[HN Gopher] You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online
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You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online
Author : fortran77
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-10-03 21:13 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| ishtanbul wrote:
| The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam
| will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on
| themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance
| shombaboor wrote:
| Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.
| altruios wrote:
| IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is
| human still.
| rogerthis wrote:
| Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call
| those that never look at messages).
| doesnt_know wrote:
| Yeah, small, invite-only "walled garden" style communities
| are definitely the future of the web.
|
| There has always been those of course, but I think they will
| just end up becoming the default, rather then the fringes.
| And the thing with these smaller communities is that they are
| far less tolerant to their hosting platforms pulling dumb
| shit (like stating they will train AI's on the comunities
| content).
| dartos wrote:
| We can only hope
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| If that was true Twitter would be collapsing. The vast majority
| have been too passive to leave. I no longer think there's a
| threshold of worsening that will disrupt Twitter, Reddit, etc.
| jsheard wrote:
| What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt
| ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall
| with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed
| but _encouraged_ by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating
| their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there 's not
| just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else,
| but also less "everything else" as time goes on due to user
| attrition.
|
| It really can't be overstated just how much it's come to
| dominate the entire site, skimming the frontpage now I
| immediately spotted a generic Midjourney-core image and the
| creator has posted 4100 pieces to date after joining... two
| months ago. 68 uploads every day on average.
| vunderba wrote:
| 100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least
| firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or
| something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).
| jsheard wrote:
| They do have an AI tag that creators are _supposed_ to set
| where applicable, and there 's an option to hide everything
| with that tag, but the enforcement is weak so there's a lot
| of obvious AI spam which isn't tagged. Many of the AI
| spammers are using DAs monetization features or promoting
| their Patreon so they're incentivized to _not_ set the AI
| tag to maximise their reach.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of
| expressions
|
| People just use it as a hosting platform
|
| Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop,"
| whatever that means, besides social networks that you
| personally do not like, in aggregate or individually.
|
| TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative
| or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times
| audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social
| media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking,
| if you exclude their presence on social media itself.
|
| If anything we already live in a post-scarcity world with
| regards to engaging content, starting a few years before the
| advent of generative AI. Why would AI generated content reverse
| that trend? Isn't TikTok's feed algorithm agnostic to whether a
| video is AI slop or user created? Isn't Instagram's? Are you
| really going to play No True Scotsman with "spaces" "prone to
| AI slop?" Shouldn't Kyle Chayka, who supposedly wrote a book on
| this, know that? Aren't there already too many good books,
| movies, TV shows, video games, operas, plays, etc. to consume?
|
| The toughest thing about this article is it is longing for a
| world that hasn't existed for a long time. If anything, the New
| Yorker and the New York Times, by doing a bad job at being
| media companies, have reduced the amount of new narrative
| creative projects that can thrive, not increased it. They never
| look in the mirror. The fickle and sometimes vindictive
| personalities that work there are not allied with narrative
| creators.
|
| The idea that discovering one or two diamonds in the rough
| offsets the incumbent cultural trends the New Yorker reinforces
| has long been dead - there is just way too much new stuff for
| any traditional media company to accurately review, report on
| and amplify. Everyone thriving on YouTube, Instagram, Steam,
| TikTok, hawking their shit, figured that out.
|
| It's even crazier to me that Kyle Chayka, who wrote a book on
| this, misses the mark here - I mean he should know about non-
| negative matrix factorization, which basically was the
| beginning of the end of traditional media, he should be able to
| make the leap that invention that enabled accurate
| collaborative filtering at scale killed The New Yorker, not AI,
| or anything in between 2000 and now. He should know there's
| absolutely no reason that AI generated content would be treated
| any differently than any other bad content, by NNMF or whatever
| feed algorithm.
|
| There's a possibility that the reason the NYTimes and Conde
| Nast have to reinvent themselves is because they do a bad job.
| To them, "A.I." is just another effigy, when the reality is
| that fewer and fewer people care what important New Yorkers
| think. Listen guys, it's not looking good for the writers,
| better to get your head out of the sand.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in
| relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New
| York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid._
|
| Imagine the doctor walking into the room and saying
| "Congratulations! The tumor is growing faster than your
| legacy cells."
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think this is a good thing. It's just to say
| that Kyle Chayka and this HN commenter don't offer any
| remedies. They go and complain and mock people's
| superstitious Instagram shitposts.
|
| If you care about narrative creative media, the best thing
| you can do is pay for it. Whatever that means to you. That
| is my remedy. The New Yorker isn't going to go out and
| promote _Substack_ , and the deeper you think about why,
| the more you realize it is the New Yorker who are the
| assholes.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and
| magazines, the latter is shrinking
|
| This isn't even factually correct, the New York Times has
| done well, and grown over the last decade. In particular
| their move in the early 2010s towards paywalled premium
| subscription content, away from advertising, which was
| lambasted at the time, was in hindsight a very smart move.
|
| Yes, in the aggregate premium offerings don't come close to
| the size of the market of slop, it's always been a numbers
| game, but if you're talking about cultural trends, the people
| who run those slop factories read the Times and the Journal,
| they don't watch Youtube shorts themselves and probably keep
| their kids a mile away from it.
|
| Cultural capital and literal capital aren't the same thing.
| Danielle Steel has made 800 million selling 200 smut novels,
| but that hasn't given her a lot of cultural status or
| influence. The people who make decisions and set trends don't
| read her books.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten
| onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair
| project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says
| that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for _enough
| people_ that discerning users are just helplessly along for the
| ride on every platform.
|
| The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is
| because people like it. The next iteration, IMO, will be AI
| generated children's science fair projects that also have a
| pepsi logo in them, still with 60k likes.
| kibwen wrote:
| And how many of those likes are AI-generated?
| munk-a wrote:
| We need to move above that before it kills the web though -
| if the end state is that you want to look at any old random
| adorable puppy pictures so you just ask your machine to
| generate them for you then we might have a way out of this
| internet death cycle. I'd hope that if you can trivially
| produce your own better tailored slop on your local machine
| then the AI slop online will lose any value - I'm concerned
| that we're going to lose a lot of good content created by
| artists before we reach that level though.
|
| I suspect the actual outcome will be a rise of manual
| curation and providence where a feed of adorable puppies or
| discussions on technology will rise or fall by how diligent
| the moderator is at keeping slop out of the feed.
| swatcoder wrote:
| That's the short-term metric that got us here in the first
| place.
|
| People are mostly not stingy with likes for individual pieces
| of content, but they are sensitive to sites becoming less
| stimulating as a whole.
|
| People may mindlessly engage with all sorts of slop content
| in between the stuff they actually want to see, but as the
| former starts to overwhelm the latter, they bleed off.
| Animats wrote:
| > When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow
| gotten onto my feed...
|
| There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered
| feeds? There are filters for that.
|
| From the article: _" The main people benefitting from the
| launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users
| trying to communicate with one another but those who are
| producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated
| content that is monetizable on social platforms."_
|
| Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| bakugo wrote:
| I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that
| the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI
| generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated
| people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on
| Facebook.
| desumeku wrote:
| https://archive.is/dsh2w
| ryandv wrote:
| This is just the practice of invasive data harvesting taken to
| its natural conclusion, which any tech savvy user or computer
| geek brought up in the pre-postmodern social media era of the
| Internet (before Facebook) could have seen coming decades in
| advance. The only winning move here is not to play, accepting the
| unfortunate consequence that you will need to "limit the reach of
| your profile just to avoid participating in the new technology" -
| because nothing on the Internet is ever forgotten, and can (and
| will) be used for any purpose.
|
| Adding a few magic words to bewitch the AI into not scraping your
| profile is the new superstition of the digital era, a cousin to
| the pseudolegal "no copyright intended" incantation often seen on
| pirated YouTube videos of yesteryear. You cannot have your cake
| and eat it too, for there is a fundamental tradeoff between
| privacy and convenience as popularized by Schneier, _11 years
| ago._ [0] You must _stop using the platform_ and do something
| other than continue to consume vapid social media nonsense; yet
| no one ever listens or cares, for the revealed preference of the
| masses is to continue to not be users of the system but to be
| used in exchange for "free" access to these platforms.
|
| [0]
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/trading_priva...
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is
| problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every
| single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a
| bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is
| minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing
| anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall
| (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the same).
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| There's many good reasons, but for me it's that I don't want
| companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of
| profit sharing.
|
| When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I
| get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements,
| etc.).
|
| That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI
| video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user
| I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a
| creator there's no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > For the time being, though, avoiding A.I. is up to you. If it
| were as easy as posting a message of objection on Instagram, many
| of us would already be seeing a lot less of it.
|
| It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it
| for sure. Here is what I have done:
|
| 1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have
| already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others.
|
| 2. I have stopped supporting businesses that use AI/support ones
| that are against AI. For example, the company behind the
| Procreate iPad app is 100% against AI so I support them. Also, in
| my professional life, I have already refused to collaborate with
| three separate companies due to their promotion and use of AI.
|
| 3. I've deactivated any tools that could be AI based like
| assisted writing tools in Gmail.
|
| 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images
| or text. Nor do I watch any videos any more.
|
| 5. I am reconnecting with friends and share with them through
| email and other means.
|
| In my opinion, the internet has gotten WAY worse with the
| introduction of generative AI. Generative AI itself is not the
| root cause of course: the aggressive capitalistic takeover of the
| internet is, but AI is the apex tool for that and it makes the
| internet a rather horrible place.
| chrisjj wrote:
| [delayed]
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I thought it was going to be about escape generative AI output
| online.
|
| Personally, I run a large-ish niche FB group and I haven't seen a
| threat of bots taking over there or other online spaces. Is there
| anywhere that people have seen the bots crowding out the people?
| My guess is Twitter but that place would already/always a sewer.
| 23B1 wrote:
| "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'.
| Dumb fucks."
|
| -Mark Zuckerberg.
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