Comment by safety1st
8 days ago
I really don't envy anyone who has to moderate anything at the moment.
But yeah. The vast majority of user generated content on the big platforms was already very loosely moderated, and was already mostly trash.
The platforms are just going to keep on doing what they always do, which is optimize for engagement. It's not the crappy AI comments I'm worried about, it's the good ones. These things will become much better than humans at generating clickbait, outrage, and generally chewing up people's time and sending their amygdalas into overdrive.
I think we're going to keep getting more of what we have now, only more optimized, and therefore worse for us. As the AIs get good we will evolve an even more useless, ubiquitous, addictive, divisive, ad-revenue-driven attention economy. Unplugging your brain will be harder to do but even more worth doing. Probably most people still will not do it. Getting serious dystopia vibes over all this.
God its bleak in trust and safety/content moderation/fact checking. And I’m not even talking about America - good luck to you lovely weirdos.
One of the answers to “how do we solve this mess” was “climate change”. (Dealing with depressing things does funny things to humans).
One report on cyber security (which had Bruce Schneier as an author) showed that LLMs make hitherto unprofitable phishing targets, profitable.
There’s even a case where an employee didn’t follow their phishing training and clicked on a link, and ended up in a zoom call with their team members, transferring a few million in USD to another account. Except everyone on the call was faked.
This is the stuff on the fraud and cyber crime axis, forget the stuff for mundane social media. We’re at the stage where kids are still posting basic GenAI output after prompting “I think vaccines are bad and need to warn people”. They are going to learn FAST at masking this content. Hoo boy.
Dystopia vibes? It’s like looking into the abyss and seeing the abyss reach out to give you a hug.
Time to go full blown conspiracy theory mode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
1) Even telephone calls will become totally untrustworthy -->
2) Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times -->
3) Total control and censorship, the end of what we think of as the Internet today.