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You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

newyorker.com

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Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#21

Post by [deleted] »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #13
ishtanbul wrote: post #2

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next…

[deleted]

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#22

Post by doctorpangloss »

kibwen wrote: post #16
doctorpangloss wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking…

> TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. Imagine the doctor walking into the room and saying "Congratulations! The tumor is growing faster than your legacy cells."

Yeah, I don't think this is a good thing. It's just to say that Kyle Chayka and this HN commenter don't offer any remedies. They go and complain and mock people's superstitious Instagram shitposts.

If you care about narrative creative media, the best thing you can do is pay for it. Whatever that means to you. That is my remedy. The New Yorker isn't going to go out and promote Substack, and the deeper you think about why, the more you realize it is the New Yorker who are the assholes.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#23

Post by rpgwaiter »

joe_the_user wrote: post #14
ryandv wrote: post #8

This is just the practice of invasive data harvesting taken to its natural conclusion, which any tech savvy user or computer geek brought up in the pre-postmodern social media era of the Internet (before Facebook) could have seen coming decades in advance. The only winning move here is not to play, accepting the unfortunate consequence that you will need to "limit the reach of your profile just to avoid participating…

I'm not sure why having an LLM use my output in particular is problematic - I'm pretty sure OpenAI trained GPT-3+ on every single bit of data they could find, so they probably included a bunch of stuff I've written here already (though it is minuscule fraction of their vast corpus of course). Losing anonymity is something I'd be much more worried about overall (not that it's entirely separate I don't think it's the s…

There’s many good reasons, but for me it’s that I don’t want companies profiting off of my posts that have no intention of profit sharing.

When I make a Youtube video and companies run ads on it, I get a piece of that pie (assuming I meet the requirements, etc.).

That same video fed into Gemini so google can charge for AI video generation? I get nothing, Google makes bank. As a user I can pay for YouTube premium and not see ads, but as a creator there’s no amount I can pay to not feed Gemini.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#24

Post by yieldcrv »

vunderba wrote: post #17
jsheard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd give to see the user retention stats at DeviantArt ever since they allowed it to be filled absolutely wall-to-wall with the most boring AI art you've ever seen. Not just allowed but encouraged by jumping on the bandwagon and integrating their own generator. Anecdotally it feels like there's not just an insane glut of AI slop drowning out everything else, but also less "everything else" over time due to user…

100%. It's intensely frustrating that they didn't at least firewall that vast amount of AI noise using a subdomain or something (e.g. ai.deviantart.com).

Deviantart was already noise of unappreciated forms of expressions

People just use it as a hosting platform

Sounds more like a UX issue that you can see galleries

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#25

Post by Barrin92 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #11
ishtanbul wrote: post #2

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

Hard to make any forecast about "spaces" "prone to AI slop," whatever that means, besides social networks that you personally do not like, in aggregate or individually. TikTok and Meta apps are definitely growing faster, in relative or absolute terms, than the New Yorker and the New York Times audiences are, paid or unpaid. If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking…

> If you compare aggregate social media to aggregate news and magazines, the latter is shrinking

This isn't even factually correct, the New York Times has done well, and grown over the last decade. In particular their move in the early 2010s towards paywalled premium subscription content, away from advertising, which was lambasted at the time, was in hindsight a very smart move.

Yes, in the aggregate premium offerings don't come close to the size of the market of slop, it's always been a numbers game, but if you're talking about cultural trends, the people who run those slop factories read the Times and the Journal, they don't watch Youtube shorts themselves and probably keep their kids a mile away from it.

Cultural capital and literal capital aren't the same thing. Danielle Steel has made 800 million selling 200 smut novels, but that hasn't given her a lot of cultural status or influence. The people who make decisions and set trends don't read her books.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#26

Post by Animats »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #13
ishtanbul wrote: post #2

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next…

> When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed...

There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that.

From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is monetizable on social platforms."

Yes. The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#27

Post by bakugo »

ishtanbul wrote: post #2

The outcome is that spaces which are prone to AI slop and spam will wither and lose real users, eventually collapsing on themselves. For the social media platforms, good riddance

I wish this was actually true. The unfortunate reality is that the average internet user can't tell that they're looking at AI generated content with an AI generated caption and AI generated people posting AI generated comments, as we've already seen on Facebook.

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#28

Post by rogerthis »

altruios wrote: post #5
shombaboor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord and heavily moderated forums are the future.

IRC still is around. Pretty sure most of the user base is human still.

Lots of bots. Also body-only-soul-less users (as I call those that never look at messages).

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#29

Post by chrisjj »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #9

> For the time being, though, avoiding A.I. is up to you. If it were as easy as posting a message of objection on Instagram, many of us would already be seeing a lot less of it. It's true that it is quite hard, but there are ways to reduce it for sure. Here is what I have done: 1. I've deleted accounts for websites that promote AI. I have already deleted LinkedIn, Github, Medium, and a few others. 2. I have stopped s…

> 4. I do not click or read any articles with AI-generated images or text.

How can you possibly know the articles you read have no AI-generated images or text?

Re: You Can't Opt-Out of A.I. Online

#30

Post by Terr_ »

Animats wrote: post #26
jabroni_salad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed with an AI generated children's science fair project I always notice that it has 60k+ likes. To me it says that the stuff is indistinguishable from real for enough people that discerning users are just helplessly along for the ride on every platform. The article purports that the reason slop is here to stay is because people like it. The next…

> When I pop open facebook and see some page has somehow gotten onto my feed... There are still people watching Facebook with unfiltered feeds? There are filters for that. From the article: "The main people benefitting from the launch of A.I. tools so far are not everyday Internet users trying to communicate with one another but those who are producing the cheap, attention-grabbing A.I.-generated content that is mone…

> The main use case for LLMs remains blithering.

And in a close second-place, to cheaply/easily counterfeit signals that we are/were treating as indicators of human things like "intelligence", "time-investment", "emotional involvement", "distinct identity", etc.

I wonder how many traditional cover-letters / essays will vanish because the format has been so debased it doesn't mean anything, and people will say: "Just give me the core bullet-points."

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