Comment by energywut
2 days ago
We're so fucked, as a species.
People are already way too easy to get to believe conspiracy theories. Shit like Pizzagate or whatever is only going to get more common when bad people start making, "and look, here's the video proof!"
And we've already got Tiktok and Youtube Shorts just pumping the dopamine centers in the brain for short form content. Generating shit you like dynamically is going to be an addictive nightmare. The moment it gets monetized we're going to see the equivalent of slot machines pumped at us from every channel -- flashing lights and emotional tugs to get us to part with our valuable money or attention.
And that's to say nothing of the impact these tools have on artists and creative people or the costs to train and deploy these tools.
We're already seeing it today. The amount of 'footage' about LA right now that's showing some sort of war zone that is clearly AI generated, but being consumed as if it was real is staggering.
Yes, perfect AI content has multiple issues, that need to be addressed differently
- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.
- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated
Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.
Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).
That's been happening since Photoshop. Describing this as some apocalyptic event is absurd.
Photoshop requires skills. The comparison with Photoshop is absurd.
So does AI. You think you're creating an Oscar-winning movie by prompting VEO with no thought?
1 reply →
Photoshop requires time.
We can only hope that people become aware that the Internet is a bullshit-machine and will only pull their news information from journalists, but I know this is wishful thinking.
We've basically flooded the information space with r-strategists.
In evolution, rapid reproduction gives an advantage to spamming low-quality offspring [1], and rapid selection without agglomeration [2,3] incentivizes antisocial behavior.
Ideas spread, mutate, and evolve just like animals [4]. So when the Internet made it free for anyone to transmit information to millions of people instantly, trustworthy information sources [5] and prosocial cultural values started dying [6], as literally the worst and craziest people become dominant [7,8,9,10,11].
...Presumably "AI" is going to make this even worse, and immeasurably so.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
2. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers
6. https://theweek.com/culture-life/third-places-disappearing
7. https://globalnews.ca/news/1157137/internet-trolls-are-sadis...
8. https://www.engadget.com/2018-03-19-study-shows-distribution...
9. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
10. https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2023/why-are-online-po...
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
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