141–150 of 320 posts
And 100% of my YouTube ads are scams the last few weeks, many with deepfake fuckery going on. This whole side of the Web needs to be put down. The algo-feed ad-clearinghouse side. It’s a cesspit.
It's a sign that mass-communication-for-everyone-at-scale isn't a great idea after all. We can just go back to small forums and private group chats. Let human-scale social norms rule instead of algorithmically-amplified grey goo.
I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster. If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.
IMO one of the main things ChatGPT offers is the ability to interact with the knowledge of the internet without wading through ads and SEO spam.
Also that information is by definition old. For something it doesn't matter, for many other things, like current news, it very much does.
So while the attraction of having a personal "butler" doing the hard work for you is great, no doubt, it is ultimately no better than getting one's information from Facebook - you have ceded control and get whatever the creators of the system deem you worthy of having. Including political and other agendas. Just look at the censorship the Baidu bot is applying and the entire "jailbreaking" industry around escaping the artificially imposed boundaries on these bots, for good or bad reasons.
And ultimately even ChatGPT and its ilk won't help us any when the web they scrape will be filled with machine-generated spam and crap drowning out all the useful information. Garbage in, garbage out applies even to these robots. They aren't magic.
I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster. If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.
For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.
And 100% of my YouTube ads are scams the last few weeks, many with deepfake fuckery going on. This whole side of the Web needs to be put down. The algo-feed ad-clearinghouse side. It’s a cesspit.
Tried reading a local newspaper website recently? It’s a mess of ads, pop ups, scams leaving a small 2-3 line window of text to read and scroll!
The locally owned newspaper has none of this garbage whereas the "corporate owned" newspaper has ALL of it.
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This is why I refuse to turn off my adblocker on YouTube, and never will. I'm not rewarding YouTube with my money (for YT Premium) for being absolutely useless at vetting their advertisers. I'd rather just not use YouTube at all if it comes to it.
You eventually get to a scale where vetting is near impossible. Paying for premium brings them closer to a state where they don’t need advertising at all.
Ads are Google's main businesses, they should be responsible for vetting. Saying it's a scaling issue is a poor excuse, and if that is their legitimate stance then it should be used as evidence that the government needs to step in.
There are tutorials showing how to create an AI influencers using mix of text to image and deep fake. Next step will be high quality fake vidoes not just images and those will be even more believable for most of people.
An with AI advancing so fast, they will be better than what most people would create on their own.
While this may be a particularly dangerous way of thinking[1], it might be good that everything on the internet is becoming obviously fake, AI-generated junk. So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public. And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the…
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This right here is why we adblock. Google needs to wake up and do something if they really want to stop people from using adblocks on Youtube, or their other properties.
YouTube offers an ad-free service. (yes, I know content providers can still embed their own promotions into their videos).
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IMO one of the main things ChatGPT offers is the ability to interact with the knowledge of the internet without wading through ads and SEO spam.
Agreed. I think this is a good argument towards development of open LLMs. If you're old enough, similar arguments existed about "open / free internet" and we're seeing some of the consequences of having it be controlled by mega corps.
The LLMs don't have any sort of magical way of filtering that out. So if you train an LLM on spam, hoaxes and similar garbage you will get recommendations to drink bleach as a cure for covid. And that applies regardless of whether the bot is trained by a megacorp or someone in their garage using open source network and tools.
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The solution is paying for content, but it's been shown over and over again that the vast majority of people won't pay for most of the content they consume.
Seems like the content market is due for a correction, then. If people are sick of toxic ads, and toxic ads pay for content, but nobody else wants to pay for the content, the content can just die and we'll figure something else out I'm sure.
I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.