Comment by Analemma_
6 months ago
> I feel like the problem seems to me to be behavior, not a technology issue.
To be honest, this has been a grimly satisfying outcome of the AI slop debacle. For decades, the general stance of tech has been, “there is no such thing as a behavioral/social problem, we can always fix it with smarter technology”, and AI is taking that opinion and drowning it in a bathtub. You can’t fix AI slop with technology because anything you do to detect it will be incorporated into better models until they evade your tests.
We now have no choice but to acknowledge the social element of these problems, although considering what a shitshow all of Silicon Valley’s efforts at social technology have been up to now, I’m not optimistic this acknowledgement will actually lead anywhere good.
You can’t fix AI slop with technology because anything you do to detect it will be incorporated into better models until they evade your tests.
How is that a bad thing? At a certain point, it’s no longer AI slop!
https://xkcd.com/810/
Polite slop is still slop.
Most people use platforms like HN to engage in conversation with other people, not simply to assimilate information as efficiently as possible. That they are conversing with actual human beings has value to them, even when they do human things like express emotions and humor.
Hacker News could be perfectly civil if it removed the human element entirely and had an AI post links and generate threads, avoiding common tropes and boilerplate and preferring technical and factual accuracy. Make the forum read only. It would succeed in HN's goal of avoiding Eternal September and maximizing the signal to noise ratio (to the degree that it's possible with AI,) and the technical quality and information density of threads would be superior to anything HN currently hosts on average, but it would also undermine the goal of making it worth a damn to nearly anyone.
The comic is an example of the principle, not advocating that our ultimate goal is discourse that is civil or polite.
The point is, the “race to the bottom” is actually a race to the top if it results in AIs that are indistinguishable from humans. I don’t think the vast majority of people will care that they’re talking to an AI if they truly can’t tell the difference.
Would you? How do you know I’m not an AI?
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