Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

arnon.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 218 posts

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#91

Post by theturtlemoves »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #23
arnon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

build things """"people"""" want

People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to you…

> All AI has done is automated an already terrible process, which has - ironically - broken it so badly that it no longer works.

Evil contains within itself the seed of its own destruction ;)

Sure, sometimes you should fight the decline. But sometimes... just shrug and let it happen. Let's just take the safety labels off some things and let problems solve themselves. Let everybody run around and do AI and SEO. Good ideas will prevail eventually, focus on those. We have no influence on the "when", but it's a matter of having stamina and hanging in there, I guess

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#92

Post by jfengel »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #64
pron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.

5% wrong is an extremely charitable take on the NYT. I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No e…

That sounds like something from the opinion page rather than the news. That is ok, as long as it's clearly labeled. It doesn't sound particularly high quality; perhaps they were a local giving their view from the community.

Regardless, clearly labeled opinions are standard practice in journalism. They're just not on the front page. If you saw that on the front page, then I'd need more context, because that is not common practice at NYT.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#93

Post by DougN7 »

drakythe wrote: post #26
everdrive wrote: post #7

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complex…

Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.

I misread your comment as being about Vulture Capital. I think I like that :)

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#94

Post by guzik »

So I went on X after a long break from social media, and my feed is full of tips like this one:

Growing on X is so simple I’m shocked it works.

100x comments a day

10x posts a day

15x DM’s a day

1x thread a day

1x email a day

This is how you grow your presence on X.

Even if having a presence matters, how can you actually say something meaningful if you post 10 times a day - there's no way (unless you just repeat yourself). Hopefully my algorithm's just gone weird but sadly the people I used to follow stopped posting.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#95

Post by wannadingo »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #64
pron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.

5% wrong is an extremely charitable take on the NYT. I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No e…

So since incorporating in 1851, let's say they put out 60,000 issues. 1 issue would represent about 0.002% of their output. How do you get to over 5% wrong?

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#96

Post by rglover »

tsunamifury wrote: post #85
pron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.

Once a problem demands second order thinking you immediately lose a significant portion of the population. It’s simply reality, or else propaganda wouldn’t work so well.

This is easily one of the most valuable comments I've ever seen on HN.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#97

Post by area51org »

everdrive wrote: post #7

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complex…

Quote may be cliched, but still it's valid.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#98

Post by everdrive »

onion2k wrote: post #68
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to you…

If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will. If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvio…

I do think that in general people are just conditioned by advertising in a general sense. I have family (by marriage) where most conversations just boil down to "I bought [product] and it was _so_ good." or "I encountered a minor problem, and solved it by buying [product]." It's pretty unbearable.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#99

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

everdrive wrote: post #7

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complex…

The world will be a soulless hell, but Dario Amodei promises we'll live forever in it.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#100

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #13
alexpotato wrote: post #8

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens fame [0], has a great quote (paraphrasing): Interviewer: How will humans deal with the avalanche of fake information that AI could bring? YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw. In democracies, this is often either the government (e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) or…

> by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information Except those institutions have long lost all credibility themselves.

For sure. He then goes on to mention "in democracies", but a lot of democracies are now failing, in part because the institutions like the free press are being directed by their billionaire owners, or suppressed. And the family ties are being impacted heavily by mass misinformation and propaganda campaigns online, where their publishers are actively pushing it themselves (major worldwide social networks are now state influenced and / or their top brass has subjugated themselves to the reigning parties and / or any countermeasures have been removed).
Post reply on HN