I agree with you, but the owners and customers of ad-supported communities like Facebook have an incentive to inject clickbait from fake users posing as humans. Facebook is already well along that road, with a captive if aging userbase. Maybe they'd flee if they had an alternative.
Most people on social media don't interact, just consume. You are talking to small self selected minority
If there was an HN clone generated on the fly for you or the guy you replied to then what's the difference? Especially if you imagine you didn't know it was generated. That's the problem with this tech, for you there's no difference. But probably a difference for society.
You must have missed a train or two over the past fifteen years, so called “social media” have very little to do with the social part they used to, they are mostly algorithmically driven dopamine shots to capture user's attention, and TikTok is the purest form of it.
Some people are stimulating themselves with opioids too. Outside the Hacker News bubble, which statistically has elevated incentives to push "the future is AI", the consensus I've seen is revulsion towards fully algorithmically generated content streams.
This is like seeing Frito-Lay's stock price rise, and concluding that restaurants are doomed in the future. There's about the same amount of equivalence.
I don't doubt that we will be able to make a content machine. Honestly, we had that on tiktok before generative AI. But I feel like this kind of misses the point of art. The idea of art for me is on some level experiencing someone else's intention and connecting with others based on that. Generative models have no intention or experience so I am uninterested in what they have to say even if it is technically well executed.
It will happen for different people at different times, but at some point the realization that you are looking at people who don't exist living lives that aren't possible to sell you products that won't help you will click for you, and when it does it will cut you off from society in a way we don't currently have words for.
Are you sure about that? In the Matrix Cypher wants to return into the matrix knowing fully well that it is fake, and backstabs his friends to accomplish it. I suspect we may see it play out similarly irl. Fiction tends to be pretty good at commenting on human nature.
There's a trope of humans who don't fit in to the world.
My comment is more that more and more people will find themselves as that person unexpectedly as they are driven out by the popularity of people that do not exist.
Sure, some people may love the idea of being the only real person in a sea of fakes, but those people are true freaks and not worth discussing except out of pity.
There is a moment where people might be so engaged it might not be profitable anymore though.
Brands pay for ads because it generate sales. If people become vegetables that doomscroll all day, barely pausing to eat and have a dump, they will also stop purchasing stuff.
Or maybe people will be so addicted that social medias as a drug becomes a commercial product in its own riggt and tiktok can paywall it.
Agreed, the TikTok one will be vastly more popular, as it requires no creative input. Also much more near-term. Some version could be shipped within months.
It's already partially that, just with humans still supplying the prompts and doing some cherrypicking before posting their AI-generated videos. I wonder if there will be some "for you (AI)" and "for you (non-AI)", and which one will end up being the default?
I remain skeptical that there is enough overlap between videos I’d want to watch and videos that make me buy stuff. Conceivably there could be ads I’d want to watch even though they don’t work on me. A subscription model seems more likely in my case, though.
This is chilling and also seems inevitable long term