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GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

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Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#91

Post by treebigtree »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #44
iwontberude wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just like Henry Ford and the automobile, one of many externalities was the destruction of black communities: white flight that drained wealth, eminent domain for highways, and increased asthma incidence and other disease from concentrated pollution.

Yet, overall it was a net positive for society... as almost every technological innovation in history has been. Did you know the 2/3rds of the people alive today wouldn't be if it hadn't been for the invention of the Haber-bosch process? Technology isn't just a toy, it's our life support mechanism. The only way our population gets to keep growing is if our technology continues to improve. Will there be some unintende…

"as almost every technological innovation in history has been"

This is simply false. You really are the king of making unfounded claims.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#92

Post by hyperadvanced »

asdff wrote: post #83
randomNumber7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you evaluate if content is authentic?

Eventually it won’t matter. People will forget what it was like to have authentic content. They’d look at it like how we might view monks in the middle ages copying the bible a hundred times by hand. Even today people don’t even trust themselves to write an email. You see people on HN and reddit openly admitting they used ai to help make their post because they believe they cannot write. The march to illiteracy and i…

This is a plain fact. The amount of obviously GPT’d text out there is so breathtaking. The good news is that all of this shit people are squeezing out of GPT is really reinvigorating my desire to work on novel creative projects.

In nearly every form of entertainment over the past 2 years, quality has degraded rapidly, to the point where most Reddit threads really aren’t worth reading - they’re all chock full of It’s Not X It’s Y! Most movies are heavily re-explained plots and reboots of old IP, CGI, dialogue glued on after the fact. Pop music has been on life support for 10 or 20 years, and that was before anyone could AI generate whatever derivative sonic slop they wanted to create. Books and publishers are holding strong to avoid GPT, but the desire for Dragon smut will ultimately overwhelm any aesthete’s preference for originality.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#93

Post by pdyc »

Strange nobody provided counterpoint. I would argue that questions meant for stackoverflow have shifted to genai tools and they have even richer data, questions, background of user and accepted answer so they dont need so data to improve. Side-effect of this is whoever gets most users wins and continues to win leading to monopoly as data is not public

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#94

Post by hackable_sand »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #32
lbrito wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its being downvoted because HN has a very active billionaire-techbro-fanbase. Also who's this Dario?

It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever. This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who…

And for those of us living a reality of subjugation and fear, you're a fucking liar.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#95

Post by [deleted] »

go_photon_go wrote: post #76
ropable wrote: post #75

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing. I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that…

Stack Overflow should pivot to be an AI agents/local LLM information board and advertise the non-stack overflow stack exchange sites. There is a lot they could do.

[deleted]

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#96

Post by PeterStuer »

ropable wrote: post #75

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing. I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that…

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users.

Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was.

We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for knowledge production (often itself mere regurgitation), but the 'cures' proposed in the article feel very much worse than the disease.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#97

Post by rcxdude »

PeterStuer wrote: post #96
ropable wrote: post #75

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing. I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that…

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users. Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was. We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for know…

I didn't help that SO had some very quirky expectations of how it should run, and failed to communicate those well, causing a constant friction between moderators and users. Also, there was often friction between the site admins and moderators, causing them to lose a lot of moderators over time as well.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#98

Post by nicbou »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #88

These takes are gonna age like milk. The new world is one where someone can have an LLM assisted insight, post it on their blog for free, have it indexed by every agentic search engine, and it becomes part of the zeitgeist. That’s the new data that’ll feed the new models: a better information diet over time. And guess what else: models are getting better at identifying - at scale - the high quality info that’s worth…

But what would be the point?

There is a huge difference between giving eggs to your neighbours and sending them to a breakfast restaurant in another state. A connection is made between you and the neighbors. A community forms around it.

What would be the point of having a machine write your thoughts so they can shift a model's weights by infinitesimal amounts? How would that compare to building a small following, getting reader mail, and maybe even meeting a few of them?

My website is used as training data. I get nothing from it. The AI twists words I have carefully selected, misleads people, and strips me of the fruit of my labour. If I lost my entire audience, I would stop doing that work.

Moreover, there is a cost to producing high quality information. Research alone takes a long time when you're putting information online for the first time. I wouldn't do it for a vague chance of affecting the Zeitgeist.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#99

Post by [deleted] »

PeterStuer wrote: post #96
ropable wrote: post #75

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing. I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that…

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users. Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was. We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for know…

[deleted]

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#100

Post by kamaal »

worik wrote: post #43
cthalupa wrote: post #33

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself. Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was alrea…

I feel no nostalgia for Stackoverflow. I always found it very frustrating that for a person at the start of the learning curve it was "read only" Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being LLMs on the other hand are sweet and welcoming (to a fault) of the naive newbie I have been learning to use Shell…

>>Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being

AI's biggest feature is being able to ask it question and not getting humiliated and judged in the process.

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