Comment by colechristensen

17 hours ago

One of the paradoxical things that makes me hopeful is that there's going to be such an incredible amount of low effort AI slop content that it's going to drown out the low effort human-made content and generate a large amount of distaste for it. So much will be so bad that good taste and high quality will be rewarded more status as the people who will say and believe anything will be led astray and left behind.

Maybe it's hard getting across what I mean so a more concrete example is there will be SO MUCH clickbait out there that serious outfits instead of being forced to do it will be able to successfully differentiate themselves by NOT doing it. (and many similar things in different arenas)

I'm trying to say that LLMs raising the noise floor will drown out a lot of the toxic noise that's been plaguing us.

I can hope.

6 comments

colechristensen

Reply
aliasxneo  17 hours ago

> So much will be so bad that good taste and high quality will be rewarded more status as the people who will say and believe anything will be led astray and left behind.

I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's working to some extent. Perhaps AI will be the thing that accelerates its death, but part of me thinks something else needs to happen beyond just an increase in useless content.

  • colechristensen  16 hours ago

    In my opinion there isn't an external _nefarious_ force causing all of this. Certainly those forces exist but without them much the same would be happening.

    It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).

    If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.

    And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.

mrhottakes  17 hours ago

Have you considered that (further) lowering the signal-to-noise ratio will make it much more difficult to find and distinguish a signal?