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Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#11
post #5

> Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, says he thinks AI could create a “post-truth world.” He says it will likely make it significantly easier to convince people of false narratives, which will be disruptive in many ways Significantly easier? I would have thought that it would get harder to convince people of anything.

Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug. If people want to believe something, and AI provides somewhat believable fake evidence, they will believe it.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#12

We may not be ready but we may as well get ready. I would strongly prefer to work with skeptical people again. Skeptics can be convinced, they just need evidence. Although I am genuinely intrigued by AI running out of things to ingest, and moving onto AI generated content. Is the snake starting to eat its tail?

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#13
Humans are not mentally ready for anything beyond tribes on the African savanna. Everything else is achieved via complicated brain hacks or social structure hacks that function like cognitive dongles to let a tribal hominid interface with a radically different world.

We just need to develop a whole new battery of hacks for this world. It’s happening slowly.

I’m not convinced that AI is going to make things qualitatively different from social media. It may allow bad actors to produce a lot more bullshit but it’s not like an environment saturated in bullshit is new.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#14
I am not scared for AI overflowing the news sites with bullshit. We already have a fire hydrant worth of bullshit content produced for consumption. Lies and fakes have coexisted with humans forever. People did rumours, then we had books, press, radio, television, and now the Internet. "But it's easier to produce lies/deepfakes today" -- true. However, the absolute cost of producing a lie per consumer already was negligible, and now it's even smaller. People will recalibrate their level of trust in technology and move on.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#16
AI is unrelated to post truth. We have been living the era of the fake news since 2016, when Russian trolls started to peddle with elections and President Trump created his legendary alternative facts. AI may exaggerate these issues, but not much. Anything AI can do can be done by human liars as well. If humans are not mentally ready then shit has already hit the fan and blaming/pointing the AI and its research or regulation is not constructive.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#17
Really don’t like the idea that we will act as interfaces for the AI, I honestly believe it will only many the majority of people lazier and dumber. I’m also incredibly shocked that no one is talking about AI as a friend/companion, that has to not be good for you in the long run. Humans need real human connection, AI is too artificial for that (duh). Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up. Yes, people that grow up on fast food are still alive, but they are less happy and have more health problems (mental and physical), but it did the “job”, that job was to fuel them. In this case, AI will do its job, make people less “lonely”, but I highly doubt it’s a replacement for human companionship.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#18

We may not be ready but we may as well get ready. I would strongly prefer to work with skeptical people again. Skeptics can be convinced, they just need evidence. Although I am genuinely intrigued by AI running out of things to ingest, and moving onto AI generated content. Is the snake starting to eat its tail?

But that's sort of the point, isn't it? It's generous even to call "skeptics" a group. There are just "people who have skepticism about X," many of whom have skepticism for wildly different reasons — many of them bad reasons — and therefore are not convinced by good evidence.

AI will produce whatever evidence a person needs in order to shore up their own "skeptical" beliefs. Same problem as social media, where finding 1000 other people who share your fringe beliefs looks like compelling evidence for your belief being true. Just now it's on-demand, hyper-personalized, responsive to your own doubts, and there's no chance of you realizing "ah, my comrades on the other end of the tube are actually idiots!"

I'd bet an AI product that tells a flat earther that "it's an open question" will be much more successful than an AI product that attempts to dispel that myth. That is, at least until an AI can effectively convince people away from their beliefs, which almost certainly will not happen via "calmly providing solid logical evidence," given that this is not usually an effective vector for persuasion anyway. Now you've got a new problem, which is a technology capable of convincing people of all sorts of insane things.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#19
The rapid development of AI could lead to people generally being frightened away from digital products. In my own social environment, I see more and more people who used to be very enthusiastic about computers turning away to more analog entertainment and work.

Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play" without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is starting to create significantly more problems than it has actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.

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