Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media. Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.
you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information. If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.
> positive healthcare outcomes
Its seems to be hidden from view. Global health is getting worse, not better
I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better. Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.
The death of consensus reality is also the death of democratic politics. Too many people regard that as a positive.
Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
It seems to me the era of being able to trust pictures was an aberration. Before the camera images created in any form might depict something that really happened, an exaggeration, or a total fabrication. The camera represented a technological leap that made capturing reality significantly more easy than faking it, though faking it was never actually all that hard. Now technology has progressed again and we're back where we started. Any image might be real, edited, or totally fabricated, and we can no longer fool ourselves about "photographic evidence." Trust is and always will be about credibility of the claimant. Additional evidence is itself only as trustworthy as its providence. An attempt to destroy the ability to create images that resemble photographs is doomed to fail and wrongheaded to begin with. The only reason such an idea would occur to someone is they were born in an aberrant era where the culture had ingrained in them the semi-grounded belief that certain types of images are representative of reality. That wasn't the case historically and won't be again.
Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media. Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.
you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information. If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.
Even in healthcare alone, I would question whether the impact was net positive. You have to balance the "access to information" with how people need to deal with false information, health charlatans, ads shoving then supplements they don't need, people's inability to discern what to do based on even true information that they get.
What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too. Maybe people are more likely to get tested. Maybe scheduling appointments is a bit better. What am I missing?
You're not counting the capex which could be the same cost as 5-10 years of Claude.
This assume Claude's price doesn't change. Which isn't a great assumption considering inference providers are moving to usage based billing. Also the VC money isn't going to last indefinitely. Current inference providers are being subsidized with VC money at this point.
> Current inference providers are being subsidized with VC money at this point.
This isn't true.
Anthropic is making an operating profit including the loss making subsidised subscriptions (but excluding training).
Your normal inference provider is doing great. Do the math on a H100 rental and you can see the margins.
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine.
I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen.
I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only.
Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Please!
you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information. If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.
Even in healthcare alone, I would question whether the impact was net positive. You have to balance the "access to information" with how people need to deal with false information, health charlatans, ads shoving then supplements they don't need, people's inability to discern what to do based on even true information that they get. What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too.…
debating this isn't particularly useful of either person's time.
There are plenty of documented cases of reddit posts encouraging deeper investigations or legally authorized tele-health providers (where you can communicate directly with a licensed medical professional).
The number of people using telehealth services is significantly less than the number of people that have bad health outcomes from internet usage. If it were otherwise, ChatGPT, Reddit, and telehealth companies would be managed very differently.
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
You don't remember the discussion around Narrative Science ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science ) then. They were a university spin-out that could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats. Their software enabled local news websites to publish articles about every game, which was seen as a boon to sports fans and a key driver for web traffic. There was a lot of cr…
Literally the first thing I wrote after OpenAI's chat completions API came out was a Python script that took in a JSON description of a football (soccer) game from an API and used gpt-3.5-turbo to generate an article about it.
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine. I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen. I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only. Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Pleas…
I enjoy the technology too, but the tradeoffs are pretty grim. It takes stepping outside of my bubble to see it in full force, but AI misinformation is already rampant.
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine. I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen. I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only. Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Pleas…
You should reconsider the scope. Nobody is losing sleep over Airbnb pics.
We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible.