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AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

fortressofdoors.com

71–80 of 292 posts

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

#71
Like proof of work and proof of stake, I think we’ll see proof-of-humanness in a way that’s far more intrusive and cumbersome than current captchas ever were.

At this time we’re still safe by doing “click the joke that’s actually funny”. Once an AI figures that one out, I imagine we’ll have to prove we are made of meat.

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

#72

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…

[deleted]

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

#73
post #32

The idea raised in this article is interesting. However, if the technology on the side of the spam producers improves, platforms will follow and improve their technology for recognizing spam. So, yes, there might be some temporary lemons failures on some platforms, but I would not expect a big logging off to happen on the long-run. After all I think this is a cat-and-mouse game of superior technology in producing / i…

> 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…

While all of the above are true, there is a variable which was a constant for thousand of years. That is that language is generally static, it doesn't change much over ten, twenty years, or fifty years. It sometimes undergoes significant changes over the centuries.

Well that constant will be transformed to a variable. While GPT can recognize and produce outputs of a language, this tool, or similar tools can be used to produce another language, totally from scratch or a variant of an existing language, instantly.

In the language context, i would argue it is a lot more difficult to produce effective spam than in the image context or video. People will change their language, the model will have to be trained again in the new language, and that is until people up their game and change language again. This is happening already, young people use different language in the internet than older people. I would be surprised if we don't witness in the near future, the internet of a million languages.

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

#74
post #44

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

> It isn't so much about vetting participants than about moderating the discourse

Vetting, moderating ... none of them scale well when done manually. The solution I see is that everyone have their own AI filters, customised as they see fit. You can include or exclude specific people and topics, make it as diverse or narrow as you like, allow challenging opinions or not. One of the filters can be to detect AI bots. Don't make the world conform to you, be selective and just skip the bad parts.

I think people are going to trust their own AI tools that are running on their own computers more than they trust other people and especially other AI. We already know we can't face the future onslaught of information with the old methods, we need help. User controlled AI is going to be our first line of defence and our safe space, "a room of one's own" where there is no tracking and thought policing.

With the advent of large language models we already have that, indirectly - the LM is a synthesis of everything, but we let it generate only conditional to our intentions. All the view points are in there for us to reach, it depends on us how we relate to them.

AI should be like a cell membrane separating outside from the inside. It should keep the bad stuff out, take the necessary nutrients and nurture the life within.

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

#75
post #61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

My comment is based around his specific words of “disease of our times”, being unrelated to the timeframes you’ve mentioned.

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

#76
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…

The internet is full of lemons, not only social media, SEO-influenced services, and services where money buys you reach.

If you take any popular medical fact (for example, about diets), you will find countless published academic articles supporting and against it. This extends into other fields like physics, sociology, and politics too. But the contradictions there (while present) are not as overtly visible.

Many popular news outlets are leaning towards reporting in a "flavor" their audience expects and mixing opinions into their reporting.

By some studies, 80%+ of internet users admit to being duped at least once by fake news or misinformation online in 2022. That's the misinformation they spotted. 50%+ Americans say they read fake news online regularly.

As for logging off, according to Reuters Institute, 41% of Americans actively avoided news in 2022. And anecdotally, my friends and I have withdrawn from social media like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on significantly this year. It definitely feels like a lot of information online is misinformation, either synthesized intentionally or "broken-telephoned" into fantasy by mainstream media.

I do not know how to deal with this personally but disengage from most of the online world. The signal-to-noise ratio of reliable information in many regions of the internet is meager. I mainly read Hacker News (which also sometimes features contradictory research or news), some academic journals, Wikipedia, some forums in my professional field, and some RSS news sources. Everything else on the internet has become too awash with contradictions and misinformation.

I never thought I'd have to retreat so far from mainstream media and social media. Mass logging off is going to impact these areas of the internet seriously.

I am scared of what AI language models will do to professional blogs, news, and academia. Editors and peer-reviewers there are already overwhelmed with unreliable information.

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

#77
post #63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You didn't answer my question. I barely spend more than 15-20 mins a day on HN, so how does it matter if I am reading something useful or not. This is just an imaginary problem like the problem of having 100 million vids of how to boil and egg on youtube. Once you get the info you need from one vid who sits thro the rest. People just tune it out. Like traffic or bar conversations.

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

#78

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 i…

With cryptographic signatures I could at least verify that something stems from the same account that I previously agreed with, but this would require people to be able to manage their own private keys.

Actually nothing would stop people from signing their own comments today and sometimes it is done.

With e2ee messengers I feel pretty confident that a message comes from the right / real person after I verified their public key.

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

#80
Even for cars, "The Market for Lemons" dynamic has never been a major effect. It doesn't define automotive culture. The theory does describe parts of reality in the used car market, but even here... it's not the main thing. A theory like this may be useful for understanding existing phenomenon, but not for prediction... IMO.

Anyway... "SPAM" may be over. That is, I suspect that whatever low end, semi-legal marketing drek produced by GPT-like will not read as "SPAM" to us. Rather, we'll get whole new species of junk marketing, telescams and whatnot.

My prediction is that the first piece of weird will be AI autocomplete. A GPT that takes more context (eg all company emails) built into email & DM clients... that will escalate quickly. The line between human and machine will blurr.

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