I've been goofing off on twitter during down time between contracts and it's truly amazing if you go to a political "discussion" how many blue check "verified" accounts that are AI. I'm sure it's not just regular bots because they've responded to some of my troll remarks to them with a decent level of acuity and context. Going to their feed it's dead obvious that they are AI bots though, because their only reason for existence on there is pure mayhem and misinformation. I don't think Musk was talking about getting rid of bots, he was just talking about getting rid of non-paying bots
Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
311–320 of 548 posts
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#312The comment by Yuval Noah Harari seemed insightful to me. If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it’s a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. ie you can never pursuade the bot but it can wear you down / eventually find an argument that works. The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse Aside from the whole skynet thing the ab…
The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated. There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has becom…
I would predict that the chilling effect will be lesser for "unreasonable" voices such as trolls and extremists, and will be greater for the moderate voices.
This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social media has shown.
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What the heck else is post-truth supposed to mean?? An environment where it's become difficult to tell what is true and what isn't. You could also phrase it as, what's real and what isn't. An epistemic crisis. I think we crossed into a post-truth world 7 or 8 years ago (it's been in process for at least a couple of decades) so it's not like AI precipitated this crisis, but it will accelerate it to new levels.
Right, we already live in a post-truth world where it's politicians and journalists who omit or twist facts to support their agenda. It's not just politicians and journalists who do this, but they tend to have the most reach and influence on average.
By that definition, we've always been in a post-truth world.
Yes, access to truth lies on a spectrum. Post-truth references pop up in this moment particularly due to the quantum leap in dis/misinformation. Any layperson, anywhere, can soon convincingly fabricate media of nearly any form: images, video, audio, legit-looking websites, etc. To me, it's justifiable to regard 2023 as an inflection point for truth. My predictions are less catastrophic than many worried folk, but I definitely see why the post-truth moniker is appropriate. Crazy times!
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#314When were humans ready for anything?
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#315I don't think we're mentally ready for social media, even. What something like Twitter can inflict on a person when it goes wrong is absolutely unprecedented, and we still haven't adapted to it. Think that for instance going to the cinema, watching a movie, walking out and venting to a friend "Boy, this one sucked. $ACTOR_NAME did a really bad job with this one" is a perfectly normal thing to do. But move that to Twi…
I'd argue there is reasonable evidence that we were ready for the printing press. Everything beyond that, not so much.
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really relevant to my point, which was that new means of spreading information are capable of spreading both true and false information, and that history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information. So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the chur…
So, your point is not the printing press, but it was "the church". Well, in this case, it isn't "the church", so there any analogy already fails. > history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information. And that's enough? So we can forget about The protocols of Elders of Zion and the stab-in-the-back myth and the misery they imparted because something…
It sounds like you're simply arguing against free speech.
Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that humans need to balance things out. Getting zero confrontation from interaction will be boring in the long term, or will make you fall into your flaws deeper and faster. This is usually the issue of authoritarian surrounded by yes men. On the other side, having too much confrontation will destroy your confidence, kill your motivation, blur your plan / vision with uncertainty, etc. It's more likely that…
Is there any reason an LLM could not be programmed to disagree? Perhaps the level of disagreeableness would be a tunable parameter and could be cranked up when in the mood for a fight or down when one one just wants to converse. Some randomness could keep it from getting too predictable.
Yes you can, but AFAIK AI doesn't have moral basis and at best the confrontation will be random. Sure you can program the AI to have some moral basis but people will choose to flock with those that have the same alignment with them and keeping the confrontation at minimum, thus the flaw still exists even if it doesn't bore you.
In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly. Those are having different moral basis and maybe changing daily. It'll be hard to simulate that with AI, that the fact we have the ability to control them means we're in charge of what confrontations are there to stay.
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lies might be successful, but that doesn't mean people don't care about truth. A lot of mythology served the precise purpose of explaining something that people couldn't otherwise explain, like lightning. Once science provides a more compelling story, it can become hard to go back.
> Once science provides a more compelling story, it can become hard to go back. I get the feeling you haven't gone out in a while.
Of course a lot of the stories science tells are difficult enough that most people haven't internalized them. But, for instance, nobody thinks lightning is thrown by a god anymore -- and that's without even understanding the details of meteorology. It just makes more sense to the ordinary person that stuff crashing into stuff in the atmosphere would make electricity. That is, it's a compelling story, and I don't expect us to backpedal from it.
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#319I 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 negl…
Sure, but scale was limited. Comparing post-LLM production of rumours, fake news, and propaganda with previous methods is like comparing pre-industrial hand manufacturing with modern mass production.
You can now turn electricity directly into propaganda furthering your cause, which is unprecedented.
Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen people on /r/singularity argue how LLMs are a better friend than actual friends or therapists because they are always available, non-judgemental and "listen better". EDIT: Here, for example: https://i.redd.it/7qxb1ohvhada1.png
If you think about it as a one-off amusement it's no big deal. This is how most people are evaluating it. But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and br…
I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning. The people who interact with other humans will have relationships with those humans. And those relationships are the evidence that they're way ahead.
I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But relationships are hard. They take work and there's a decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.
I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but also an improvement for some.