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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

#241

Post by yunwal »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #69
Jiro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Coca cola can't have millions of influencers on their payroll (or at least, it wouldn't be economically profitable for them to do that). An AI could easily create and post on accounts on a scale that dwarfs real human-generated content.

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

#242

Post by NoToP »

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 recently have been discussing pricing models for quality curation rather than profit per se with a friend. The obvious advantage is that it's a simple, objective, broadly applicable means to distill a baseline of quality. The obvious disadvantage is that it is biased towards those with the most disposable income (and willingness to spend), which depending on the topic of the forum may or may not correlate with quality of insight/opinion. Based on what I've seen of /r/lounge, I conclude curating a community with price mechanisms alone doesn't lead anywhere interesting. But perhaps it can amplify quality on top of some other mechanism.

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

#243

Post by Veedrac »

How quick the zeitgeist moves, from laughing at OpenAI for pretending their toy has consequences and going into it with caution, to casual acceptance that this represents a transformative and damaging change to the future of the internet. Which, really, is the thing to learn here: not the predictions on what today's nascent technology will do a decade hence, but that what a decade hence will be nascent could well be outside your Overton window today.

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

#244

Post by z0r »

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…

A key part of the Something Awful forum's success was the $10 registration fee required to create an account.

Discussion can't scale beyond a certain number of active user accounts without a large drop in quality. It's kind of hard to tell what that limit is because every forum has a large number of mostly quiet lurkers who simply want to read and follow the discourse. SA's $10 fee created a barrier to entry, and the culture of bans being regularly handed out to bad posters encouraged people to lurk until they were ready to make good posts. Upvotes and downvotes as popularized by reddit and reddit-like forums served as a kind of substitute for that effect but they don't work well with as many users as those websites have.

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

#245

Post by LarryMullins »

pessimizer wrote: post #231
LarryMullins wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as soon as people see "verified humans" posting things they utterly disagree with, the temptation to call those people "bots" will be too great to resist. A substantial portion of internet commenters will sooner call a human verification system into disrepute than admit that some real people really do earnestly disagree with them. They'll spin conspiracy yarns about how "the other side" controls the verificat…

You're just poisoning the well. edit: I find it very bizarre and very fashionable to defend the integrity of a verification service that does not exist, and to already dismiss the non-existent people who could suspect that this hypothetical system of verification was corrupt as conspiracy theorists.

Your response is very strange. I have not "defended the integrity of a verification system", nor am I inclined to because I do not support the creation of such verification systems in the first place. And I have no clue what "well" you think I'm poisoning.

My point was not that such verification systems are incorruptible. My point is that such verification systems are pointless because they will inevitably be perceived as corrupt. Whether or not the verification system is actually corrupt makes no difference. Such systems are worthless because people won't trust them. Any system will be accused of being corrupt by "both sides" of any heated debate, and they're not both going to be right. But it doesn't matter of one, the other or neither are correct. What matters is that the system won't work because people won't trust it.

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

#246

Post by georgeecollins »

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…

The third point also made complete sense to me. My family has been using a Discord server to communicate for years now, and at first people thought that was strange. It's social media for people you really know and interact with, not a BS news feed. Think of it as a real network, not a fake network or an entertainment network. And a dozen other services function in the same way.

But I get invited into discord servers for developers I work with, interests, I share, and I think it is getting to be more and more common. Some people will spend time in fake networks and probably not get a lot of value out of them other than entertainment. And others will gravitate to real networks for communication.

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

#247

Post by ericmcer »

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 don't know when it happened exactly, but I have noticed the top comments on youtube/instagram/fb are always something completely inane like 3 heart emojis or something. It was always baffling that any kind of meritocratic system that ranked comments would result in something so useless being placed at the top.

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

#248

Post by altairprime »

burnished wrote: post #232
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.

Genuinely, what do you see as dated? My only other point of comparison is Reddit so I suspect I’m behind the times.

Do you use old or new interface?

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

#249

Post by burnished »

altairprime wrote: post #248
burnished wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely, what do you see as dated? My only other point of comparison is Reddit so I suspect I’m behind the times.

Do you use old or new interface?

Old, I think? I saw a friends and his was this stream of pictures and gifs, whereas mine is entirely titles with the occasional thumb nail.

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

#250

Post by ShredKazoo »

yunwal wrote: post #241
ShredKazoo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> How is this different from Coca-Cola paying influencers to post negative stuff about Pepsi? Coca cola can't have millions of influencers on their payroll (or at least, it wouldn't be economically profitable for them to do that). An AI could easily create and post on accounts on a scale that dwarfs real human-generated content.

80/20 rule -- 20% of influencers generate 80% of the views. Don't need to pay everyone.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...

^ Wouldn't this apply to ChatGPT bots as well?

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