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AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

fortressofdoors.com

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

#81

Post by clnq »

seydor wrote: post #24
woeirua wrote: post #9

This article gets it. ChatGPT heralds the end of free user comments, forums and social media. Because when everything and everyone online is fake, why even log on to Insta or FB or Twitter? The internet will still be useful, but Web 2.0 will go the way of the dodo unless it adapts and the easiest way to cut down on spam is to charge users money for access. Spam campaigns are a lot less lucrative when it costs money t…

There is as much spam as there is email. Did people quit email?

A lot of people did. Most business communication happens in virtual meetings or on platforms like Slack and Teams. Most informal communication occurs through voice calls and instant messaging. All that used to be email around Y2K, as far as I remember.

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

#82

Post by ls15 »

taylorportman wrote: post #68
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 po…

Even though it is not an official service, in Germany there is Abgeordnetenwach [0](Translate: representative watch), where citizen can ask parlamentarians directly. Some parlamentarians are great at answering questions, while some never reply and some only let their offices copy & paste standard replies. I wish politicians would be forced to make an effort to reply to their sovereign. Certain reasonable anti-spam and DoD measures granted.

[0] https://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/

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

#83

Post by matkoniecz »

glass3 wrote: post #12
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

Search engines are faltering because many intersecting trends are destroying the availability of a vibrant, indexed, text-based internet: emphasis on video content, siloed content behind logins and paywalls, pulling traffic out into "apps" that are no longer part of the web, etc. GPT-style language models are also driving massive creation of spam that further dilutes and poisons the text sources that their own traini…

New search engines will falter. Whoever has a collection of current pages has the data set to be a gateway to authentic information.

Google has problems already.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

emporas wrote: post #73
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…

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 t…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by ShredKazoo »

prox wrote: post #66
kybernetyk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)

Flash intros eventually went away, presumably because websites without them were more successful. So your argument appears to imply that humans will still be more successful on social media than AIs?

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

#86

Post by oli5679 »

The current quality of human-generated online content is not uniformly high.

I rely heavily on search engines and recommendation systems, but these are gamed by SEO spam, and flame-war political content.

I want the quality of the content I see to be as high as possible, irrespective of whether it has an AI or human author, and if an LLM can write an excellent Stack Overflow answer/movie review, I'd be interested to read it.

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

#87

Post by randomsearch »

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…

What you’re missing here regards diversity and volume.

Diversity: because language models are in some sense capturing an average (even if that average can be from a subset of training data), its comments will not be very diverse. I suspect if you try sampling away from the center of the distribution, you’ll find the quality degrades to nonsense.

Volume: the biggest problem is that you’ll end up with complete overwhelm of plausible comments. Language models cannot reason, which means they are incapable of producing the best insights (they can probably provide insight through “monkeys at typewriters” effects).

So the smart human who has analysed the subject really well, who currently has to rise above a certain amount of background noise, will now get completely swamped by it.

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

#88

Post by groestl »

brundolf wrote: post #67

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…

> So at some point only physical contact will be fully reliable

But then there are twins, so... The "problem" pre-existed.

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

#89

Post by michaelt »

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…

I've long had a theory that services that demand an upfront payment for an ongoing service will find the payment works against their growth goals and remove it.

For example, businesses that involve $$$ reusable delivery containers don't work well because they want to give first-time customers a discount not a surcharge. Whatsapp was ridiculously cheap - something like $1/year - but they still decided that worked against their network effects.

There are some markets where you pay upfront and on an ongoing basis, like buying a printer and ink or a games console and games - but they often subsidise the upfront cost with profit from the ongoing costs.

I'm not sure how well a $5-to-join social network would work for that reason. Sites like metafilter survive - but with five moderators and one coder, they're not going to be replacing twitter, facebook or HN any time soon.

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