[HN Gopher] Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI
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Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI
Author : ctoth
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-02-27 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theintrinsicperspective.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theintrinsicperspective.com)
| the_shivers wrote:
| I feel like this is exaggerating a bit. Spam exists, but the
| internet is still very usable. It could certainly become worse in
| the future, but I find it pretty easy to sift through content
| these days to get what I need.
|
| Also, I don't think the problem is necessarily AI for some of
| these complaints. Twitter replies are awful because you can pay
| for increased visibility. On a platform like Reddit where its
| popularity that determines visibility, the issue virtually
| disappears. Same issue for SEO spam websites, it's a function of
| Google's algorithm which incentives brainless keyword spam rather
| than it being an AI issue. Both of these issues predate
| generative AI.
|
| The braindead children's youtube videos, for what it's worth,
| also predate AI.
|
| I feel like these are just growing pains from a revolutionary new
| technology. Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of
| a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed
| to work out the kinks.
| rusty_venture wrote:
| > Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot
| of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to
| work out the kinks.
|
| I think the author's point is that generative AI is a
| completely different animal than the printing press. The
| printing press could be used to spread both factual information
| and misinformation alike, and for various reasons factual
| information seems to have predominated, and high quality
| information is at least readily available, even if it's not the
| majority of printed work. Then there's the Internet, which can
| similarly be used to publish both information and
| misinformation. Perhaps due to the lower bar for entry and the
| speed of dissemination, the balance of information to
| misinformation and high-quality to low-quality content doesn't
| favor information or high-quality content as strongly as it
| does in the world of printed text, but at least the Internet
| always has the potential to spread factual information and
| high-quality content.
|
| Then there's generative AI. Unlike the two communication
| technologies referenced above, AI can ONLY produce low-quality
| content. It is by design a statistical inference technique that
| generates content remixed from its training data. Without
| substantial human rework and rewriting, AI will always produce
| such low-quality drek as "it's hard to learn volleyball without
| a ball". And it's increasing promoted as a way to reduce human
| effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it
| without supervising it's output, especially if they are trying
| to mass-produce content to make money. So now we have a new
| situation in which the majority of content produced going
| forwards is likely to be extremely low quality and perhaps
| contain substantial misinformation as well, whether
| intentionally or unintentionally. The author seems to posit
| that exposure to this type of content will negatively affect
| people's ability to learn to produce good, original content of
| their own, as they are not exposed to even passably good
| writing from a young age, so they cannot learn to emulate it.
| dartos wrote:
| People are still very much exploring AI for the first time.
|
| We technically inclined people are ahead of the curve.
|
| One people get a "feel" for what AI content looks like,
| they'll be able to filter it out like the do all existing
| spam.
| leobg wrote:
| Or by Sam Altman's ego.
|
| (The author doesn't say that. But he points out that pre-Altman
| OpenAI was afraid that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release, while
| now they let anyone use GPT-4 to spam the hell out of YouTube
| kids.)
| ctoth wrote:
| I thought this was interesting, Erik is a great thinker and
| writer, but I felt as though the bad stuff he doesn't like here,
| specifically the weird videos for kids, might equally be blamed
| on photoshop, YouTube, or any other technology in the chain.
| Alternatively, it can be blamed on specific people and their
| specific actions.
|
| Like, blame the person that makes the weird videos, not the
| technology that can both make weird/alien scripts for kids videos
| and also write my React components and describe what's outside my
| doorbell camera. It's some serious baby with the bathwater
| action.
|
| General-purpose technologies are general-purpose.
|
| The behavior he's upset about is currently human behavior. I
| don't know of anyone who has wired up GPT and asked it to make
| money and it has decided to start making YouTube videos.
| Phanyxx wrote:
| I'm reminded of Balk's Law (Everything you hate about The
| Internet is actually everything you hate about people.)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think the AI generated content looks superior to unboxing
| videos.
|
| The problem is that generative AI is competing with clickbait and
| it turns out it does the job cheaper.
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