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AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

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Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#61

Post by eru »

s5300 wrote: post #46
seydor wrote: post #23

The internet is not limited to Social networks. The "Market for lemons" has existed for decade, google is a market for lemons where people buy from SEO spam, Google assistant , Siri , amazon are also. The logging off is a pipe dream for some people, even though they know that humans are informational creatures and that the "offline world" has never lived up to the desirable one since the time books were invented. Doo…

>> Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times Seems more like extremely wealthy sociopaths & psychopaths that thrive in a capitalistic system are. Don’t think people would be so doomy & gloomy if it weren’t for those with the means to do so trying to shape society into their dystopian dreams. Two examples if needed: Thiel & Davos family

Have a look inside Mao's China or Soviet Russia to cure you of the notion that capitalism is special here.

Doom and gloom have been around for longer than a money based economy, too.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#62

Post by pmontra »

This is why I quit social media years ago. There is no difference between a stream of posts from strangers and a stream of posts from bots. What I care is interaction with friends and FB wouldn't give it to me or not as effectively as WhatsApp and Telegram. So I ended up with WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels where I know first hand most of the people or more rarely I'm at one hop from them. The only place where I regularly interact with strangers is HN.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#63

Post by ben_w »

gsatic wrote: post #36
lossolo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> platforms will follow and improve their technology for recognizing spam Written language has patterns, and your response and mine also follow these patterns. Language models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT can learn these patterns because there are finite ways in which humans write text. ChatGPT responses are easy to recognize because it was fine-tuned with specific data to meet chatbot requirements and provide Q&A style re…

So what? How much time in day, do you think you spend reading what random people you dont know are saying? Who this effects is jobless people.

How many people on Hacker News do you know, or is that just a way to say you're looking for work right now?

People here have experimented with using GPT-3 to generate comments and content shared here, well before chatGPT was released; while it can sometimes be a bit suspicious, it can also get up-voted: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news...

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#65

Post by college_physics »

ericmcer wrote: post #29
college_physics wrote: post #11

In real life people developed (over millenia) a wide range of mechanisms to support stable social interactions. Concepts like ownership, privacy, authority etc. are not laws of nature but deeply rooted behavioral patterns that proved to be useful in some global sense. What happens currently with the explosion of "digital society" is that, largely due to greed, certain first mover groups are dismantling all that - bas…

There is a pretty huge difference between having an email address and credit card vs actively engaging with twitter/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc. You can still participate and benefit from online govt services and banking while avoiding social media.

This might be a too sanguine view that flies on the face of countless warning signs. All digital behavior inceasingly happens through the same mobile device which had been a true wild west, commingling vast personal information islands (location, behavior, health/biometric, financial etc).

Social media apps have already manifested themselves (in the East) as "super apps" and purportetdly this might also be the target business model for some western outfits

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#66

Post by prox »

kybernetyk wrote: post #52
ShredKazoo wrote: post #28

Consider this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/ There are 2 possibilities: The AI can comment as well as a human, or it can't. If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same experience as before. If it can't, then its contributions won't get as many likes/upvotes, and they won't be particularly prominent. Most content users see will be human…

>If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same experience as before. Out of fun I posted a few "posts" generated by ChatGPT to my local town's facebook group (complaining about the quality of snow this year, nonsense like that). The posts got a lot of engagement (100+ comments each) and the only one who figured out it was AI generated was a g…

I agree, AI is like that long flash intro you couldn’t skip in the early website days. Just annoying enough to disrupt any actual commentary (aka true exchange of ideas)

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#67

Post by brundolf »

For me this feels spot-on. But I wanted to comment on one thing:

> Fourth, we'll see a resurgence and even fetishization of explicitly "offline" culture, where the "Great Logging Off" becomes literal

I actually think the author undersold this a bit, because even once you've siloed into social buckets with people you already know- as long as it's digital communication, you can't quite be sure it's really them. Even if you're voice-chatting while playing a game together, even if you're video-chatting, we'll reach a point where that could all be faked.

You could rely on cryptography to make sure someone is who they say they are, but that requires extra hoops and a basic understanding of how to use it and what is and isn't trustworthy. Most people probably won't bother

So at some point only physical contact will be fully reliable

(Until, I guess, Musk's brain-computer interface takes off. Then nothing is real)

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#68

Post by taylorportman »

wyldfire wrote: post #2

> Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts being "verified" as genuinely human. IMO this is long overdue. And I think people should/will eventually even pay for this feature. > Powerful nation states will be more than eager to assist them in this regard. I agree - world governments could consider even subsidizing this in some way in order to foster fewer anonymous botnets sowing discord. The web…

I've always wondered why governments can't run social networks for giving voice/reputation to citizens weighing in on current issues to give rise to a phenomenon similar to the net in the Ender's Game books that gave voice to Ender's siblings. There exists a lot of untapped potential to harness the passion of the armchair pundits but no pressure to mold this passion into grassroot hierarchical influence that could potentially grant political sway for individual's expert opinions. Currently opinionated relatives of holiday dinner & BBQ socials are under little pressure to cultivate their passion beyond a small inner circle of hostages of social etiquette - if only they had an outlet to mold that cunning & passion, to temper it with the satisfaction of having your opinionated views addressed by the big shot president of the times. In the book, these kids are calling shots under pen names. It's fun to think about.

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#69

Post by ShredKazoo »

Jiro wrote: post #45
ShredKazoo wrote: post #28

Consider this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/ There are 2 possibilities: The AI can comment as well as a human, or it can't. If it can comment as well as a human, our experience of using social networks will not be degraded. We still get the same experience as before. If it can't, then its contributions won't get as many likes/upvotes, and they won't be particularly prominent. Most content users see will be human…

The AI could comment as well as a human until it gets to its payload, which is a scam. People will vote it down after they get taken in by the scam, which is too late. Or maybe not even then, if the payload isn't a scam per se, but something that's deliberately designed by the AI's developer to be slanted. A million AIs that are indistinguishable from humans but occasionally throw in a comment about how they got sick…

>People will vote it down after they get taken in by the scam, which is too late.

Not too late to create training data by which the social media platform can detect and remove subsequent scams. Especially if they 'report' rather than downvote.

>A million AIs that are indistinguishable from humans but occasionally throw in a comment about how they got sick from Pepsi could make things very profitable for the Coca-Cola company.

How is this different from Coca-Cola paying influencers to post negative stuff about Pepsi?

>Also, upvotes are an imperfect measure of how good the post is and AIs would be able to game the measure.

How is this different from humans gaming the measure?

Re: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

#70

Post by wkat4242 »

seydor wrote: post #44
angarg12 wrote: post #25

Regarding the Third point, I can already see part of this movement. I've become disenchanted with the quality of the discourse. Specifically as I've entered a more senior stage of my career, I'm looking to mingle with like-minded folks in similar situations. Thing is, these folks don't usually lurk online, and even if they do, their voices get overwhelmed by the flood of (mostly low quality) content. I'd be happy to…

It isn't so much about vetting participants than about moderating the discourse , which is hard to do right, and usually relegated to the few people who are willing to do it for free , which is bad quality (like reddit) Ai can be used to moderate discussions however , if it is trained to remove low effort in an unbiased way

I don't think the discussion between carefully vetted participants needs to be moderated. We go for moderation too quickly these days. Of course if someone goes crazy they should be banned but in less extreme scenarios a well chosen group should behave, just like it's but necessary to moderate a social gathering in real life.
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