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by pixl97 105 days ago
>other people are reasonable like you

No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".

AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.

Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

4 comments

Every order of magnitude of difference constitutes a categorical difference.

The ability to create spam instantly, fitted perfectly to any situation, and doing that 24/7, everywhere, is very different from before. Before, spam was annoying but generally different enough to tell apart. It was also (in general) never too much as to make an entire platform useless.

With AI, the entire internet IS spam. No matter what you google or look at, there's a very high chance it's AI spam. The internet is super duper extra dead.

And the incentive to spam. AI pull request writers feel like they're helping the project, not hurting it, so they do it a lot more.
And even if you figure out a reliable way to detect AI, guess what, USERS USE IT TOO for legitimate content, so you can't even use system like this. It's horrid
I tried to build something: https://github.com/YM2132/PR_guard which aims to help in these cases. It's not perfect but with stronger AI detection tools (Pangram) it could be improved although the issue of cost then arises and who pays for it.
"The internet is super duper extra dead."

I get unreasonably angry when I read this statement, or similar ones.

If you mean "portions of the web I go to or my email inbox", you may be right.

But for the rest of us that hang out in one or multiple private spaces, sometimes with connections between them, the internet is better connected and easier to find people, groups, information, and interests than ever before.

> Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet.

AI also generates spam though, so this is a much bigger problem than merely "unreasonable" people alone.

I mean, AI generates spam at the behest of unreasonable people currently, and we can just think of it as a powerful automated extension of other technologies. We could say it's a new problem in quantity but the same old problem in kind.

Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.

> Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

At least a bunch of lawyers already got hit when their court filings cited hallucinated cases. If this trend continues, I'll not be surprised when some end up disbarred.

This seems self-correcting. Every lawyer, and maybe court, will use AI to review the other party's filings for such things. AI overseeing what is true and what is not - nothing disturbing about that distopian future.
> AI here is the final nail in the coffin

so far*