581–590 of 611 posts
Its getting worse. Kindle bookstore is getting flooded with books created with generative AI.
chatgpt rewrites of popular books on sell on amazon. the author wrote 24 books in a year. https://twitter.com/MelMitchell1/status/1742936379796193612
One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for AI-generated garbage. Its command of the language is perfect - in fact, it's much better than that of most human beings. Anyone can instantly generate superficially coherent posts. You no longer have to hire a co…
I rely on the stilted style of Chinese product descriptions on Amazon to avoid cheap knockoffs. Why do these products use weird bullet lists of features like "will bring you into a magical world"? Once you LLM these into normal human speak it will be much harder to identify the imports. https://www.amazon.com/CFMOUR-Original-Smooth-Carbon-KB8888T
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I'm in the camp where I want AI and automation to free people from drudgery in the hope that it will encourage the biggest HUMAN artwork renaissance ever in history. I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me. And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content…
I'll go one further, though I expect to receive mockery for doing so: I think the internet as we conceive of it today is ultimately a failed experiment. I think that society and humanity would be better off if the internet had remained a simple backbone for vetted organizations' official use. Turning the masses loose on it has effectively ruined so many aspects of our world that we can never get back, and I for one d…
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I don't think micropayments can work, either. The vast majority of Internet content—and I mean stuff that does get seen, not obscure sites with a dozen visits a years—isn't even worth a penny to most (not all, but most) of the people who "consume" it, but is worth a lot more than micropayment-amounts to some smaller set of people. Enforcing micropayments wouldn't, for nearly all sites that rely on ad revenue now, res…
I think micro-payments could work in many different ways and with much different results depending on which model becomes prevalent. But the issue is mostly that it has to both "work" once there's enough users and it has to have a mechanism for adoption even before it is "big enough". Example of alternative for micro-payment model: You pay $20 to an intermediary each month. You upvote web pages/domains. Pages you vis…
In a field of thousands of interchangeably-identical but pretty poppies, would you pay a tenth of a penny to have one more poppy out there? How about a hundredth of a penny? No, it'd be of so little value to you that even a split-second of time spent contemplating the question vastly exceeds its value. The trouble is that most browsing isn't discriminating—acceptable alternatives include almost anything else (as in my Nokia Snake Game example—it's just killing time, and some options might be preferable to others but the difference is extremely tiny).
The only way it could work is if you somehow got almost the entire Web to opt in and start blocking non-micropaying users, such that very little at all was browsable on the Web without going through the trouble of setting this up and it was basically just a second ISP bill. I don't think that's possible unless a full ban on Web advertising were to happen, not just on spying ad-clearinghouses, but also on traditional ads. Then... maybe, but I still wouldn't bet on it working out.
Paid content does work, but it has to aim at addressing the small slice of the audience for whom your content is worth a lot more than a micropayment and getting whole dollars out of them, not pennies or fractions of pennies.
The only place anything like micropayments has kinda worked over a whole medium-category is music. What does that look like?
1) There's a clear legal framework and licensing scheme around music that is broadly adhered-to, and existing, well-established organizations to deal with to get it all sorted out.
2) There's little exclusivity of content, which lets competition at service quality & convenience take center stage and keeps competitors on their toes (very unlike video streaming...)
3) People do care to have access to particular content. They care a lot, when it comes to music, and indeed, many spend much of their time listening to the same songs, albums, and artists over an over. They do not find a random playlist of free music from Soundcloud or whatever to be at all an acceptable replacement, even if it's all in genres they like.
4) ... and yet, this scheme sees constant criticism of not making any notable money for all but the very, very top of the pile. It's not a significant income stream for the vast majority of artists, even those who do make a living at music. Their income still has to be made up elsewhere (remember that "small slice of your audience to whom your work is way more valuable than micropayments"?) And this is the closest thing we have to a working example of micropayments, and it is in fact a functioning micropayment market of sorts. It still, arguably, isn't very good.
The way out is authenticity. Signed content is the only way to get that. You can't take anything at face value. It might be generated, forged, et. When anyone can publish anything and when anyone is outnumbered by AIs publishing even more things, the only way to filter that is by relying on reputation and authenticity so you can know who published what and what else they are saying. Web of trust has of course been tr…
> Signed content is the only way to get that. This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it. It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can a…
Once you have that, unsigned content or content signed by AIs is easy to spot. Because it would either have no reputation at all, or a poor one.
Signatures are impossible to forge (or sufficiently hard that we can assume so), and easy to verify. Reputations are a bit more work but we could provide some tools for that or search engines and other content aggregators could check things for us. But it all starts with a simple signature. Once you have lots of people signing their work, checking their reputation becomes easy. And the nice thing with a reputation is that people care about guarding it is as well. Reputation is hard to fake; you build it throughout your life. And you stake it with everything you publish.
There's no need for blockchains or any fancy nonsense like that. It might help but it's a bit of a barrier to taking this into use.
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And it is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to prove that a speaker at defcon that you recognize from last year isn’t an imposter wearing a mission impossible mask; these conditions are too strict.
Once we have the technology to convincingly create imposters at Defcon for pennies at scale, your analogy will matter. Until then, it's irrelevant because we don't have a reason to suspect a motivated party has the means and opportunity to create that convincing imposter.
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And it is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to prove that a speaker at defcon that you recognize from last year isn’t an imposter wearing a mission impossible mask; these conditions are too strict.
How is that physically impossible? You can grab the neckflap and take off the mask.
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People used to email each links to cool websites! And there were services like Hotline! And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!
Oh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.
Well….
Before modems, we used to drive to peoples houses and literally swap floppy disks of software and files!
There would be meetups.
I was just a kid, but my Dad used to network with other computer owning parents and friends!
So Sneaker Net essentially.
We’d go to computer shows too!
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> You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do. I used to do SEO copywriting in high school and yeah, ChatGPT's output is pretty much at the level of what I was producing (primarily, use certain keywords, secondarily, write a surface-level informative article tangential to what you want to sell to the customer). > At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.…
It didn't take very long for the first lawyers to get sanctioned for using ChatGPT-made-up cases in legal briefs. https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-us... It would be hilarious if the end result of all this would be to go back to a 1990s-2000s Yahoo style of web portal where all the links are curated by hand by reputable organizations.
The internet was already becoming ad farms. This is the final blow and now the internet as we knew it will die.
I’m not that pessimistic about llm generated content. I’m starting to use it to rewrite my online and slack comments for grammar, I’m also using it for brainstorming, enhancing things I create, code (not as in “ok ai write me an app” but as in “change this code to do this, ok this is not considering x and y edge cases, ok use this other method, ok refactor that” it is saving me a lot of typing and silly mistakes while I focus on the meat of the problem.
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Things go in cycle. Search engine was so much better at discovering linked websites. Then people play the SEO game, write bogus articles, cross link this and that, everyone got into writing. Everyone write the same cliches over and over, quality of search engine plumets. But then since we are regurgitating the same thought over and over again, why not automate it. Over time people will forget where the quality post c…
Nah, you got the right of it. It feels like the end of Usenet all over again, only these days cyber-warlords have joined the spammers and trolls. Mastodon sounded promising as What's Next, but I don't trust it-- that much feels like Bitcoin all over again. Too many evangelists, and there's already abuse of extended social networks going on. Any tech worth using should sell itself. Nobody needed to convince me to try…