Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.
The paperclip maximizer is us.
It always was.
The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we needed some work done, we asked family and friends too, and ended up with a cowboy. When the work needed to be re-done, we looked up local reviews for contractors, and ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard.
> ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard. How do you know that? Or is it just that your bias is coybows are bad and so you assume someone who dresses and acts better is better? Now step back, I'm not asking you personally, but the general person. It is possible that you have the knowledge and skills to do the job and so you know how to ins…
Perhaps I wasn't clear - I don't know enough to say if the job was good or bad just by inspecting it, I know the first job was bad because it didn't solve the problem, and then a more expensive contractor explained why, and did solve the problem.
Our issue was water intrusion along a side wall that was flowing under our hardwoods, warping them and causing them to smell. The first contractor replaced the floor and added in an outside drain.
The drain didn't work, and the water kept intruding and the floor started to warp again.
When we got multiple highly rated contractors out, all of them explained that the drain wasn't installed correctly, that a passive drain couldn't prevent the problem at that location, and that the solution was to either add an actively pumped drain or replace the lower part of the wall with something waterproof. We ended up replacing that part of the wall, and that has fixed the issue along that wall. (We now have water intrusion somewhere else, sigh).
If anything, I was originally biased for the cowboy, as they came recommended, he and his workers were nice, and the other options seemed too expensive & drastic. Now I've learned my lesson, at least about these types of trickier housing issues.
Also, no one mentioned evaluating someone by how they're dressed - the issue was family/friend recommendations vs online reviews, and I while I do take recommendations from friends and family into account, I've actually had better luck trusting online (local) reviews.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#103Yuval 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…
How very inconvenient it is, then, that at the same time intentional efforts to spread uncertainty and to erode trust in traditional institutions are at an all-time high! Must be a coincidence.
It's a feedback loop; you need things like freedom of speech and press to get a functional and free democracy, but you need a functional and free democracy to have freedom of speech / press. Infringe on one and you take down the other. But you need to strip down the legal branch of a free democracy first, because the democracy and freedom of speech/press is protected by a constitution in most cases.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#104I don't think this shows that you can't trust things. I think it means trust should be earned.
We might be transitioning to a world where trust has value and is earned and stored in your reputation. Clickbait is a symptom of people valuing attention over trust. Clickbait spends a percentage of their reputation by trading it for attention.
In a world of many providers, most people have not heard of any particular individual provider. This means they have no reputation to lose, so their choice to act in a reputation losing manner is easy.
Beyond a certain scale when everyone can play that game we end up with the problem that this article describes. The content is easy but vacuous. There are far more people vying for the same number of eyballs now.
The solution is, I believe, earned trust. Curators select items from sources they trust. The ones that do a good job become trusted curators. In a sense HackerNews is a trusted curator. Reddit is one that is losing, or has lost, trust.
AI could probably take on some of the role of that curation. In the future perhaps more so. An AI can scan the sources of an article to see if the sources make the claims that the article says it makes. I doubt it can do so with sufficient accuracy to be useful right now, but I don't think that is too far off.
Perhaps the various fediverse reddit clones had the wrong idea. Maybe they should in a distributed fashion where each point is a subreddit analogue operated each with their own ways of curation, then an upper level curation can make a site of the groups they trust.
This makes a multi level trust mechanism. At each level there are no rules governing behaviour. If you violate the values of a higher layer, they lose trust in you. AI could run its own curation nodes. It might be good at it or it might be terrible, it doesn't really matter. If it is consistently good, it earns trust.
I don't mind there being lots of stuff, if I can still find the good stuff.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#105Doesn'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…
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#106I wish we were talking about what's next versus what's increasingly here. How can infinite AI content be strictly awful if it forces us to fix issues with our trust and reward systems? Short term, sure. But infinite (also) implies long term. I wish I had a really smart game theorist friend who could help me project forward into time if for nothing other than just fun. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to reduce the…
> How can infinite AI content be strictly awful if it forces us to fix issues with our trust and reward systems? You're assuming they can be fixed. > But damned if we don't have an interesting and engaging problem on our hands right now. There's got to be some people out there who love digging in to complicated problems. I'm sure the peasants during Holomodor also thought: "wow, what an interesting problem to solve".
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Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#107This isn't limited to sales. The trust collapse is also coming for the public debate, interpersonal relationships and probably more stuff than I can imagine right now.
I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#108Three words to solve this problem: direct mail marketing.
Just kidding, that just goes into my RL trash can.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the potential upsides to this as that people just might start taking time to engage in a bit of critical thinking before reacting. Is this real? How likely is this AI nonsense? What is the source? Is this the full picture? etc. Perhaps I am too optimistic...
Neil deGrasse Tyson said a quote expressing a concern about the future impact of AI on information credibility. The exact quote is: "I foresee the day where AI become so good at making a deep fake that the people who believed fake news as true will no longer think their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news was faked by AI."
I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.
Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
#110This isn't limited to sales. The trust collapse is also coming for the public debate, interpersonal relationships and probably more stuff than I can imagine right now. I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person.
> I predict a renaissance of meeting people in person.
I hope that will come to fruition.