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

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 200 posts

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

#91

Post by hitarpetar »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #60
entropie wrote: post #55

> “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.” Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk. It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.

“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.” This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it. The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but huma…

typical technological determinism. comparing AI to the motorcoach assumes something we cannot know yet, namely that the impact of AI on the next century will be comparable to the invention of the automobile. there's also a long list of negative externalities caused by automobiles. who cares? anyone hurt by climate change, or who lives in a grid organized around cars rather than people. anyone who has ever been killed in a car accident.

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

#92

Post by District5524 »

supersrdjan wrote: post #84

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.

That still seems to be a problem. It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued). At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.

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

#93

Post by shortrounddev2 »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #15
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…

On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them. I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discu…

I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are

1. Car crashes

2. Street/bum fights

3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)

4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")

5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)

Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level

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

#94

Post by Loughla »

spicybright wrote: post #63
sssilver wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!

I refuse to use reddit with it's modern UI. Once old.reddit.com dies I'm hanging up my spurs

I left when they killed 3rd party app access.

Honestly even the curated subs I was a part of were pretty toxic or echo-chambery now that I've had time to look back

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

#95

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

> in a local facebook group for my town ... [someone posts AI promos]

> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining

people are less confrontational the more local it is

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

#96

Post by mediaman »

ryandrake wrote: post #77
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…

I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and t…

Cultural antibodies take a long time to develop. In twenty years you will see more common resistance to what's being produced today, but less to whatever new innovation is released then.

See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.

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

#97

Post by mihaic »

thih9 wrote: post #89
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

I think it's not at all self-contradicting.

HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.

Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.

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

#98

Post by ares623 »

supersrdjan wrote: post #84

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.

You/me in your/my current state are/is the single most important thing in the world.

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

#99

Post by kjkjadksj »

supersrdjan wrote: post #84

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.

Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.

I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.

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

#100

Post by kjkjadksj »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #40
dingnuts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this website exists as an advertisement for a brand. the people here are hustling harder than anywhere! it's worse than LinkedIn! that's why this website is a constant dick measuring contest -- it's a news site run by a venture capitalist firm about startups! Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills? the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..

I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone. HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.

Uhh, the yc job board is essentially a different site entirely than this forum.
Post reply on HN