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Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#281
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly believe fast food and frozen food provided a lot of value to the society. Much more than the harm they did. So I'll take this as an optimistic view to AI.

Frozen food absolutely, as you can have something that's still pretty nutricious but very fast to prepare. Fast food ? I'd argue drawbacks heavily overshadow benefits of saving few minutes

Is some places (maybe mostly in the US) it's bad. But the idea of fast food -- to have ready-cooked, mass-produced food that you can get quickly -- isn't all that bad.

Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?

They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI therapists/companions must be so bad too early.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#282
post #53

The comment by Yuval Noah Harari seemed insightful to me. If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it’s a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. ie you can never pursuade the bot but it can wear you down / eventually find an argument that works. The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse Aside from the whole skynet thing the ab…

I've noticed some humans are willing to argue without giving up too. Sometimes online arguments follow a pattern where each response is longer than the last until one person decides it's not worth their time to continue the argument. In my head I've called this "argument by attrition".

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whew it's satire. Whew. I've literally seen posts on the internet that read like this sans the satire.

I've seen people on /r/singularity argue how LLMs are a better friend than actual friends or therapists because they are always available, non-judgemental and "listen better". EDIT: Here, for example: https://i.redd.it/7qxb1ohvhada1.png

If you think about it as a one-off amusement it's no big deal. This is how most people are evaluating it.

But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25 years.

This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That would require a lot more work.)

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#284
The best source of truth is found in the here and now, grounded in the body and one’s immediate environment.

We socialize with each other to regulate each other - ideally taking that grounded truth and intermingling it with the grounded truth of others.

This has always been the healthy way.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#285
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we going to provide that evidence? And make sure that evidence is actually true, instead of AI generated? Send them a link to a wiki page that has been mutated by an AI bot updating it? ;-)

How have we done this so far? The only two answers I can come up with are A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test those experimentally); or B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that, if the…

> If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that

We're talking about MKUltra right? The classic "crazy" conspiracy theory that turned out to be true but was discredited for decades?

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#286
post #53

The comment by Yuval Noah Harari seemed insightful to me. If you argue against a bot about a political matter, not knowing it’s a bot - you always lose on a long enough timeline. ie you can never pursuade the bot but it can wear you down / eventually find an argument that works. The only winning move is not to play. So I could see this having a chilling effect on all discourse Aside from the whole skynet thing the ab…

This is dumb idea from someone who does not use online forums. When someone keeps making stupid points against me online, I get only more dug in on my views. If anything, you would want to make a bot to say "Not X" so the pro-X side could feel better about how dumb the opposition to X is.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#287
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of jobs are already human interfaces for computers. Ever talked or messages with a call center? They're following scripts and trying to pattern match your problem with what they have to work with manually, AI is just going to 10x this for both good and bad. Mostly bad, I suspect, because good luck getting an AI to escalate to a supervisor.

The AI is more than happy to escalate to a supervisor ... it's just that the supervisor is the same AI but using a different voice. After spending 30 seconds lamenting how you just can't get good help these days, the AI supervisor goes into the same script the original AI was going through. Except it occasionally throws in a "sorry we have to do this part again, the AI is always messing this stuff up".

I bet they'll serve the supervisor with a better, more expensive model. It actually makes sense!

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having AI friends will be equivalent to consuming fast food instead of healthy home cooked meals growing up A person who is starving will do better with fast food than with no food at all. It's far from ideal, but for some people this will make their lives marginally more tolerable.

And also, fast food is no that much worse than traditional food anyway. home-made stir fry will have worse calories than a McDonald's chicken burger. homemade pasta is going to be as fattening as any fast food meal. it's just macros in the end. it does not matter where you get them from.

Eh, 'fast food' has bled over into what you eat daily, hence your conflation of the two.

Your home made stir fry is likely using a bottle of some kind of sauce that is 30% sugar massively increasing its calories.

But conversely your home made stir fry, if using plenty of vegetables, is going to have a much larger amount of fiber than that white bread bun should should reduce your desire to snack.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#290
post #27

Truth has never been that important. Humans spent thousands of years thinking a giant man living on the mountain threw lightning bolts from the sky, or the spirits of their ancestors watch everything they do, or fairies and gremlins and whatnot cause mischief. They still managed.

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