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A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#81

Post by [deleted] »

tharne wrote: post #62
sdwr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker

That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are. I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English…

[deleted]

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#82

Post by AIorNot »

I found this in the article to be pretty funny

“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

20 years ago I remember all the scary articles/studies about the web ruining education.

e.g

Net cheaters (from link below)

The ease of gathering information on the Internet has a darker side. The simplicity of finding out things on the Web also makes it easy for students to cheat. Cutting and pasting text from a Web site and into a paper is effortless. So is wholesale copying or purchasing finished essays or reports. About a fifth of online youth (18%) say they know of someone who has used the Internet to cheat on a paper or test. While 9% of those who have been online for a year or less know someone who has cheated, 19% of those who have been online for 2 to 3 years and 28% of those who have been online for more than three years know people who have used the Net to cheat

from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#83

Post by Forgeties79 »

randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

Moderators really need to start cracking down on this stuff. If nothing else just posts per week limits or something.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#84

Post by supersrdjan »

Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.

If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#85

Post by Barrin92 »

Mabusto wrote: post #30

I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool. Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your bra…

>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.

And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.

People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#86

Post by master-lincoln »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #67
sssilver wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would such verification work at planetary scale?

Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.

how would a phone number proof uniqueness though? I can buy multiple SIM cards even with showing ID

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#87

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #78
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.

Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!! Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that…

I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1.

> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.

Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#88

Post by tarsinge »

randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#89

Post by thih9 »

randycupertino wrote: post #7

I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page. There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the…

Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.

E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661253

Re: A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

#90

Post by Karrot_Kream »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #87
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!! Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that…

I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1. > I guess I use my real life friends and family for that. In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth thr…

> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion.

I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.

> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.

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