[cjjfjjfjf]

In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

[qurren]

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

[larodi]

Indeed, people seem to try to engage more around me. May be generational, but it can definitely be felt. The internet of algorithmic media may experience a downfall nobody saw coming.

[joquarky]

Some will stay even as their reality becomes more and more abstract.

Meanwhile, the Morlocks will stay grounded and develop novel tastes.

[applfanboysbgon]

I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.

[qurren]

I've also more or less stopped posting my photography on Instagram because (1) my Instagram feed is now full of AI images getting 10000 likes while I get 100; if nobody sees what I post it's not worth posting (2) people instead accuse my images of being AI even though I took painstaking effort to get to interesting actual places in the world during interesting weather (just after storms, etc.) and lighting, and this is incredibly discouraging.

[queenkjuul]

It's probably AI accounts accusing you of AI

[boelboel]

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

[whstl]

Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.

[throwaway85825]

There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.

[smith7018]

Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo

[boelboel]

You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse.

I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.

[nonethewiser]

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

[FabCH]

The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world.

And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…

[hk__2]

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example.

I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.

[tempestn]

I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.

[FabCH]

Multiple people have the same response, I randomly selected this one for follow up:

Yes, but two things were lost:

1) the need for skill or an accomplice. He _couldn’t_ tweet that image in 2016, not without first asking someone to photoshop it. And that need to engage in human to human communication is something truly fundamental that was changed and lost.

2) Any ambiguity or misunderstanding. Yes bad textual tweets exist for a long time in politics. But there IS something about images that is more powerful than text. The text „I’m Jesus Christ and god sent me to heal the sick“ would probably make the news, but a lot of people would go: „is he quoting the bible? What’s going on?“, not so much with Jesus Picture.

[tempestn]

Isn't that kind of good then? It's probably valuable for the public to know that this is how he sees himself.

[nonethewiser]

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?

[watwut]

Both. And even more for people who still defend republican party ... which stands behind and supports Trump 100%

[nonethewiser]

But what does it say about AI?

That it can depict Trump as Jesus? You don’t need AI for that.

[ge96]

Hard to beat shrimp jesus

[PhunkyPhil]

School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.

[_aavaa_]

This is not a great example depending on how you frame this.

The solution to the cheating is, as has always been, to have tests conducted in person, on paper without digital technology, under strict supervision.

[joquarky]

All of this is moot when the parents complain to the spineless school board when their kid fails the supervised tests.

[breezybottom]

It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.

[stanmancan]

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI.

You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs.

There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions.

The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platforms are just eating it up because “user activity” is a win for them.

[legitster]

The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers.

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

[throwaway85825]

AI is the same slop but cheaper. Ideally the value of slop approaches zero but the value of quality stays the same.

[nonethewiser]

But what is the social damage? Can you quantify the damage, even roughly?

[stanmancan]

It's likely nearly impossible to evaluate that in the short term; I think we're looking at generational damage, much of which won't be apparent for years to come.

[witx]

How easy it is now to forge data (video, images, etc) will rott society. Cheating for students is now so much easier. There many examples.

Is it really that hard to understand?

[dijksterhuis]

one example from today https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewq1w7r0zgo

i'm no fan of the politician, but scams like this one are increasing at a significant rate and are a lot harder for non-technically minded people to spot, think your grandmother etc

also recently https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pl7zj024o

also: grok CSAM; plundering massive swathes of copyrighted material / intellectual property; making electricity more expensive for regular folks; increasing global carbon footprint building massive data centres; destroying a whole swathe of entry level jobs for recent grads (not just software junior roles); circular funding deals to keep the bubble (scam) alive, while positioning the large companies as necessary for govt. work so when the bubble bursts tax payers will have to bail them out; people with mental health issues being left to run riot with the tool; suicides; the degradation of human knowledge workers using their knowledge (the muscle atrophies when you don't use it cos "ai said yes") ...

[Qhemlomo]

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society.

I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

[pixl97]

>I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

While Star Trek is fiction, it's probably a good idea to understand the history of how the ST utopia came about, at the cost of a third of the worlds population and decades of suffering.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III

[tintor]

"World War III was the last of Earth's three world wars, lasting from approximately 2026 to 2053."

[panzi]

It's the wrong way around. If we get AGI (or any well working AI) before we abandon capitalism it's going to be a huge disaster. A handful of even richer even more powerful very greedy people will have all the wealth and everyone else will have nothing. I mean, there was a WW3 in Star Trek, so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

[thewebguyd]

> so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

It was (aside from first contact, and the subsequent development of the replicator which enabled the post scarcity economy). The federation was built from the war, not after it.

Suffering is what made the utopia possible, and if ever get to the point of nearing a post scarcity economy, we are likely to experience the same. Progress is built on catastrophe. Whether or not you call it progress depends on if you are born later after the catastrophe and can look back and call it progress, or if you lived through the suffering without seeing the end result.

[autoexec]

Thankfully there's nothing to suggest that LLMs will ever bring us AGI (or any well working AI)

[Qhemlomo]

If AI takes over to slowly, we might play the boiling game aka we don't realize that the water gets warmer and warmer until we boil.

But lets be honest, i don't know that, you don't either. But if a critical mass is reached, faster, we might need to actually solve this problem instead of migrating to a very dystopian future.

Stoping is not an option i think. Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google <<< they ahve so much money and so much to loose. And then we have USA vs. China.

[root-parent]

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

[Macha]

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

[DaveZale]

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

[woah]

Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

[stackghost]

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up.

Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me.

Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.