With the rising Generative AI hype, I'm starting to feel totally overwhelmed. I'm a tech person and I've always enjoyed tech stuff and innovation. But seriously, with the recent advances in Generative AI, and especially with the absurd proliferation of AI apps that are simple modifications of GPT3/ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, I'm worried about the consequences that it will have on humanity. Nowadays, whenever I see new content online, the first thing that I think about is whether it was created by an AI or a Human. And with all these new AI tools popping around, the Generative bulls*t is expanding even to my emails and my personal/work chats. I feel like I'm suffocating from all this fakeness. Is anybody else in a similar situation? What do you think about this Generative AI hype?
Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
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Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#2A large portion of news stories are provided to networks by the Associated Press, who has been using AI generation for news articles for at least the last half decade
https://web.archive.org/web/20180703132951/https://automated...
Not to mention that bots have been flooding inboxes, message boards, chat rooms, and communities for about as long as anyone can remember
I am also tired of the fakeness, but I think that with enough exposure, the hype will die down and we'll start noticing more patterns that tip us off as to whether or not something is real (at least in areas where it matters)
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#3it is very healthy for mental therapy sessions
>> But for a few thousand people, the mental health support they received wasn’t entirely human. Instead, it was augmented by robots. >> “People who saw the co-written GTP-3 responses rated them significantly higher than the ones that were written purely by a human. That was a fascinating observation,” he said.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#4IMO, we have a choice in whether or not we want to get caught up in hype. Actively choosing to avoid it may mean curating your Twitter feed. It may mean not talking to certain people who can't shut up about it. If you are feeling really genuinely overwhelmed, it might me a good idea to disconnect momentarily and go for a walk. Ground yourself in nature.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#5It's one of the best times in recent memory to read Guy DeBord - like a topographic map for a landscape of modern social superstructure.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#6> Nowadays, whenever I see new content online, the first thing that I think about is whether it was created by an AI or a Human
That's just going to be the new normal. It means there will be more services that rely on reputation and trust, e.g. verified accounts and credentials. This isn't great news for HN. Unless there are some big changes, I think HN is going to drown in generated content that's indistinguishable from low to medium quality human-written content.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#7It's one of the best times in recent memory to read Guy DeBord - like a topographic map for a landscape of modern social superstructure.
Can you elaborate
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#8It's one of the best times in recent memory to read Guy DeBord - like a topographic map for a landscape of modern social superstructure.
Can you elaborate
Sure, with the caveat that there are those out there who could give a much better explanation than I.
Take Society of the Spectacle for example. It's a guidebook for those looking to understand the modern media landscape. 56 years on, reading it will take the reader on a journey that vacillates between quaint and prescient. It's written in largely an aphoristic prose that I've found to be fun reading with a partner, using each pithy paragraph as a jumping off point in to discuss its modern implications.
It would be fun and worthwhile exercise to use it as a basis for discussion in the modern generative AI landscape. With the right group, I can see it fomenting great conversations that contextualize what we're collectively experiencing as generative AI content permeates our lives.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#9IMO technology overall increases the ambient "responsibility" pressure for everyone, including children.
This artificially ages everyone so now younger and younger people have to learn to cross reference research papers, manage tribal alliances, make bayesian inferences, deal with existential depression, navigate social hierarchies, etc...
Generative AI furthers this trend. Now individuals cannot simply BE in a reality but have to be responsible for constantly managing and curating their own realities while having a rough idea of how others are managing their own realities to work together, have relationships, etc...
I feel this is the root cause of people feeling overwhelmed. It's the responsibility of being constantly alert and ready to enforce boundaries. Like a soldier at war, fighting for the peace of a stable shared reality.
Re: Ask HN: Is this Generative AI hype healthy?
#10There's a small but legitimate chance that is the final poison that will spoil the internet we've gotten used to and send many of us back to prioritizing physical, real-world connection with the community physically around us. If automatic generation means noise swamps signal so much that automated curation can't sort them out, the casual internet of strangers looks a lot different.
If so, that's not an apocalypse or the end of global communication or SaaS's or computers -- it would be an adjustment from the last 30 years of forums, blogs, social networks, influencers, and other internet folk content, where we felt like we were connecting with real people all across the world.
But based on how these latter phenomena seem to have affected mental health and physical activity, that might be a good thing. It could be that the Social Media Age was an unsustainable cultural flash and that a different kind of lifestyle experience and internet culture will come up behind.