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The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

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Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#161

Post by phantasmish »

onion2k wrote: post #68
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to you…

If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will. If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvio…

> That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will.

Within the last year I opened an Instagram account just so I could get updates from a few small businesses I like. I have almost no experience with social media. This drove home for me just how much the "this is where their attention goes, so that's revealed preference" thing is bullshit.

You know what I want? The ability to get these updates from the handful of accounts I care about without ever seeing Instagram's algo "feed". Actually, even better would be if I could just have an RSS feed. None of that is an option. Do I sometimes pause and read one of the items in the algo feed that I have to see before I can switch over to the "following" tab? I do, of course, they're tuned to make that happen. Does that mean I want them? NO. I would turn them off if I could. My actual fucking preference is to turn them off and never see them again, no matter that they do sometimes succeed in distracting me.

Like, if you fill my house with junk food I'll get fatter from eating more junk food, but that doesn't mean I want junk food. If I did, I'd fill my house with it myself. But that's often the claim with social media, "oh, it's just showing people more of what they actually want, and it turns out that's outrage-bait crap". But that's a fucking lie bolstered by a system that removes people's ability to avoid even being presented with shit while still getting what they want.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#162

Post by palmotea »

throwmeaway307 wrote: post #11
everdrive wrote: post #7

Doesn'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…

move fast and break things! nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!

> move fast and break things!

> nevermind if the things are people or their lives!!

Breaking things is ok. If people are things then it's ok to break them, right? Got it. Gotta get back to my startup to apply that insight.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#163

Post by pron »

zahlman wrote: post #157
pron wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to consider circumstantial factors as well This, too, goes into the probability of something being right or wrong. But the problem I'm pointing out is an inconsistent epistemology. The same kind of test should be applied to any claim, and then they have to be compared. When people trust a random TikToker over the NYT, they're not applying the same test to both sides. > It’s also why things like calling you…

My experience has been that people who trust some form of alternative news over the NYT are not preferring "some random TikToker". And a lot of the time, that trust is specific to a topic, one which matters to them personally. If they cannot directly verify claims, they can at least observe ways in which their source resonates with personal experience.

Yes, but their choice of whom to trust is wildly inconsistent. There is no consistent test of how they judge some claim more or less trustworthy against an opposite claim. Of course, none of us are fully consistent, but some are just extremely so.

Call me naive, but I think education can help.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#164

Post by pjc50 »

alexpotato wrote: post #8

Yuval 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…

The thing is, building such institutions and maintaining trust is expensive. Exploiting trust is lucrative (fraud, etc.) It's also expensive to not trust - all sorts of opportunities don't happen in that scenario if, say, you can't get a friend or relative in the right place.

There are many equilibrium points possible as a result. Some have more trust than others. The "west" has benefited hugely from being a high trust society. The sort of place where, in the Prisoner's Dilemma matrix, both parties can get the "cooperate" payoff. It's just that right now that is changing as people exploit that trust to win by playing "defect", over and over again without consequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#165

Post by Refreeze5224 »

onion2k wrote: post #68
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to you…

If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will. If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvio…

The core of this issue is a power imbalance. Advertisers have the full power of American capital at their disposal, and as many PhDs who know exactly how to exploit human psychology as need. Asking people to "vote with their wallet", or talking about "revealed preferences", or expecting people to be able to cope with this system is nonsense in the face of the amount of power available to the marketers.

It's fundamentally exploitation on a population scale, and I believe it's immoral. But because it's also massively lucrative, capitalism allows us to ignore all moral questions and place the blame on the victims, who again, are on the wrong side of a massive power imbalance.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#166

Post by thechao »

quantummagic wrote: post #150
tartoran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions. The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the…

There's always someone willing to outthink you. That's the whole premise of a magic show: there are people willing to dedicate irrational amounts of time to trick you in to believing something that isn't true.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#167

Post by eddythompson80 »

I'm honestly all for it. As AI keeps poisoning all aspects of online content and online interactions, people who care about that sort of thing will have to move back to in person interaction more.

The person you're physically interacting with might be using AI in their workflow, that's fine. I use AI too. I just don't want to "build a relationship" with AI. I don't care for AI "content". Art, blogs, articles, advertisements, even detestable things like sales and marketing are all forms of human relationships to me. It's fine if you wanna autogenerate it. I'm even "in the market" for autogenerates stuff as I use AI bots too, but you can't try to sell me a 100% automated-burger when I have the Fabricator 3000 too.

If I'm hungry and just want a burger, I'll get my Fabricator 3000 to generate one for me. If I'm in the mood for a human touch on food and a dining experience, I'll cook, go to a (reputable) restaurant or a friend's place who likes to cook. Maybe there is a market for you to run your Fabricator 3000 to generate a burger for me. maybe. I don't know why I'd buy it though when I can just get your prompt and feed it into my own Fabricator 3000...

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#168

Post by AndrewKemendo »

heddycrow wrote: post #158
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re really interested at the furthest depth then take a look at my paper: https://kemendo.com/GTC.pdf If that resonates further let me know at my un on icloud domain

Thanks, I will read. I haven't considered what it's like to be interested at the furthest depth, but I will do that now.

Thanks! Happy to answer and questions you have or if you have any feedback I’m open to it

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#169

Post by trollbridge »

8474_s wrote: post #125
vesche wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/07/05/are-w...

> Release the hypnodrones If you are not building the next paperclip optimizer the competition already does!

SamA actually said perhaps data centres should occupy the majority of the earth’s crust.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#170

Post by quantummagic »

thechao wrote: post #166
quantummagic wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions. The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the…

There's always someone willing to outthink you. That's the whole premise of a magic show: there are people willing to dedicate irrational amounts of time to trick you in to believing something that isn't true.

But if you accept my premise, it suggests a different course of action than most people are focused on today. That is, if you're a good person, and want to build a healthier society, then rather than focusing on the stupidity of the masses, and trying to suppress every errant idea that emerges from them, you should instead create an incentive structure that engenders their trust. You would focus on stern, even corporal, punishments for those at the pinnacle of society, more than those at the bottom. Politicians should not emerge from their time in government with hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains; which is a non-partisan problem today. And any "scientist" that fakes research data, should be treated very harshly, as a criminal. Undermining public trust in expert opinion causes more death and hardship than a typical street-thug murderer.

There is zero chance of making everyone smart enough to navigate the world adroitly. But there is a slightly better than zero chance we could organize our society to earn their trust.

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