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The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

arnon.dk

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Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#171

Post by saulpw »

dkdcio wrote: post #25
arnon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can't have opinions? Also, this is entirely hand-written ;)

this is a funny phenomenon that I keep seeing. I think people are going through the reactionary “YoU mUsT hAvE wRiTtEn ThIs oN a CuRsEd TyPwRiTeR instead of handwriting your letter!1!!” hopefully soon we move onto judging content by its quality, not whether AI was used. banning digital advertisement would also help align incentives against mass-producing slop (which has been happening long before ChatGPT released)

I don't have the time or energy to judge content by its quality. There are too many opportunities for subtle errors, whether made maliciously or casually. We have to use some non-content filter or the avalanche of [mis]information will bury us. We used to be able to filter out things with misspellings and rambling walls of text, and presumably most of the rest was at least written by a human you could harangue if it came to that. Now we're trying to filter out content based on em-dashes and emoji bullet lists. Unfortunately that won't be effective for very long, but we have to use what we've got, because the alternative is to filter out everything.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#172

Post by code_for_monkey »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #64
pron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.

5% wrong is an extremely charitable take on the NYT. I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No e…

were defending bushs katrina response now?

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#173

Post by saulpw »

arnon wrote: post #21
titanomachy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This didn’t seem AI-generated to me, although it follows the LinkedIn pattern of “single punchy sentence per paragraph”. LinkedIn people wrote like this long before LLMs. I do love the irony of someone building a tool for AI sales bots complaining that their inbox is full of AI sales slop. But I actually agree with the article’s main idea, and I think if they followed it to its logical conclusion they might decide to…

You're right - it isn't This is just how I write in the last few years

You might have become too much like a marketing bot, sad to say.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#174

Post by devsda »

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…

Trusting institutions is fine but you have to trust people or institutions for the right things, blind trust is harmful.

I'll trust my doctor to give me sound medical advice and my lawyer for better insights into law. I won't trust my doctor's inputs on the matters of law or at least be skeptical and verify thoroughly if they are interested in giving that advice.

Newspapers are a special case. They like to act as the authoritative source on all matters under the sun but they aren't. Their advice is only as good as their sources they choose and those sources tend to vary wildly for many reasons ranging from incompetence all the way to malice on both the sides.

I trust BBC to be accurate on reporting news related to UK, and NYT on news about US. I wouldn't place much trust on BBC's opinion about matters related to the US or happenings in Africa or any other international subjects.

Transferring or extending trust earned in one area to another unrelated area is a dangerous but common mistake.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#175

Post by phantasmish »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #139
nsxwolf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID ended my trust in media. I went from healthy skepticism to assuming everything is wrong/a lie. There was no accountability for this so this will never change for me. I am like the people who lived through the Great Depression not trusting banks 60 years later and keeping their money under the mattress.

I've seen this take a few times recently, including from a relatively famous person who seemed to be on my wavelength generally but I don't quite understand what is meant by it. Could you quickly summarize how and why you felt let down by the media in regards to COVID?

Seconding this, I somehow managed to avoid encountering the coverage of COVID that people say shook their faith in institutions, despite following the news pretty closely. Like to the point that if not for others' reactions it'd never have occurred to me to regard the coverage as notably bad (unlike, say, the lead-up to the war in Iraq). I'd love to know what people are talking about when they bring this up, because I truly have no idea.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#176

Post by johnnienaked »

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…

That's not how they did it though. Trusted institutions are only really needed in a trustless society and reliance on them as a source of truth is a really new trend. Society used to be trustful.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#177

Post by lucianbr »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #165
onion2k wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fundament…

Who else can and will stop the infernal machine other than the people? Can't see anyone. I hope you're wrong and expecting people to cope is not nonsense, because expecting the FDA or UN or Trump or Xi to do it is even more nonsense.

What authority are you going to complain to to "correct the massive power imbalance"? Other than God or Martians I can't see anything working, and those do not exist.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#178

Post by zahlman »

pron wrote: post #163
zahlman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is no consistent test of how they judge some claim more or less trustworthy against an opposite claim.

From my experience, there absolutely is. It just isn't legible to you.

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#179

Post by arnon »

tetris11 wrote: post #15

I needed to get some builder quotes for my home. It did not enter my mind to go online to search for any. I just reached out to my family for any trustworthy builders they've had, and struck up conversations with some of my fancier neighbors for any recommendations. (I came to the conclusion that all builders are cowboys, and I might as well just try doing some of this myself via youtube videos) Using the internet to…

> I know roughly the quality of what I expect to get

because you know the brands and trust them, to a degree

you have prior experience with them

Re: The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful

#180

Post by stonogo »

tetris11 wrote: post #15

I needed to get some builder quotes for my home. It did not enter my mind to go online to search for any. I just reached out to my family for any trustworthy builders they've had, and struck up conversations with some of my fancier neighbors for any recommendations. (I came to the conclusion that all builders are cowboys, and I might as well just try doing some of this myself via youtube videos) Using the internet to…

     all builders are cowboys
What does this mean?
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