22 points
*

“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

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4 points

I will have to give this one a try again. I’ve read several of his books, but this one hurt my head to read and I stalled out.

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1 point

I got through it as an audiobook on my 2-3he commutes at the time. Worth it for the last third or so for sure

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2 points

You can say the same about classical media like books or TV. Maybe, AI is more persuading?

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9 points

Pretty sure the internet will adapt.

White lists of non ai content sources. Ai content allowed descends to 4chan levels of quality. Etc etc

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2 points

Hopefully we can reroute around the damage.

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7 points

Kids are stupid, it makes sense generating content for them is easier.

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0 points

The problem is feeding them crap will keep them low IQ. Most parents want the highest quality educational content instead.

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6 points
  1. Thats not how IQ works
  2. IQ is close to worthless as a measure of education or nurturing.
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4 points

Most parents want the highest quality educational content instead.

They shouldn’t be on youtube then.

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3 points

YT is one of the best sources in the world for high quality information. The amount of shit I’ve learnt from learned people is ridiculous.

Blame them watching Mr Flip Floppos Fun House Toy Unboxing Review and MC RP scream stream.

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0 points

It likely means no interest resources for education, not only YouTube. Or may not any resources for education? How far will AI connect spread?

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3 points

You thought there was non-corrupt YouTube content before this?

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1 point

I don’t want to explicitly advertise my own content but Noise Artists typically have single digit views.

The algorithm not pushing it is a very good indicator of corruption levels.

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