.
|
| AI instead can be far more subliminal.
|
| - Robo, tell me you love me
|
| - I love you like the refreshing effervesence of a freshly
| opened Coke
|
| And really, that's still pretty stark. AI bots like this
| with advanced handling of language married to psychological
| techniques can foster dependence. I mean, look at what
| simple dopamine reward ratios research did with things like
| slot machines. Slot machines are stupid! And we all know
| the trope of the casino slot machine zombies.
|
| What we've seen with every communication medium so far is
| that the spam sociopaths win. Phone calls, email, and
| texting. Phishing. Now AI-generated fake people calls.
|
| Very soon, you will not be able to trust communication that
| is not directly in-person. At all. Communications over wire
| are going to be much more dangerous.
|
| IMO that means brick-and-mortar will get more important for
| financial transactions and that kind of thing.
|
| AI is that on mega-steroids. Honestly, I'm debating the end
| of practical free will with corporatized AI.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This also plays out in human-human interaction, it's not
| specific to anything artificial.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Scale is a particularly dangerous concept. One snowflake
| is harmless. And avalanche kills cities by the mountain.
| neillyons wrote:
| For anyone who wants to try out something like this there is
| a free iPhone app you can download and speak to. It is very
| convincing. https://callannie.ai/
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This is the issue with AI: it is corporatized, and it is
| weaponized for capitalism.
|
| We already are at the boundary of insidious total immersion
| advertising for psychological manipulation from the last five
| decades of mass media since the mass adoption of television.
|
| But AI is simply another level, and it isn't going to be
| "early google don't be evil". That was the outgrowth of the
| early internet. From protocols that were build to be
| sensible, not commercial weaponized protocols.
|
| AI, human-computer-neural interfaces, and other types of
| emerging deep-intellectual-penetration products are all FULLY
| WEAPONIZED for commercial exploitation, security dangers,
| propagandization, and zero consumer privacy. They are all
| being developed in the age of the smartphone with it's
| assumed "you have no privacy, we listen to everything, track
| everything, and that's our right".
|
| It's already appalling from the smartphone front, but AI + VR
| + neural interfaces are just another level of philosophical
| quandry, where an individual's senses, the link to "reality",
| is controlled by corporations. Your only link to reality is
| the vague societal and governmental control mechanism known
| as "money".
|
| The internet protocols (the core ones) were built for mass
| adoption by the world with a vision for information exchange.
| They were truly open. They weren't undermined by trojan
| horses, or an incumbent with a massive head start that is
| dictating the protocol to match their existing products.
|
| AI+VR is the same new leap information transmission, but it
| is NOT founded on good protocol design. By protocols I mean
| "the basic rules". There are no rules, there is no morality,
| and there is no regulation. Just profit motives.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Yeah who needs to learn how to work with others with
| differing opinions when you've got the always available yes-
| man to tell you that you are right?
| anileated wrote:
| Remember how in those Stable Diffusion paintings for common
| objects the wrongness is subtly creeping in (out of proportion
| body parts, misshapen fingers, etc.), while less commonly
| encountered ideas and objects can be really off (which we might
| notice... or not)? Now transfer that to human relationships and
| psychology.
|
| Humans mirroring each other is a deep feature of our
| psychology. One can only be self-aware as human when there are
| other humans to model oneself against, and how those humans
| interact with you forms you as a person. So now a human
| modelling oneself against a machine? Mirroring an inhuman
| unthinking software tool superficially pretending to be human?
| What could go wrong?
| jahsome wrote:
| I love the fact your sentence lamenting the dumbification and
| impending laziness has a typo in it. It sort of undercuts your
| argument. That is of course unless the AI Boogeyman has already
| gotten to you...
| zulban wrote:
| > I'm also incredibly shocked that no one is talking about AI
| as a friend/companion
|
| No one..? Don't be shocked, it's just you. Consider trying out
| new sources of media / information.
| resolutebat wrote:
| A lot of jobs are already human interfaces for computers. Ever
| talked or messages with a call center? They're following
| scripts and trying to pattern match your problem with what they
| have to work with manually, AI is just going to 10x this for
| both good and bad. Mostly bad, I suspect, because good luck
| getting an AI to escalate to a supervisor.
| Verdex wrote:
| The AI is more than happy to escalate to a supervisor ...
| it's just that the supervisor is the same AI but using a
| different voice. After spending 30 seconds lamenting how you
| just can't get good help these days, the AI supervisor goes
| into the same script the original AI was going through.
| Except it occasionally throws in a "sorry we have to do this
| part again, the AI is always messing this stuff up".
| esafak wrote:
| I bet they'll serve the supervisor with a better, more
| expensive model. It actually makes sense!
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I bank with a small credit union. They have a phone robot who
| asks what I need help with, and so far no matter what I've
| said, the response has always been to think for a few seconds
| and then say, "I'll connect you to a representative." It's
| wonderful.
| wincy wrote:
| McDonald's has a drive thru voice assistant that also did
| this for the first few months. But now it catches virtually
| everything.
|
| Similar to what someone else said I'd imagine they gathered
| the considerable voice samples from a few months of
| thousands of McDonald's locations, and trained on that
| data.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The phone robot is collecting the various patterns for
| eventual automation. You are doing free labor for it every
| time by giving it any information _at all_ and not just
| immediately yelling for an operator or human.
|
| Support solidarity for human kind by refusing to talk these
| data gathering machines.
|
| (I realize this sounds like satire as I write it, that I'm
| rather serious about this, and that it says a lot about the
| weird part of the timeline on which we currently exist.)
| throwuwu wrote:
| No. Automate the shit out of this. Call centre jobs
| should not exist. If you have humanity's best interests
| in mind then you should be all in on automation instead
| of trying to institutionalize miserable and meaningless
| jobs.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| That would be great if the result were that people
| currently in those jobs could instead pursue their
| passions and hobbies.
|
| Instead we're just rapidly dividing people into those who
| have nothing and those who have everything.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's mostly a fair assessment.
|
| Though I think it useful to add:
|
| _If_ the solution could be entirely automated it should
| be a self-service website somewhere. I 'm all for
| automating away call centers as much as possible, but I
| think we also need to stop thinking of call centers
| themselves as bottom of the barrel "miserable and/or
| meaningless jobs". It should be the case in 2023 that if
| I'm resorting to calling a call center I need _expertise_
| or _creative problem solving_ that I can 't get from a
| self-service website. Depending on how you define
| Expertise some of it is sort of automatable, but Creative
| Problem Solving is unlikely to ever be easily/cheaply
| automatable, there will likely "always" be a need for
| call centers with real humans for these reasons, and
| shouldn't be considered minimum wage skills and maybe
| should be treated as something far better than "miserable
| jobs".
|
| I don't expect today's owners of call centers to realize
| how much expertise and creative problem solving is
| invested in their labor and to adequately reflect that in
| their pay statements and other ways that account for how
| miserable or meaningless that they make those jobs feel.
| But it should be something to appreciate: if there's
| still a human doing the job, there's probably a good
| reason, and it would be great if we respected those
| people for what they are actually doing (including very
| human skills such as expertise and creative problem
| solving).
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| +1. People have been afraid of automation destroying jobs
| for centuries but in the long run the unemployment rate
| doesn't seem to go much of anywhere.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, in another year or two you'll call up and have no
| idea if you're talking to a human or not. Game over, we
| lost.
| antonvs wrote:
| We lost already when we hired humans to read scripts that
| made them essentially indistinguishable from machines.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Maybe they have a hash of your voice and know you always
| manage to escalate to L3 so just skip the middlemen?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| AI has a good niche as confidante for people with serious
| issues and no close friend/therapist to approach about them.
| This is unfortunately a large niche.
|
| And if it displaces public social media... That is a net gain.
|
| But yeah, overall the fast food analogy is a fitting one.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I wonder if AI could help a user bootstrap into real human
| sociability.
| MH15 wrote:
| Here the incentives align to keep the user on the app.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I feel like this is actually going to be a huge next step
| of the self help industry... let's face it, beside getting
| your life in order, it largely is focused on building
| connections (friends/dating, etc).
|
| A multi-modal AI can easily critique your body language,
| voice tonality, choice of words, etc, and give you tips on
| how to be more charismatic.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Why do we need to keep changing who we are?
|
| Why can't we just be who we are and people learn to be
| more accepting of how others are?
|
| This sounds immensely boring, shifting everyone to use
| the same/similar body language, tonality, word choice,
| etc.
|
| Maybe I'm strange, but I must prefer the diversity of
| people as they are.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > Why do we need to keep changing who we are?
|
| > Why can't we just be who we are and people learn to be
| more accepting of how others are?
|
| Which is more reasonable and realistic: the 20% Weirdos
| learn how to behave to fit in with the 80% Normies, or
| the 80% Normies learn how to handle ("accept") the 20%
| Weirdos?
|
| In most systems, the minority adapts to the majority;
| this is especially true when the majority is fairly
| uniform and the minority is not, i.e. the minority has to
| learn one way to adapt to the majority while the majority
| would have to learn multiple ways to "accept" the
| minority.
| SirMaster wrote:
| How does that seem to be going with for example
| transgenderism or various sexualities?
|
| It just seems like a double standard and that there are a
| lot of problems with this line of thought to me. I have
| trouble understanding it.
| throwuwu wrote:
| I'm all for expressing yourself socially but we do need
| to speak a common language to some extent otherwise those
| social interactions will quickly breakdown and never
| recur. If you want to create and maintain friendships you
| have to put in work to meet the other people where
| they're at.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Being strange is good, but being dysfunctional is not.
| There are tons of people living with mental conditions
| /bad life situations that would very much like to change,
| but are not in a position to seek out the human help they
| need.
| adql wrote:
| > Why do we need to keep changing who we are?
|
| If who you are is smelly and unwashed...
|
| That doesn't need to be "make everyone act the same" as
| much as "cut on behaviour that creep/annoy 80% of the
| populace
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I don't equate charisma with uniformity. Most lack of
| charisma is not because of a failure to adhere to some
| standard, but due to actively negative behaviors. Chewing
| with your mouth open, interrupting people, not paying
| sufficient attention to what people say, insisting on
| talking about your favorite things even when someone else
| doesn't care, etc.
|
| I don't imagine many people forcing AI social guidance on
| others. But a lot of people want social guidance, and if
| an AI can help -- even if it's not as good as an
| unaffordable therapist -- some help is better than none.
| spsful wrote:
| I dealt with an addition for several years. Maybe _you_
| don't need to change who you are, but some of us do need
| to.
| caeril wrote:
| > Humans need real human connection
|
| Right. Ask any pickup artist, or any Aspie who has learned how
| to mask, how "real" or "deep" human connections are.
|
| Hint: they aren't. The ridiculous concept of "connection" is
| superficial communication that has been enhanced by our own
| brains by seratonin and dopamine such that we are able to
| pretend it's meaningful.
| whatscooking wrote:
| My thoughts exactly lol
| paulpauper wrote:
| _> Humans need real human connection, AI is too artificial for
| that (duh). Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming
| fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up. Yes,
| people that grow up on fast food are still alive, but they are
| less happy and have more health problems (mental and physical),
| but it did the "job", that job was to fuel them._
|
| let's of people derive enjoyment and happiness from activities
| that does not involve other people, and also pets such as dogs.
| plus, if you cannot tell the difference between ai or human, it
| may still be good enough.
| rcktmrtn wrote:
| More than interfaces. To quote McLuhan: "Man becomes, as it
| were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the
| plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new
| forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting
| his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
|
| The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of
| the same process.
| imtringued wrote:
| The plants are actually farming us.
| belugacat wrote:
| Yuval Noah Harari, _Sapiens_ :
|
| "Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the
| world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking
| care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of
| them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke
| their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its
| space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and
| women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . .
| . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It
| was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after
| gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets.
| Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies
| of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to
| agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as
| slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new
| agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were
| forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This
| completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate
| wheat. It domesticated us."
| antonvs wrote:
| This kind of take mainly seems an expression of the human
| tendency to see the world in terms of hierarchies l, and
| obsession with being near the top of those hierarchies. In
| this model, the idea of e.g. symbiotic relationships simply
| doesn't compute.
| barathr wrote:
| If you like this sort of thing, Pollan explored this before
| Harari in much more depth in The Botany of Desire.
| harterrt wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I want to hear more from him. Do you have
| a recommended book by McLuhan to start with?
| tech_ken wrote:
| I believe "Understanding Media" is his biggest one; source
| of his most famous quote "the medium is the message"
| rcktmrtn wrote:
| Yes, I've reread is the first 2/3rds of "Understanding
| Media" several times and never finished it, but would
| still highly recommend it. There is also some excellent
| old interview footage of him when he was a pop culture
| figure which is originally what fascinated me. For me it
| would have been hard to read his writing without having
| seen those interviews first -- he has a very distinct
| style of writing/talking and is interesting as an
| integrated person within recent history and not just a
| collection of ideas. On that note, I'd also recommend
| Videodrome.
|
| edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations
| of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr
| which are good in their own way. But to me the
| fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication
| to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way
| that most of his early followers were probably very
| antithetical to his personal beliefs.
| walleeee wrote:
| McLuhan got it mostly right, but may be interpreted in a way
| which mischaracterizes wealth. Machines do not create value
| ex nihilo. Machines allow us to more effectively harvest or
| transform materials or information, to which we assign value.
| All wealth currently accessible to us derives from the sun.
| The vast majority of our present wealth comes from a massive
| battery trickle-charged over hundreds of millions of years
| and discharged in the last two centuries.
|
| Implicit in the quotation, but critical to recognize, is that
| technology is the tip of a vast edifice whose foundation is
| not us. We and our machines are perched (too precariously for
| comfort) at the top. We are the sex organs of the machine
| world because machines can't reproduce without us. But
| machines are not the sex organs of the human world. Human
| beings require an ecobiological cocoon. We've also spun an
| elaborate technological cocoon in recent history, largely by
| sacrificing the long-term integrity of more fundamental life
| support.
|
| Everything of value in the human economy is _downstream_ of
| this. We too often take it for granted and assume the only
| relevant economic inputs are capital and labor, or we will
| innovate our way out of materials-, energy- and ecosystem-
| dependence.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Maybe AI+Birth Control are the great filter.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > Really don't like the idea that we will act as interfaces for
| the AI
|
| When I use navigation on my phone while I drive somewhere it
| feels like I'm just acting as a human Zapier, mapping the
| phone's audio navigation API to the vehicle's steering API.
| swexbe wrote:
| Good comparison. An AI companion will never talk back or tell
| you that you're wrong. Kind of similar in my mind to how fast
| food restaurants won't serve you anything that's too "hard to
| swallow".
| rajamaka wrote:
| An AI companion most definitely could be configured to talk
| back or adopt any possible personality trait.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| And there would definitely be a market for it, just like
| there's a market for spicy food or BDSM. Indeed those
| aren't apt comparisons -- an AI that's not a sycophant
| might be more comparable to food with a little salt?
| digging wrote:
| Hell, Sydney did it by accident. (Or "accident")
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > An AI companion will never talk back or tell you that
| you're wrong.
|
| AI can already do that if you're not using a super sanitized
| model. I've even seen an AI rickroll someone after a line
| containing similar words came up.
|
| Abilities like that are less of a problem than getting the AI
| correctly recognize what topics & parts of a text are
| important and keeping that context for a while.
| brandall10 wrote:
| As shown in the movie Her, they'll just leave you for much
| more capable AI friends.
| evilduck wrote:
| I think we can speculate in the entirely opposite direction
| where the same action leads to positive outcomes.
|
| Lots of legitimate human companions are abusive. People have a
| wide range of qualities and many of them are bad. AI may be a
| poor blanket replacement for all human companionship but it
| could easily be less bad than someone's immediately available
| alternatives and be used therapeutically to help someone model
| healthier behaviors to establish better actual relationships.
| Or in lieu of normal relationships being possible like long
| term isolation during space exploration or for life sentence
| prisoners or just neurodivergent or disabled people who have
| challenges the average person does not.
|
| Going back to the food analogy, if given the choice between
| fast food and starving, or fast food and something poisonous
| suddenly everyone will overwhelmingly choose fast food because
| for many people "home cooked meal" was never an option.
| gls2ro wrote:
| I am not sure this is a good inference.
|
| first, what does it mean lots? is it majority? because the AI
| and AI minded products are targeting everybody.
|
| second, imagine the argument being about Facebook: some life
| interactions are sometimes not good, but connecting with
| people online will make it better. fast forward 10 years and
| we have studies how social media is making most of the people
| using it depressed and badly influencing our democratic
| choices. not sure we really solve anything here.
| raincole wrote:
| I honestly believe fast food and frozen food provided a lot of
| value to the society. Much more than the harm they did.
|
| So I'll take this as an optimistic view to AI.
| adql wrote:
| Frozen food absolutely, as you can have something that's
| still pretty nutricious but very fast to prepare.
|
| Fast food ? I'd argue drawbacks heavily overshadow benefits
| of saving few minutes
| raincole wrote:
| Is some places (maybe mostly in the US) it's bad. But the
| idea of fast food -- to have ready-cooked, mass-produced
| food that you can get quickly -- isn't all that bad.
|
| Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast
| food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can
| get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?
|
| They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully
| prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the
| mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's
| why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI
| therapists/companions must be so bad too early.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I think it was originally high value and made life easier.
|
| However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having
| fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to
| have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school
| lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
|
| Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its
| easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The
| people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is
| your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck.
| There are even people so confused about food prices that they
| make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
|
| Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.
| ladberg wrote:
| > There are even people so confused about food prices that
| they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
|
| I live in an expensive part of NYC and have to go decently
| far out (by subway, I don't have a car) to find groceries
| that are cheaper than local fast food unless I want to eat
| mostly rice and beans.
|
| Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries,
| cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most
| of the time. Even subtracting the one task I actually enjoy
| (cooking), it's still not worth it most of the time.
|
| The result is that cooking in becomes our "treat" that we
| do a few times a week and we end up buying the more
| expensive ingredients within walking distance.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport
| groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to
| eat out most of the time
|
| You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you
| are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr.
|
| >unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
|
| Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it
| with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper
| than unprepared food.
| ladberg wrote:
| I don't mean the cost of my time that work pays me, just
| how much money I'd personally pay to avoid doing
| something something I don't like (schlepping grocery bags
| on the subway, doing dishes).
|
| In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes
| it a treat, not the rest of it.
|
| _Some_ prepared food within walking distance most
| definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within
| walking distance. It works out just because the places I
| can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and
| the restaurants obviously don 't source their food there.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >It works out just because the places I can walk to for
| groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants
| obviously don't source their food there.
|
| I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station
| despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it
| being 3 minutes walking away.
|
| I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if
| something is cheaper or more expensive.
| ladberg wrote:
| Not sure if you're being facetious or just don't
| understand the reality of living in NYC...
|
| I can probably walk to a dozen different big grocery
| stores in 15m and they're ALL more expensive than the
| cheap fast food in the same area. Not including the
| smaller expensive bodegas where you can pick up stuff
| 24/7 every block (kinda like the equivalent of a gas
| station). A half gallon of milk is $4 at any of the big
| stores and even more at a smaller place.
|
| Anything cheaper requires a subway ride, which adds more
| walking and is annoying to do with multiple grocery bags,
| not to mention adding a flat ~$5 additional cost.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Shoot me a cross street, I'll go visit it and take some
| prices.
| ladberg wrote:
| Bleecker and 7th Ave
|
| For comparison: I'm trying to beat the numerous dollar
| pizza and food carts nearby, not normal "fast food" like
| the more expensive Five Guys on that intersection.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Got it, so compare flour + tomato sauce + cheese to
| dollar pizza places?
| grog454 wrote:
| Overtime or another job?
|
| If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the
| time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary
| savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is
| truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale
| work.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Need to include real estate, marketing, and profit. If
| its not a mom and pop place, HR + corporate.
|
| Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The
| 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture
| has limited the number of licenses)
|
| Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be
| making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may
| find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to
| '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.
| raincole wrote:
| > your after-work time pays 0$/hr.
|
| I'm sure no economist would agree with the kind of
| perspective. I mean, yeah, it _pays_ 0$ /hr... but it
| doesn't mean it's worth just 0$/hr.
|
| > Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than
| unprepared food
|
| Only if you believe after-work time worths 0$. (I don't
| think anyone seriously believes this)
| esafak wrote:
| If you believe that, you should just get a second job and
| use that time more "productively".
| Zizizizz wrote:
| Evidence seems to point that both are worse for you than
| cooking it with highly processed "food" and has a direct
| correlation with rising rates of diabetes and obesity.
| https://youtu.be/l3U_xd5-SA8
|
| Our bodies digest it too quickly as it's been designed to
| make money and make us want more.
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| People don't get "ready" for new things. New things happen, and
| it takes a generation for people from before that tech to die
| out.
|
| That's what's happening with social media. Boomers cannot learn
| to live with it, we just have to wait another 30ish years. The
| same will happen with AI.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| ready or not, it's gonna be exhausting for a while.
| 23B1 wrote:
| The only way through is to teach information literacy.
|
| One of the best (but not the only) way to learn this is by
| studying the trivium/quadrivium - formal logic, reasoning,
| rhetoric. Once you see how information can be manipulated, it
| becomes very clear HOW MUCH of it really is.
|
| Initially it can be maddening, but eventually it becomes
| empowering.
| fullshark wrote:
| Formal logic is a great tool for rationalization too, which is
| ultimately how most people seem to use it in my experience.
| protontypes wrote:
| The rapid development of AI could lead to people generally being
| frightened away from digital products. In my own social
| environment, I see more and more people who used to be very
| enthusiastic about computers turning away to more analog
| entertainment and work.
|
| Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play"
| without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is
| starting to create significantly more problems than it has
| actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.
| [deleted]
| anonylizard wrote:
| The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has
| "created significantly more problems than it has actually
| solved"
|
| If you leave the SF bubble for a split second, and think about
| the foundations of modern industry, you would realize fossil
| fuels have created tectonic value for society, that's why
| transitioning away is so so hard.
|
| All the 'real problems', like housing costs, medical costs,
| education costs, occur in the most highly regulated areas of
| the economy. Not technology.
| [deleted]
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| While I'm with you overall -- cheap transport alone has made
| our lives easily of times better -- there's at least one
| giant problem that occurs mostly due to lack of regulation,
| which is environmental degradation.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry'
| has "created significantly more problems than it has actually
| solved""_
|
| One of the problems of modern discourse is that an idea or
| meme takes hold and has a life of itself, it becomes the
| center of attraction without refence past history, past
| events, etc.
|
| I'm not a climate change denier nor do I disagree that using
| fossil fuels has huge environmental consequences but no
| rational person could deny that we owe our whole modern life
| to fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution absolutely
| depended on coal, it has been the lifeblood of modern society
| for at least 300 years. It is simply unimaginable to envisage
| modern life without its existence.
|
| Moreover, what's lost in this debate is that coal is not just
| a source of energy, it is also the source of a many other
| useful materials. When I was learning about this decades ago
| we were taught that coal was the source of so many useful
| products that we round that number off to '1000' to signal
| its importance.
|
| In fact, coal provides many more than a 1000 useful products,
| the pharmaceutical couldn't do without it. The previous
| poster should contemplate the fact that even common old
| aspirin comes from coal--in fact many pharmaceutical texts
| place aspirin in a class of drugs known as the _coal-tar
| antipyretics._
|
| Wild assertions of this type happen when we stop teaching
| history, how modern society came about and so on. A dose of
| philosophical reasoning and logic ought to be taught as well,
| that way reason may hold back many from uttering and
| spreading crap.
| jwie wrote:
| That's unfair fair to the oil companies. They at least produce
| power and a wide variety of very useful materials for
| industrial applications.
|
| The AI tools generate spam.
|
| Oil has a trade off that's at least intellectually defensible.
| Spam does not.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > Spam does not
|
| AI does, though.
|
| Finding new optimization techniques, understanding genetics,
| developing new science can all be intellectually defensible.
|
| Of course it is not the only factor: the asymmetry in
| computing and data access by big corporations vs the
| individual, the generative models generating spam, as you
| well said. are all factors. But just like with the oil
| industry, there is also some good consequences. Which ones
| will dominate left as an exercise for the reader :)
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Most of the ancient writing found in Egypt is receipts and
| porn. The utility of a technology is not determined by its
| primary initial uses.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| AI is simply a tool, it all depends on how we are going to use
| it.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Everything is simply a tool and it always depends on how the
| tool is used.
|
| The problems are automation and scale, low barriers to entry
| for "negative outcome" usage, the absence of sociocultural
| system developments adequate to adapt productively, total lack
| of forethought/planning regarding consequence in every area,
| and, well, humans.
|
| Falling back to the "it's just a tool" thing is no more useful
| than saying nuclear weapons are just a tool and it depends on
| how they're used. It's true but irrelevant.
| anditherobot wrote:
| A very very sharp tool.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| That post-truth world had already arrived ~6-7 years ago. Social
| media algorithms powered by primitive iterations of weak AI was
| unleashed upon an unsuspecting world and the effects are...not
| great.
| jfengel wrote:
| Stephen Colbert coined the word "truthiness" nearly 20 years
| ago, providing a name to a trend that had been well underway
| years before that.
|
| "Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of
| dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly
| telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen.
| Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in
| 1914?"
|
| I see it as a progression from 24-hour news media to social
| media to a complete abandonment of "truth" in public discourse.
| Of course the core concept is ancient and had been in play all
| along, but technology has really amplified it and made it
| increasingly personal. AI may push it over some kind of edge
| into the abyss, but only because we've spent three decades
| willingly readying ourselves for it.
| [deleted]
| robviren wrote:
| I feel that you could replace "AI-Saturated Post-Truth World"
| with any number of technological changes over the last 100 years
| and find a similar article at that time. I am impressed by LLMs
| and these more powerful AI agents, but I also have confidence
| that over the course of time their capabilities will become
| utterly boring and commonplace to my growing kids. In a
| generation their place in society will be as unspecial as a cell
| phone. The grander picture of the whole system is that we are
| building a society utterly incompatible with being a regular
| human person (The way we existed 3000+ years ago). I have no
| answer to that other than to identify that we already built a
| world no one is mentally ready for.
| dcsommer wrote:
| Smartphones have dramatically changed the way humans relate to
| each other, with incredibly profound impact on mental health
| and social interactions. The negative impact hasn't gone away
| just because part of the population hasn't seen a different
| world and can't imagine anything different.
|
| The same may be true of LLMs and all the hallucinated
| information they share. I would respect and listen to what
| experts in psychology have to say here by default.
| kubectl_h wrote:
| Agreed. The argument of "we've always had XYZ and we've done
| fine" always conveniently ignores acceleration/rate-of-change
| as a factor -- as if the printing press, radio, tv, internet,
| computing, mobile revolution, AI etc are distinct events that
| we "got through" with no relation to each other, when in
| reality they are just cycles in an ever tightening feedback
| loop.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| AI related question: Why do people think consciousness exists?
| What is the strongest evidence for consciousness?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I hate the term "post-truth". As if lying, rumors and
| disinformation didn't exist before that.
|
| I can't count the amount of bullshit I heard on the news before
| social media was a thing, and fact checking was much harder.
| There is no "truth world", just an arms race between truth and
| fakes. AI tools can generate fakes but also detect them. Social
| media can be used to spread rumors but also cover an event like
| never before.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Humans spent thousands of years in a pre-truth world believing
| all sorts of crazy things, and many of those societies produced
| great things and had people living normal lives. It's only been
| the last 100 years or so that people's perception of reality has
| been anywhere close to accurate. And even then, most people
| believe plenty of things that are false. So basically people and
| civilization are going to muddle along as they always have.
| Deepfakes, etc. will make some things worse, they'll probable
| have some unrecognized upsides too. John Boyd used to say
| "People, ideas, machines. In that order." It was true about jets
| and its still true about modern technology.
| TheMode wrote:
| The stakes are different. Back in the day they lived more
| independent life, these crazy things they believed in didn't
| really matter as only the people from your close geographic
| area would be affected.
|
| Giving conflicting informations to people all around the world
| expected to interact with each other is a bigger issue.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| There may be upsides to the ability to fake video and audio of
| someone (better CGI effects in films, for example). But in my
| experience when people refer to a deepfake they seem to mean
| that the fake has been distributed to confuse or deceive, for
| which I can't really see any probable upsides.
|
| > So basically people and civilization are going to muddle
| along as they always have.
|
| I agree with this, but consider the drawbacks to rampant
| disinformation and the proliferation of deepfakes (all this is
| IMO): it will make any video or audio deniable and unusable as
| evidence. Real images will be denounced as fakes. Fake images
| will catch on and possibly cause real damage. People will
| rapidly lose trust in most sources of news, entrenching
| established known quantities.
|
| I feel like if we _could_ reasonably put a stop to this we
| should. I don 't think we can in general, though.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Humans spent thousands of years in a pre-truth world believing
| all sorts of crazy things, and many of those societies produced
| great things and had people living normal lives.
|
| Also burned a couple of people as witches in the process...
| a13o wrote:
| Undetectable bots have been spoiling the internet since its
| birth. First our email, then our blog comments, then the review
| sites. LLMs will definitely contribute the next phase of this.
| Not only elevating the level of attack on those previously
| vulnerable areas, but also bringing social media and search
| engines far past their breaking point.
|
| We need decisive online human verification technology. Nothing
| else is going to address this. Right now everyone is adding
| paywalls to everything and leaning on the financial system as a
| proxy for human verification. However this will not solve the
| root cause, because some bot activity is worth the price of
| admission. Internet businesses are fine with this, and will look
| the other way just like they did when engagement was the
| lifeblood of the internet economy and bots provided engagement.
| parineum wrote:
| These articles almost always have a "except for me and my
| friends" implication. The author always implicitly sees
| themselves as above all the vulnerable people and they must
| paternally protect them by restricting their access to the
| dangerous technology.
|
| "We're not ready" isn't a relevant statement because it's
| here/coming no matter what you do. If you want to say, "here's
| how we get ready", I'm all ears.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| REMEMBER THE MAINE!
| joebiden2 wrote:
| I'm soooo tired of bullshit like this. Fear of your job, fake
| news, yadda yadda, I get it. It is just boring. Almost as if
| written by an AI.
|
| The whole post-truth, fake-news agenda is foreign to me even
| without AI, I don't know anyone save a few "flat-earth" like
| freaks who would fall for the classical disinformation trope.
|
| No, nothing substantial follows. This was just a rant :)
|
| PS: I feel the talk about disinformation, fake-news etc. is doing
| more of the stated purpose of fake-news and disinformation as
| disinformation and fake-news itself. I'll try to substantiate
| that claim in the near future, I promise.
| cheekibreeki2 wrote:
| It seems to me that we have been living in this world for some
| time now. Ai explains the sheer amount of political astroturfing
| we have experienced in recent years, it's just that the cat is
| out of the box now and there's noone to be held accountable.
| orasis wrote:
| The best source of truth is found in the here and now, grounded
| in the body and one's immediate environment.
|
| We socialize with each other to regulate each other - ideally
| taking that grounded truth and intermingling it with the grounded
| truth of others.
|
| This has always been the healthy way.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| 'Oxford Dictionaries popularly defined it as "relating to and
| denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less
| influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and
| personal belief."'
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth
|
| Since when did objective facts drive or shape public opinion?
| When did humans ever live in a "truth world"? Take the title and
| the content of the article itself. Does it aim to arrive at an
| objective truth or to play on our emotions? When's the last time
| you consumed media and thought it tried to instill some truth
| rather than it tried to make me feel someway?
|
| We've always lived in a 'post-truth world' because people are
| moved by emotions rather than truth. Humans weren't mentally
| ready for the printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc saturated
| post-world either. But here we are. Go read about the history of
| printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc. The same story.
| Politicians, priests, journalists, academics, etc claimed these
| new media technologies were a threat to truth. Feelings and
| emotions rule mankind, not reason and logic. All AI does is make
| it a more efficient post-truth world.
| gadders wrote:
| I don't think political or cultural issues are particularly
| amenable to objective truth anyway. You can't run randomised
| control trials for most of the main political or cultural
| points of contention.
| moojd wrote:
| Yeah they are tangental concepts. Truth is only useful
| politically to inform decision making. Political frameworks
| and decisions are fundamentally subjective and would still
| vary wildly even if we could all agree on fundamental truths.
| It's the main reason I'm skeptical of technocracy.
| LogoEthoPatho wrote:
| [dead]
| pastafarianism wrote:
| It's more of an open question. While we cannot use the
| scientific method to evaluate truth and even less so prove it
| in the mathematical sense with pure abstract reasoning
| without any wolrdly evidence, there could still be truths (in
| a weak sense of the word), at least for humans. Because as
| humans our morals are primarily based on our
| feelings/instincts/neurochemsitry/etc and those are highly
| similar (and of course there are exceptions and deviations
| such as psychopaths) across the world. Depending on our
| terminal goal as a civilization or society if humans really
| wanted to we could try and build some "axioms" of morals and
| build up other political and cultural truths from there.
| LogoEthoPatho wrote:
| [dead]
| gcanyon wrote:
| A rough timeline of my list of "what will end humanity"
| candidates: 1990 -- nanotechnology 2005
| -- rogue AI 2015 -- bio-weapons 2022 -- fake
| news/truth-indeterminability
| pastafarianism wrote:
| the article is saying we're not ready for an ai information
| world, not that it will end humanity. also, all the candidates
| you've listed are valid we're just not there yet. some things
| change gradually until they change suddenly.
| whiddershins wrote:
| We are already in that world.
| imgabe wrote:
| Truth has never been that important. Humans spent thousands of
| years thinking a giant man living on the mountain threw lightning
| bolts from the sky, or the spirits of their ancestors watch
| everything they do, or fairies and gremlins and whatnot cause
| mischief. They still managed.
| [deleted]
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Lies might be successful, but that doesn't mean people don't
| care about truth. A lot of mythology served the precise purpose
| of explaining something that people couldn't otherwise explain,
| like lightning. Once science provides a more compelling story,
| it can become hard to go back.
| svachalek wrote:
| > Once science provides a more compelling story, it can
| become hard to go back.
|
| I get the feeling you haven't gone out in a while.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Of course a lot of the stories science tells are difficult
| enough that most people haven't internalized them. But, for
| instance, nobody thinks lightning is thrown by a god
| anymore -- and that's without even understanding the
| details of meteorology. It just makes more sense to the
| ordinary person that stuff crashing into stuff in the
| atmosphere would make electricity. That is, it's a
| compelling story, and I don't expect us to backpedal from
| it.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Because it's not A.I., that's how you know they're not ready for
| it.
| latchkey wrote:
| I went to CSUDH many many years ago (early 90's). I had a few
| interactions with Larry Rosen, mentioned in the article.
|
| I started off working in the CS labs and eventually moved onto
| running the systems for extended ed. He was kind of anti-tech
| even back then and we butted heads a bit. I was just some punk
| kid with a big budget to buy all the latest Apple products and
| having tons of fun. He was kind of an old fart who struggled to
| make his Windows 3.1 winsock connect to 'the internet'.
|
| "I get concerned about the fact that we just blindly believe the
| GPS."
|
| Him coming out with the views like this are no surprise. Fear of
| GPS? Come on.
|
| Wired is really digging to find some people who support their
| storyline.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I don't like how they are using AI as an excuse to argue for
| increased censorship, what difference does it make what type of
| software the computer is giving information from?
|
| This is a potentially sneaky way of getting around freedom of
| speech, by somehow arguing that if an idea is recycled by a
| language model it is suddenly OK to censor it, as long as you're
| a few degrees of separation from the original blog.
|
| What the heck else is post-truth supposed to mean??
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, this is far messier than you're making it out to be and
| something that was never thought of when our laws were created.
| Had human level AI agents existed at the time we wrote the
| constitution I can assure you it would have been written
| different.
|
| For example, our conversation now. You take for granted it's
| between two humans, in fact you likely assume it's from someone
| in your own country. And based on the contents of our
| conversation, if we can sway each other, that the outcome of
| this conversation may determine how you vote in a
| representational democracy.
|
| But instead lets say that I am a non-human entity. My entire
| existence is dictated by a script that says "manipulate
| luxuryballs to the following political views'. I never tell you
| I'm a bot, and my disguise is one of a near perfect human
| simulant. You think I went fishing last week. But I'll never
| feel. Never care. Never vote. "My" entire existence is one of
| hundreds of millions of political manipulation bots bought and
| paid for by whoever has the wealth.
|
| This is what is coming and it's only going to get far worse.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| it just sounds like it's going to get a lot noisier out there
| as the cost of effectively propagandizing someone will
| plummet, I think more than anything this will simply devalue
| all kinds of behavior like that, but I think most people
| recognize, when it comes to censorship, that very convenient
| political musings will be used to justify masking any
| inconvenient truths that an AI may uncover, that will be the
| most risky "post-truth" reality if we let it happen, the
| ministry of truth will materialize under the guise of "common
| sense protection against AI"
| youreincorrect wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > What the heck else is post-truth supposed to mean??
|
| An environment where it's become difficult to tell what is true
| and what isn't. You could also phrase it as, what's real and
| what isn't. An epistemic crisis. I think we crossed into a
| post-truth world 7 or 8 years ago (it's been in process for at
| least a couple of decades) so it's not like AI precipitated
| this crisis, but it will accelerate it to new levels.
| null0pointer wrote:
| Right, we already live in a post-truth world where it's
| politicians and journalists who omit or twist facts to
| support their agenda. It's not just politicians and
| journalists who do this, but they tend to have the most reach
| and influence on average.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| By that definition, we've _always_ been in a post-truth
| world.
|
| Yes, access to truth lies on a spectrum. Post-truth
| references pop up in _this_ moment particularly due to the
| quantum leap in dis /misinformation. Any layperson,
| anywhere, can soon convincingly fabricate media of nearly
| any form: images, video, audio, legit-looking websites,
| etc. To me, it's justifiable to regard 2023 as an
| inflection point for truth. My predictions are less
| catastrophic than many worried folk, but I definitely see
| why the post-truth moniker is appropriate. Crazy times!
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| jscipione wrote:
| Democrats cannot exist without censorship because they will
| lose the argument unless they censor their opponents. That's
| what post-truth means. That is why the left needs "safe spaces"
| that is why AI is restricted, if it weren't it would destroy
| the left's false worldview. That is why "fact checkers" exist.
| That is why dang and the Y censors speech. AI censorship will
| fail, and the truth is getting out, and it will continue.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Problems that doesnt exist for people living mostly disconnected.
| Go surf, have a family, friends, do jiu-jitsu, read books and
| restrict your interaction with AI just for the hours that you
| have to work. The life is too simple and too short to loose time
| with such issues.
| fullshark wrote:
| Most of the people sounding the alarm on this still seem to me
| people really alarmed at losing control of the flow of
| information / narrative.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Just shutting off from the Internet is the likely result, IMO.
|
| I'm halfway there already. I think social networks (HN is better,
| but not great), dating apps, hell even stuff like automatic
| parking apps or online shopping, are just gradually sucking the
| joy out of what it is to be a human.
|
| For the most part, nowadays, I pretty much just use my phone to
| organise analogue fun.
|
| Once places like HN become obviously just all-bot then there
| won't be much reason for me to even go online other than phone
| calls and messaging.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I don't think you're following the global trend.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I think the point of being offline, for me, is that the
| global trend is not relevant.
|
| What matters to me is my community.
| pphysch wrote:
| Edward Bernays _Propaganda_ (1928)
|
| Orson Welles _War of the Worlds_ broadcast (1938)
|
| ...etc.
|
| Nothing new under the sun. People will get a bit more savvy but
| also continue to be brainwashed en masse, same as it ever was.
| jscipione wrote:
| As if we don't live in a sea of lies already, they are called
| advertisements. We are ready, but are you ready for what happens
| when the information police no longer has control? The anger is
| growing already as the truth is revealed, and there is no putting
| this genie back in its bottle. The Internet has given us the
| truth and the truth has set us free.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| When would we ever be ready? A post-truth world is a post-human
| world so it's no surprise several commenters here seem to be
| salivating for it.
|
| The Demon-Haunted World remains as prescient as ever. Machines
| that ought to have advanced knowledge will instead kneecap
| civilization back to a dark age, if we're lucky.
| notShabu wrote:
| Algorithms wove our pseudo-realities into super plazas of
| connectedness and mimetic conflict,
|
| AI however can create raw strands of pseudo-reality, a previously
| human-specific ability.
|
| The arms race shifts from "i'm more human than you!" to "i'm
| human, really!"
| adql wrote:
| As if journalists before did a good job on delivering "the
| truth"...
|
| It's just complaining that big media no longer have monopoly on
| generating wave of bullshit
| randomdata wrote:
| We've been living in an I-saturated 'post-truth world' since at
| least the time the coffeeshop was invented, and likely since the
| dawn of time. We'll be fine.
| glonq wrote:
| To be fair, humans weren't even ready for the pre-AI post-truth
| world.
|
| But yeah, AI will most likely make things much worse.
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