The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I’m sure there were moments or clues before that.
This was when the “you’re the product if its free” arrangement metastasised into “you’re a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not”.
Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it … the internet, IE other people’s content isn’t valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.
The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically “live” and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.
I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet … whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn’t thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.
But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.
Especially coming from Google, who was one of the good guys pushing open standards and interoperability.
Eh, open-sourcing is just good business, the only reason every big tech company doesn’t is that loads of executives are stuck in the past. Of course having random people on the internet do labor for you for free is something Google would want. They get the advantage of tens of thousands of extra eyes on their code pointing out potential security vulnerabilities and they can just put all the really shady shit in proprietary blobs like Google Play Services, they’re getting the best of both worlds as far as they’re concerned.
Large publicly-traded companies do not do anything for the good of anyone but themselves, they are literally Legally Obligated to make the most profitable decisions for themselves at all times. If they’re open-sourcing things it’s to make money, not because they were “good guys”.
Well said! I’m still wondering what happens when the enviable ouroboros of AI content referencing AI content referencing AI content makes the whole internet a self perpetuating mess of unreadable content and makes anything of value these companies once gained basically useless.
Would that eventually result in fresh, actual human created content only coming from social media? I guess clauses about using your likeness will be popping up in TikTok at some point (if they aren’t already)
I dunno, my feeling is that even if the hype dies down we’re not going back. Like a real transition has happened just like when Facebook took off.
Humans will still be in the loop through their prompts and various other bits and pieces and platforms (Reddit is still huge) … while we may just adjust to the new standard in the same way that many reported an inability to do deep reading after becoming regular internet users.
I think it’ll end up like Facebook (the social media platform, not the company). Eventually you’ll hit model collapse for new models trained off uncurated internet data once a critical portion of all online posts are made by AI, and it’ll become Much more expensive to create quality, up-to-date datasets for new models. Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda and everyone else will move to newer, less enshittified platforms until the cycle repeats.
Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human. I also think most current fediverse platforms are also marginally more resistant to AI bots because individual servers can have an application process that verifies your humanity, and then defederate from instances that don’t do that.
Basically anything that can segment the Unceasing Firehose of traffic on the big social media platforms into smaller chunks that can be more effectively moderated, ideally by volunteers because a large tech company would probably just automate moderation and then you’re back at square 1.
You’re absolutely right about not going back. Web 3.0 I guess. I want to be optimistic that a distinction between all the garbage and actual useful or real information will be visible to people, but like you said, general tech and media literacy isn’t encouraging, hey?
Slightly related, but I’ve actually noticed a government awareness campaign where I live about identifying digital scams. Be nice if that could be extended to incorrect or misleading AI content too.
It should end up self regulating once AI is using AI material. That’s the downfall of the companies not bothering to put very clear identification of AI produced material. It’ll spiral into a hilarious mess.
I’m legit looking forward to when Google returns completely garbled and unreadable search results, because someone is running an automated Ads campaign that sources another automated campaign and so on, with the only reason it rises to the top is that they put the highest bid amount.
I doubt Google will do shit about it, but at least the memes will be good!
Hasn’t it already happened? All culture is derivative, yes all of it. And look at how much of it is awful, yet we navigate fine. I keep hearing stats like every one second YouTube gets 4 hours more content and yet I use YouTube daily. Despite being very very confident that all but a fraction of a percent of what it has is of any value to me.
Same for books, magazines, news, podcasts, radio programs, music, art, comics, recipes, articles…
We already live in the post information explosion. Where the same stuff gets churned over and over again. All I am seeing AI doing is speeding this up. Now instead of a million YouTube vids I won’t watch getting added next week it will be ten million.
But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.
I didn’t think so either. The funny thing is, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and the whole cyberpunk genre was warning us…
"AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”
So delusional.
Do they think that their AI will actually dig the cobalt from the mines, or will the AI simply be the one who sends the children in there to do the digging?
It will design the machines to build the autonomous robots that mine the cobalt… doing the jobs of several companies at one time and either freeing up several people to pursue leisure or the arts or starve to death from being abandoned by society.
Have you seen the real fucking world?
It’s gonna make the rich richer and the poor poorer. At least until the gilded age passes.
AI absolutely will not design machines.
It may be used within strict parameters to improve the speed of theoretically testing types of bearing or hinge or alloys or something to predict which ones would perform best under stress testing - prior to acutal testing to eliminate low-hanging fruit, but it will absolutely not generate a new idea for a machine because it can’t generate new ideas.
The model T will absolutely not replace horse drawn carts – Maybe some small group of people or a family for a vacation but we’ve been using carts to do war logistics for 1000s of years. You think some shaped metal put together is going to replace 1000s of men and horses? lol yeah right
define design – I had Chat GPT dream up new musical instruments and then we implemented one. It wrote all the code and architecture, though I did have to prod/help it along in places.
https://pwillia7.github.io/echosculpt3/
you can read more here: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/daily-experiments-gpt4-bing-ai/
Neither can the majority of engineers I have meet, but that hasn’t stopped them. You really don’t need any design ability if your whole day is having endless meetings terrorizing OEMs.
Hahaha, current ML is basically good guessing, that doesn’t really transfer to building machines that actually have to obey the laws of physics.
They just mean “steal from the weaker ones” by “create”.
Psychology of advertising a Ponzi scheme.
They say “we are going to rob someone and if you participate, you’ll get a cut”, but change a few things so that people would understand, but would think that someone else won’t and will be the fool to get robbed. Then those people considering themselves smart find out that, well, they’ve been robbed.
Humans are very eager to participate in that when they think it’s all legal and they won’t get caught.
The idea here is that the “AI” will help some people own others and it’s better to be on the side of companies doing it.
I generally dislike our timeline in the fact that while dishonorable people are weaker than honorable people long term, it really sucks to live near a lot of dishonorable people who want to check this again the most direct way. It sucks even more when that’s the whole world in such a situation.
Let’s not forget this is all driven by people with the right skillset, in the right place at the right time, who are hell-bent on making vast amounts of money.
The “visionary technological change” is a secondary justification.
Permission granted to scrape this comment too, if you like.
AI might be the one to say “solving global warming needs a drastic reduction car-based infrastructure, plus heavy government regulation and investment in new infrastructure”. They’ll throw out that answer because it isn’t what they wanted to hear.
A point I have been repeating for a while. You can’t out-think every problem. Often the solution is right there and no one wants it.
How do you get in better shape? Diet and exercise. Ok? What exactly was confusing? It’s the same freaken solution that everyone has known forever. Hell Aristotle talked about the dangers of red meat. They hadn’t even gotten to the point where they thought leaches worked and they knew that people who ate red meat all the time had medical problems.
There are lots of great solutions to climate change from stuff that just buys us a little more time (plant a billion trees) to long term solutions (nuclear and renewables) to hell mary solutions (climate engineering). And we have tried none of them.
To be fair, that did improve things for the average person, and by a staggering amount.
The vast majority of people working before the industrial revolution were lowly paid agricultural workers who had enormous instability in employment. Employment was also typically very seasonal, and very hard work.
That’s before we even get into things like stuff being made cheaper, books being widely available, transport being opened up, medical knowledge skyrocketing, famines going from regular occurrence to rare occurrence, etc as a result of the industrial revolution.
We had been on a constant trajectory of everyone getting wealthier up until the late 1970s where afterwards we saw a sharp rise in inequality, a trend that hasn’t stopped. (Thatcher and her other shithead twin Reagan?)
In the mid 70s, the top 1% owned 19.9% of wealth. Now that figure is around 53%.
Even then it is “only” the west. China was starving only two generations ago. As a whole humanity just keeps getting richer and richer. No part of what I am saying is meant to excuse the damage neoliberalism did to wealthy equality in the developed world.
Quote from the subtitle of the article
and you can’t stop it.
Don’t ever let life-deprived, perspective-bubble wearing, uncompassiontate, power hungry manipulators, “News” people, tell you what you can and cannot do. Doesn’t even pass the smell test.
My advice, if a Media Outlet tries to Groom you to think that nothing you do matters, don’t ever read it again.
The implication being that this is the deal that the AI boom is offering, it’s not necessarily an endorsement of that philosophy by the writer.
I don’t care what the implication was, I didn’t read past the slight/insult to my character, morality and intelligence. Who is some MSM empty suit tank to play cognitive narrative shaping with me, absolutely zero.
The Atlantic huh? Alright then, The Atlantic, I’ll remember your name and that you published a piece concluding people are powerless to affect change.
Now (steelman) can I square this with the sentiment from Propaghandi’s “A People’s History of the World”:
…we’ll have to teach ourselves to analyze and understand
the systems of thought-control.
And share it with each other,
never sayed by brass rings or the threat of penalty.
I’ll promise you- you promise me- not to sell each
other out to murderers, to thieves.
. who’ve manufactured our delusion that you and me
participate meaningfully in the process of running
our own lives. Yeah, you can vote however the fuck
you want, but power still calls all the shots.
And believe it or not, even if
(real) democracy broke loose,
power could/would just “make the economy scream” until we vote responsibly.
…
Does this apply here? The song is talking about ballot boxes and corporate explotation on a nation-state imperialist. The topic at hand is to do with the corporate exploitation on a worldwide colonization-of-attention level.
So i think the way I best square this question, do we have the ability to do something about it, is this:
Yes. You can do something. Not in the way that popular media depicts the french revolution. Revolution will instead be boring. In fact, IS: Change minds. Change your own mind about whatever forms of domination you have accepted as just. Demand to know who made OpenAI king. While you’re at it, demand to know why it was just for Imperialist campaigns by “superpowers” justified The Contras. It’s a history lesson we can learn from, believe it or not.
Will you stay down on your knees, or does power still call all the shots?
Any pay wall that let’s you read that much article before showing itself to be behind a pay wall can burn in hell and would have no hope of getting my business purely out of spite.
I need a hot key on my android phone to just flip off scripts real quick instead of having to go three pages deep in settings to turn it on or off.
I just use the NoScript extension on Firefox, though it still takes a couple clicks to whitelist or temp-whitelist a site. Apparently uBlock Origin can do the same in Advanced mode, but I never got around to figuring it out.
Yes just ask chatgpt to read it for you and give it the url
Like this
https://chatgpt.com/share/d9010273-9e39-4db0-b05d-0986d7044b7f
Abolish intellectual property, it is a mental illness that has infected our legal system.
“We need you to reconsider… because we already did it and we’re just looking for your stamp of approval after the fact.”
AI has barely started infecting things, it’s still avoidable… Yet even at this early stage it’s obvious these companies have no morality and are willing to break laws and violate social norms.
It’s obvious they’re evil and they’ve barely just begun.
asking for forgiveness rather than permission sorta just seems to be their policy these days, yeah?
