One of the biggest problems with AI slop (the biggest problem) is that we aren't discerning or critical enough to ignore the bad stuff. It should be fine for people to use AI to generate tons of crap so long as people curate the good stuff to the top.
Slop Terrifies Me
111–120 of 370 posts
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#112I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…
Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
book keepers, graphic artists
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
me neither, but that's because I used to be a bookkeeper. There's accountants though who have data entry people under them who they market as "bookkeepers," and they are now being replaced by AI. Most small business owners in particular dont care.
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.
That fact that people see "the singularity happening" based on LLM results, is why most people are the kind of ignorant cheerleaders of tech that predicted robot servants, flying cars, and space colonies by 2000 in 1950.
This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#115I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately…
I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr. Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult. Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#116Slop existed before AI came along.
It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.
I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
> That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer faster and people got fucked faster?
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very many will struggle without work or prospects. People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer faster and people got fucked faster?
They taught you the only two altenatives are 1917 style communism or 2026 style capitalism?
Talk about a crap educational system.
Re: Slop Terrifies Me
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket. > And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs a…
>Replacing this with AI is a welcome development.
Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
> As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and real understanding of millions of real people's situations and needs.