[HN Gopher] To bring socializing back to social networks, apps t...
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       To bring socializing back to social networks, apps try A.I. imagery
        
       Author : amichail
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2023-09-28 11:16 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | http://web.archive.org/web/20230929110452/https://www.nytime...
        
       | jasonsb wrote:
       | Social media as we knew it 10 years ago is dead and nothing will
       | bring it back. OK, maybe "nothing" is an exaggeration, but we can
       | safely exclude AI. AI will not bring back anything related to
       | social networks.
        
         | benreesman wrote:
         | Social media companies have the most defensible datasets with
         | actual longitudinal human behavior.
         | 
         | If you want some big graph attention mechanism to know if
         | people are going to get divorced? Just to pick an example.
         | 
         | AI will bring back the IP trench warfare about the "graph",
         | twist: they don't care if it gets updated.
        
         | XorNot wrote:
         | I would argue social media started dying all on its own anyway:
         | I remember the novelty of Facebook wearing off quickly when the
         | most active subset of people on it all decided to just use it
         | to cross post self promotion about their careers, and I had the
         | "right, I don't actually care about people I went to high
         | school with at all" moment.
        
         | barrenko wrote:
         | Media itself might be dead.
        
           | garba_dlm wrote:
           | nah, but the way in which ownership over media works right
           | now (20th century style) cannot hold.
           | 
           | media itself will adapt, change, morph or something
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | Eh, media dying would probably be better for us... current
             | evolution of media isn't taking it towards a destination
             | where it's beneficial to the user. Much like the morphing
             | of staph into MSRA.
        
               | [deleted]
        
       | fooop wrote:
       | ah yes. The solution for too much technology is obviously more
       | technology. I'm so glad that we have all these smart people
       | working for us.
        
       | gumballindie wrote:
       | If anything, ai will alienate people from social networks. Fakery
       | is already plenty, more will make alienation worse.
        
         | rightbyte wrote:
         | Ye I happened to visit Reddit during the mod drama, and I
         | noticed how all the bigger subs had this bot feeling to it. It
         | was nothing like it used to feel when I used Reddit 10 years
         | ago. It was like, as if 95% of the comments were from bots. Not
         | the top voted ones, but the tail on those comments. And the
         | bots seemed to just agree to whatever they were answering to
         | with vague context feedback. The mix I anticipate is like every
         | other user raging at every other user for being wrong, sorta.
        
           | bitwize wrote:
           | Reddit has been not Reddit for a long time now. I still
           | remember when the death of Fup, the store cat from Powell's
           | Technical Books in Portland, OR, made the front page of
           | Reddit.
           | 
           | But both Reddit and Portland have long since been
           | enshittified from how I remember them.
        
           | willcipriano wrote:
           | I don't think it's bots, I see these sort of people in real
           | life, it's most people in some circles.
           | 
           | They are playing a little social game where you bet on a what
           | a socially acceptable opinion is and if you guess right you
           | get dopamine in the form of likes. This concensus seeking
           | feedback loop results predictably in a hivemind.
        
             | seneca wrote:
             | Yes, exactly this. It's a form of a Keynesian beauty
             | contest. That essentially means to make your comment based
             | not on what you think, but on what you think will be
             | popular with others.
             | 
             | It's the heart of modern social media. It abdicates opinion
             | to the masses and drives the hive mind.
        
             | rightbyte wrote:
             | Maybe, it is hard to prove the "dead internet theory". But
             | I mean look at you. That is how it used to feel like on
             | Reddit. Write stuff. Someone disagrees. Etc. Reddit gives
             | me sect vibes nowadays.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | Why not both?
             | 
             | Because of Reddit's api changes it's harder to track this,
             | but at one point it was pretty easy to find accounts that
             | only posted comments that had already been posted in the
             | past.
             | 
             | Now, it's difficult to trace most comments under 7 or 8
             | words, but there were accounts that only had ever posted
             | replies from other users. Just watching some threads in
             | popular subs for replies that were exactly the same as
             | others. Then trace both accounts. Sometimes one is a
             | legitimate human, and one is a bot. Other times both
             | accounts where pretty much every post in their account is
             | something that had been previously posted.
        
           | hightrix wrote:
           | I noticed the exact same thing. In the midst of the protests,
           | it felt like reddit turned on the "AI comment bots" and then
           | just let them run. I rarely saw insightful comments or
           | comments that aren't just repeated/reposted comments from the
           | last time the link was posted. Reddit says "we did it" in
           | response to the protest, but it really feels empty these last
           | couple of months.
           | 
           | This was almost as noticeable as during the 2016 election
           | when the general sentiment of the site went from Pro-Sanders
           | to Pro-Clinton, literally over night. The tinfoil hatters
           | blame the Correct The Record group becoming active at that
           | time.
           | 
           | Along with the more recent changes of adding paid upvotes
           | along with contributor rewards and then removing the ability
           | to opt-out of ad-personalization, reddit management seems to
           | have a one track mind. Profitability at the expense of
           | _anything_ , including the userbase.
        
         | qingcharles wrote:
         | AI has changed the game for content uploaded to the Internet. I
         | haven't seen an Asian girl in the last two years who doesn't
         | run a filter on her images/videos 24x7. I know I try not to
         | upload any images of myself that haven't at least been tweaked
         | by AI, if nothing else than to improve the lighting etc. Shit,
         | I even run my comments through ChatGPT before I post them if I
         | feel like they could be improved.
         | 
         | We're living in a strange time.
        
           | DiggyJohnson wrote:
           | This is wild to me. You could just not do though things and I
           | genuinely believe the world will feel a bit less strange for
           | you personally.
        
       | 13years wrote:
       | This works as a novelty for a moment's interest. However, it
       | quickly fades as AI is making authenticity a crisis of meaning.
       | 
       | The new Meta announcements are bringing a flood of new gimmickery
       | to the social platforms. More fake realities.
       | 
       | I'm not sure where all this leads society, but I used AI art as a
       | launch into deeper introspection of where we are going here.
       | 
       |  _Is society on the precipice of falling into the abyss of
       | illusion? Whatever is applicable in the context of art is likely
       | also for the rest of all works, creative or intellectual, by
       | human beings. Whatever is the current trajectory in these matters
       | does not stop at art. AI inevitably will consume in some form all
       | disciplines and master them. Observing closely what happens to
       | art could inform us as to the future of other human domains._
       | 
       | https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-w...
        
       | carabiner wrote:
       | OpenAI must be destroyed.
        
       | qingcharles wrote:
       | Had to dig around to find this thing.. it's a Y Combinator pitch:
       | 
       | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/can-of-soup
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-29 23:01 UTC)