AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by angarg12 » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #89

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 aga…

It's a matter of mental model. I'm thinking more "private members club" than social network.

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

#212

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #154

Renaud wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>loss of anonymity comes with significant drawbacks: criticizing government and powerful people becomes more difficult. How don't see how making our lives more dystopian can be a net benefit. How many of us expose different aspects of ourselves through different identities? Maybe most people are happy to show everyone all aspects of their lives, but I'm not, in part because who I am could get me or the people I meet…

Yep, a functioning society that benefits the most needs some form of anonymous dissent.

You guys are misunderstanding how things are developing here.

The danger is not that you'll lose anonymity. The danger is that if you use anonymity, no one will listen to you. I'd wager a lot of algorithms will just shadow ban you. This is because you become viewed, effectively, the same way as the AI agent generating brand placement tweets for Bob's Bargain Basement Bar-B-Que and Bitcoin.

No one will know the difference between you and the corporate AI's. Only the verifiable humans will end up with opinions that anyone pays any attention to. It's like everything else will be a banner ad. Whether it's a banner ad or not.

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

#213

Post by jlarocco » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #193

> What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake? I think people start logging off. I don't necessarily think that's the case. Remember the old "nobody on the internet knows you're a dog" cartoon? Well, I think that for a lot of things, nobody cares if they're talking to a dog. People only care about people on the internet being fake in certain contexts. They'll very much care if all of th…

There's a lot of "I don't think" in there. Have you actually asked anybody?

I haven't, but my impression and anecdotal data is exactly opposite.

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

#214

Post by blueridge » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #101

I can imagine a future where it's quite easy to fake real people. By gathering information, pictures and maybe even videos of a person, you might be able to deep fake a credible video of them. It might know their address and use pictures and Streetview material to have them "record" a video from their house. That means that a clever script would be able to figure out who a persons real friends are (that info is easil…

At a previous company, we had a standard "About" page with our names and photos, didn't think anything of it. Fast forward a few years and we discovered a bunch of Russian "businesses" who had used our names and photos on their About page. They were selling all sorts of bogus apps and service contracts. We reached out and sent a kind message and asked them to remove our photos, they responded (and apologized!) and said they would remove the content, but of course that never happened.

To this day, when people search for me, they find an old photo and my name associated with a fraudulent company selling shit products and services.

On a related note, a few of my friends have taken down their long standing personal sites and blogs for this very reason. A few bad actors took their photos, their About pages, a bunch of their blog posts, and used them as if they were their own—quoting them, tweeting them, referencing them in "their work", etc. One of them got wrapped up in an elaborate hiring scam where someone used his photo, email address, and employment history from LinkedIn and got all the way through an interview process.

The whole situation was so jarring that he wiped everything—almost a decade of writing, his LinkedIn profile, his Twitter account, all of it.

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

#215

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

nerdbert wrote: post #203

_as31 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment section there.

Just looked at lobsters and there are zero comments on almost all posts.

Q.E.D.

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

#216

Post by awestroke » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #183

awestroke wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, people start signing their AI-generated messages. What have we gained?

You can ban them and they'll stay banned. Today they'll come back or switch to one of the other dozen accounts they post crap on. The counter argument to that is that places like Facebook are mostly not pseudonymous and a lot of crap is posted there.

Ban them on what grounds?

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

#217

Post by throw10920 » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #175

jakewins wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invite only to write, open to read. But the main trick is tracking the invite tree - if the person that invited you gets banned, you get banned too (or need to appeal to have your “branch” of the invite tree adopted by someone else).

So if jcs somehow gets banned, the whole place shuts down? I find the idea of the site intriguing yet I'm not sure what I could contribute.

jcs started the site, so him getting banned would be quite a feat indeed!

(although it would be an amusing way to shut the site down if he gets tired of maintaining it...)

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

#218

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

_as31 wrote: post #124

moffkalast wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be happy to pay a fee to become a member of a community with vetted participants You better start believing in vetted online communities Miss Turner, you're in one! It may not be vetting by moderators, but HN's dated frontend definitely acts as a forcefield against many kinds of people.

I feel like Lobsters has better quality discourse nowadays though, due to its much more explicit vetting system. I am not part of that website, yet I love reading the comment section there.

Signed up day one with a one char username. Tried to use it a few years later and by then it had been deleted. Understandable I guess, but I'm still salty about it. Just had to get that story off my chest.

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

#219

Post by chrismarlow9 » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

For my own life I've boiled it down to a "signal vs noise" problem. Whether it be a human or a bot delivering information isn't really important to me. What's important is the accuracy and proof of the information.

Eliminating the "noise" is pretty easy, just take the "mute everyone" approach. No default subreddits, use ad blockers, actively disable "suggested" content where possible, and periodically review the things I'm getting my "signals" from.

The problem I'm struggling with now is verifying authenticity of references and information. Every solution I can think of (say a chrome plugin that does analysis and can watermark text/video/image content with a "FAKE DETECTED" banner) just becomes a cat and mouse game.

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

#220

Post by throw10920 » Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #186

anselm wrote: post #156

Authors making this argument (which we see often now) really need to sketch out why cryptographic solutions will fail. The entire thesis rests on this erroneous sentence in the second point: “This can be done in two ways – just move to invite-only silos where you already know everybody, or big platforms where the owners do the vetting for you.” There are more options. We employ them when we are forced to; when it bec…

Because using technology to solve human problems rarely/never works. [1] was originally written for spam and bore mostly correct. Explain how replacing spam with “AI-generated spam” changes anything? You can try to fight this stuff but it will look more like AI to detect AI (similar to our current anti-spam tech). No reason to believe cryptography has some kind of magical bullet here as it’s an unrelated problem doma…

> Because using technology to solve human problems rarely/never works.

You're badly misunderstanding the parent post - it is not proposing a technological solution to a human problem, but a technological enforcement of a fundamentally human solution:

> subjectively score every piece of content that crosses our phone against our social trust graph...can deputize our people in our extended social network to mark content as appropriate for kids or not, or otherwise filter

This is a social web of trust, where real people do the ranking and trust assignments - the cryptography and other technology just keeps track of bookkeeping.