Comment by frozenseven
6 days ago
More capable AI systems make the world better. If you don't like AI written material on principle, you can simply choose not to read it. Follow human writers who don't use AI.
6 days ago
More capable AI systems make the world better. If you don't like AI written material on principle, you can simply choose not to read it. Follow human writers who don't use AI.
> More capable AI systems make the world better.
Support that.
Now support it while including direct costs and externalities.
If the cost and externality is that people are upset about it, I honestly don't care.
No you can start with actual money.
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The cost and externality are:
1) Lesser cost: people start to not want each other for anything, and therefore lose income of any kind, and are gradually bred out of existence like with horses and oxen in the 20th century
2) Greater cost: bot swarms separate people and can bring about any sort of effect at scale, with people powerless to stop it — eg destroy reputations, bring about support for wars, take over control, or really anything
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I feel that when making a claim like that, the burden of proof is on you to explain how AI makes the world a better place. I have seen far more of the opposite since the advent of GPT-3. Please do not say it makes you more productive at your job, unless you can also clearly derive how being better at your job might make the world a better place.
I could list many breakthroughs in medicine, material science, and engineering. Point out how AI makes information more accessible, automates away drudgery, etc. I see it every day, making the world a better place.
But I feel this disagreement isn't precisely about the technical details. If your stance is based on some fundamental idea of politics/philosophy, I can't change your mind.
That’s precisely the problem, though. The internet is already rapidly filling with AI-generated slop, and it takes a non-trivial amount of human brain power to determine whether the how-to article you’re reading is actually a reliable source or whether it was churned out to generate ad revenue.
The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters are generating something that sounds enough like Shakespeare that it’s making it harder to find the real thing.
Determining the quality of a how-to or any other kind of information you're looking for is the same job whether it was created by a human or by an AI. Check sources, read horizontally, patronize trusted producers and get your information from there.
We've got a tragedy of the commons whereupon we've grown complacent that search engines and wisdom of crowds (of nameless strangers) would see us through, but that was never a good strategy to begin with.
AI slop does little but highlight this fact and give us plenty of reason to vet our sources more carefully.
Tragedy of the commons was a thing to consider when we had sheep that grazed on the commons. It changed significantly when we invented combine harvesters.
The listicle-rot was already painful when the listicles were human-written and poorly researched. Automating the process has not improved the situation.
This exact kind of oblivious response always appears like clockwork on HN underneath any criticism of AI. “It was always like this… AI does nothing new but…”
I wonder if this is itself a form of AI generation LOL
> AI-generated slop
This phrase is kind of interesting to me because it implies that everything AI-generated is "slop". What happens when the AI is generating decent content?
Like, what if we develop AI to the point where the most insightful, funny, or downright useful content is AI-generated? Will we still be calling it, "AI-generated slop"?
Now that the machines are coming for the white collar, the Luddites those same people once mocked are starting to look more reasonable.
In the end the intelligence revolution will be a net benefit to society. In the short term there will be untold suffering.
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I can't speak for everyone but personally, that would be fantastic. It's already magical, having a mostly-accurate oracle on my laptop that takes up the same space as a TV series but that I can literally converse with and that knows a surprising amount of everything. If it could close the loop to apply the same self-reflection that humans can do, it'd be better than most of us at everything.
My beef is with AI slop, not AI content. Bring on genuinely good AI content, and send me to live on a farm in the country.
I deliberately wrote my comment in a way that would preemp this response. Yet here we are.
I honestly have little to no problem with finding and filtering the stuff I want to see. All the writers and creators I liked five or ten years ago? Basically all of them are still there and not hard to find. My process of finding new people has not changed.