Comment by segasaturn
1 year ago
Money quote:
> There’s also a social contract: when we create an account in an online community, we do it with the expectation that people we are going to interact with are primarily people. Oh, there will be shills, and bots, and advertisers, but the agreement between the users and the community provider is that they are going to try to defend us from that, and that in exchange we will provide our engagement and content. This is why the recent experiments from Meta with AI generated users are both ridiculous and sickening. When you might be interacting with something masquerading as a human, providing at best, tepid garbage, the value of human interaction via the internet is lost.
It is a disaster. I have no idea how to solve this issue, I can't see a future where artificially generated slop doesn't eventually overwhelm every part of the internet and make it unusable. The UGC era of the internet is probably over.
Oh, there are solutions. One is a kind of a socialized trust system. I know that Lyn Alden that I follow on Nostr is actually her not only because she says so, but also because a bunch of other people follow her too. There are bot accounts that impersonate her, but it’s easy to block those, a it’s pretty obvious from the follower count. And once you know a public key that Lyn posts under, I’m sure it’s her.
She could start posting LLM nonsense, but people will be quick to point it out, and start unfollowing. An important part is that there’s no algorithm deciding what I see in my feed (unless I choose so), so random LLM stuff can’t really get into my feed, unless I chose so.
Another option is zero knowledge identity proofs that can be used to attest that you’re a human without exposing PII, or relying on a some centralized server being up to “sign you in on your behalf”
https://zksync.mirror.xyz/kWRhD81C7il4YWGrkDplfhIZcmViisRe3l...
How can ZK approaches prevent people from renting out their human identity to AI slop producers?
By just making it more expensive. We’re never going to get rid of spam fully, but the higher we can raise the costs, the less spam we get.
EDIT: Sorry, I didn’t answer your question directly. So it doesn’t, but makes spam more expensive.
Well, the end of open, public UGC content anyway.
I have heard of Discord servers where admins won't assign you roles giving you access to all channels unless you've personally met them, someone in the group can vouch for you, or you have a video chat with them and "verify."
This is the future. We need something like Discord that also has a webpage-like mechanism built into it (a space for a whole collection of documents, not just posts) and is accessible via a browser.
Of course, depending on discovery mechanisms, this means this new "Internet" is no longer an easy escape from a given reality or place, and that was a major driver of its use in the 90's and 00's - curious people wanting to explore new things not available in their local communities. To be honest, the old, reliable Google was probably the major driver of that.
And it sucks for truly anti-social people who simply don't want to deal with other people for anything, but maybe those types will flourish with AI everywhere.
If the gated hubs of a possible new group-x-group human Internet maintain open lobbies, maybe the best of both worlds can be had.
Discord, or the Death of Lore :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35050858
(Even when something like a wiki exists, most of actual information will still be contained in the lore, itself blackholed by a deep web platform like Discord.)
This strange reliance on Discord as some sort of "escape from web3.0" is silly to anyone who knows what Discord is(modern AOL) and how centralized it is. Its just the same corporate walled garden with more echochambery isolation.
Is AI part of "web 3.0"? I thought web 3.0 was decentralized/blockchain stuff.
I mention Discord because a lot of people use it for stuff that would formerly be forums. Telegram is also the the same. They're doing this despite it being centralized. What's the decentralized equivalent of Discord or Telegram? Does it support phone notifications?
Invite only forums or forums with actual identity checking of some sort. Google and Facebook are in prime position to actually provide real online identity services to other websites, which makes Facebook itself developing bots even funnier. Maybe we'll eventually get bank/government issued online identity verification.
Online identity verification is the obvious solution, the only problem is that we would lose the last bits of privacy we have on the internet. I guess if everyone was forced to post under our real name and identity, we might treat each other with better etiquette, but...
> I guess if everyone was forced to post under our real name and identity, we might treat each other with better etiquette, but...
But Facebook already proved otherwise.
Optimistically, if all you want to do is prove you are, in fact, a person, and not prove that you are a specific person, there's no real reason to need to lose privacy. A service could vouch that you are a real person, verified on their end, and provide no context to the site owner as to what person you are.
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My parents use a lot of Facebook - and things some people say under their real name are really mindblowing.
Posting with IRL identity removes the option to back down after a mistake and leads to much worse escalations, because public reputations will be at stake by default.
> with actual identity checking of some sort
I am hoping OpenID4VCI[0] will fill this role. It looks to be flexible enough to preserve public privacy on forums while still verifying you are the holder of a credential issued to a person. The credential could be issued from an issuer that can verify you are an adult (banks) for example. Then a site or forum etc, that works with a verifier that can verify whatever combination of data of one or more credentials presented. I haven't dug into the full details of implementation and am skimming over a lot but that appears to be the gist of it.
[0] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issu...
Ironically, on Facebook itself I am only friends with people I actually know in real life. So, most of the stuff I see in my feed is from them.
I’m only friends with people I know on Facebook, so I’m mostly see ads on that site. There’s a feed to just see stuff your friends post, but for some reason the site defaults to this awful garbage ad spam feed (no surprise really).
Do people still post things on Facebook? I don't know because I haven't used it, ever, but I've heard that Meta has turned it into a platform mostly for passively consuming algorithmically-driven content instead of sharing your day on your News Feed.
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I suspect that the honest outcome will be that platforms where AI content is allowed/encouraged will begin to appear like a video game. If everyone in school is ai-media famous - then no one is. There is most assuredly a market for a game where you are immediately influencer famous, but it's certainly much smaller than the market for social media.
Cool, does that mean we can go out more and talk to real humans again? Can't wait tbh.
For the tech discussions I'm interested in burning cpu/GPU cycles for proof of work is a good way to make replies expensive enough that only people who care will post then.
Another option is a web of trust.
It's finally the year of gpg!
If you think about historical parallels like advertising and the industrialisation of entertainment, where the communication is sufficiently human-like to function but deeply insincere and manipulative, I think you'll find that you absolutely can see such a future and how it might turn out.
A lot or most of people will adapt, accept these conditions because compared to the constant threat of misery and precarity of work, or whatever other way to sustenance and housing, it will be very tolerable. Similar to how so called talk shows flourished, where fake personas pretend to get to know other fake personas they are already very well acquainted with and so on, while selling slop, anxieties or something. Like Oprah, the billionaire.