791–800 of 961 posts
So I guess we have entered the age of AI-generated "alternate facts" - one AI citing another AI's hallucinations as fact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common misremembering of the early internet. The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities. The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inacces…
This is such a warped and cynical view of history. Yes, advertising existed if the binary existence is what matters to you, but most online spaces were nearly free of it until the DoubleClick days -- that's 25+ years. Even then, huge swaths of the web were people putting up their personal pages, blogs about their interests, pages for their church or club or hobby, etc etc. Sites like Geocities ran dumb ads on the pag…
And sure, the ads were used to pay hosting costs. Nobody got rich off banner ads on cookery sites. But that's what I said - ads appeared immediately because servers and bandwidth were expensive. So the moment people had to pay their own way instead of being subsidized by the government, ads appeared.
Nobody was going to get regulated into bankruptcy in 1995, politicians were largely ignoring the internet back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equat…
I think of it more as a basis for shared culture - I could chat about Seinfeld / Friends, and odds were high that the other person would know what I was talking about. I imagine in prior ages this was perhaps more about folks reading a core collection of books. I expect there was less shared culture than in ^ Now it seems like we're in an era with (potentially) less of a shared cultural bases than either of those tim…
Take your examples, Friends and Frasier were aired at roughly the same time in the UK (obviously on competing stations). Most people watched Friends, but that show wasn’t really my thing. So I watched Frasier. As did my closest friends. And we’d chat about that. But I couldn’t join in with work colleagues with Friends chats.
It’s a bit like sports matches. People at work will talk about football/soccer but I’d be more interested in Snooker. So I’d chat snooker with friends and duck out of the football work chat.
I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The am…
The writing has been on the wall for quite a while, thanks to Google itself and SEO, plus Google advertising channels. Some websites already had minimum “for humans” content for years, as it was all used to appease the algorithm. And Social Media was the cherry on top, with information overloading, walled gardens, personalization and companies using it to pull a “Hey Fellow Kids” when using it for marketing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equat…
> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. A: It excludes opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.
The shared reality in that example includes only facts: OP and mum went to a movie. The movie was called X. The actors were Y and Z. The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I…
> This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me tr…
For instance, in the domain of software engineering: I would not trust it to implement a major architectural change, or a groundbreaking, complex new feature. I would trust it more (but not completely) on something like a refactoring that may touch thousands of lines in a fairly mechanistic way, but that was a little too-complicated for simpler tools likes regexes. While that's kind of a nifty use, I think it's fair to say that non-LLM software purpose-built for such tasks can probably do the same thing more effectively for less real cost (meaning the currently-subsidized real cost of all the training and inference power burn, etc)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kagi
They only repackage what Google et all returns. Or have they started own indexing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it were generally possible to forge cryptographic signatures we'd have bigger things to worry about than AI generated photos.
I agree, but this doesn't require a general capability. The suggestion is a camera could apply the signature. Cameras could be hacked.
And the value of the signature is also going to vary by who claims it. Improbable photos signed by a random camera body sold to an anonymous consumer should be treated with more suspicion than one a newswire agency publicly claims, for instance.