Everything pertaining to the technological singularity and related topics, e.g. AI, human enhancement, etc.
AI
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Well, the free internet was fun while it lasted.
If it’s any comfort. It’s been in the decline ever since iPhones became a thing.
The normie phone people : (
Do kind of miss the days when it was just nerds around, and simple little stories like Jon Titor were interesting enough compared to its competition to get noticed. These days you have to write a 400+ page webnovel just to have a chance of getting an audience..
But imagine writing even two paragraphs of text on a phone. Imagine reading two paragraphs of text on a phone. No wonder Twitter found an audience.... it was honestly baffling to me at the time.
As they always say, "I find it impossible to convey adult thoughts in ~140 characters.."
I don’t know I got in pretty late and around that time I remember hearing articles about the piratebay founder complaining that the internet is becoming too centralized.
As a dumb teen i had no idea what that meant and I like everything falling under simple big brands. Only years later would I start to feel the value of niches and organic communities.
But flash games were a lot of fun. Nowadays they call them mobile game and they fill them with microtransactions and sell them for money. But that was 7 years ago, mobile games are not even relevant anymore, it’s just tik-tok brainrot that’s hip now.
Not quite true.
As a percentage of gaming industry revenue it is shown that the mobile space generates almost twice as much revenue as traditional PC gaming.
These days we have Qanon and people actually believe it
As they always say, "I find it impossible to convey adult thoughts in ~140 "characters.."
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law
you can’t derive an ‘ought’ conclusion from entirely factual or ‘is’ premises.
no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers
Why did you just quote Godel’s incompleteness theorem? Are you a bot?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Its a free country I suppose
I've assumed all reviews on the internet for anything are fake. You didn't nee AI to create them.
Wait, people still trust restaurant reviews? I just assume good reviews are bots or people who were paid to give a review.
The only reviews I find have any value are the negative ones. Because people generally only give a review when they have a bad experience.
Though even those are mostly worthless. How many of those reviews are simply Karens?
Soon even negative reviews will be AI generated. When a hundred believable reviews costs 1 cent, it starts to be worth it to spam your competitors. You'll need to rely on people you know or at most people with 2 degrees of separation from you.
The more there are, the less value they'll have.
The value of reviews is based on their accuracy. As in, a humans real experience.
The output of LLMs are inexpensive and this means we'll see a flood of these types of reviews. And that will devalue the entire process.
I wonder if Reddit will face a similar flood? Perhaps Reddit will be one of the last places that you can find real human reviews, for a time.
Ultimately it seems like this will just devalue the entire process of reviews in general.
But, I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit looks at my view here and the paranoid side of Reddit does its usual "Ignate! You're not afraid enough!" Smh...
Yes, that's my expectation as well. It will be a cheap and effective way for low quality establishments to protect themselves from being exposed by destroying the review process. To a large extent this has already happened -- no one trusts average ratings anymore, for example -- but LLMs will finish the job.
As for reddit, I think people will move from blocking some people, to automatically blocking most and only following a small set of posters that they trust for some reason.
That's an interesting view. What do you think? Should we invest?
Secretly (or not so secretly now) I cheer on the demise of Reddit. Yet I come here so often and have done for 10 years now. It's a bad habit for me.
But as to where it's going, especially in view of the Singularity, I'm not sure. It's an interesting question.
These days I have quite a few people following me. It's surprising to see how many. But I don't get anything for that. I keep telling myself to just make YouTube content and give up on Reddit entirely. Or only use it to promote other content.
But I'm very interested to see where this will go. Despite its many, many flaws, Reddit is very popular.
I think the view is that Reddits data... Or our hard work, will always be worth money. To Reddit.
I'm not so sure. I think AI may be able to learn from the environment as we do soon enough. Add in synthetic data and I don't know if past data will always hold the value we think it will.
Be wary of one star amazon reviews that also mention a competing product. I've started to see those pop up a lot.
Which is really annoying because that's going to be looked at as another way to advertise your product and signal to noise just keeps getting worse.
This isn't about restaurant reviews king, think one step further about what bots that are capable of convincingly impersonating humans are going to do to the internet at large. This is not just a problem for Yelp.
It's been my experience that people do not trust the words of others. There are minorities who do, but most are skeptical of the words of strangers.
Maybe it's just the experience of someone like me, living in a city like Vancouver, but I get hit frequently through phone calls and emails with all kinds of scams. Daily.
In the past it was more rare and something you might fall for. But now it seems that most emails and even most phone calls are scams.
Of course if I got a new number and email, that would reduce the pressure for a time. But it would eventually ramp back up again. Spam is far too easy and inexpensive.
LLMs aren't going to be so convincing when we don't even pick up the phone because we don't recognize the number.
And if we don't trust the reviews enough to even look at them, then it doesn't matter how convincing LLMs will make those reviews.
Of course there are at risk groups, such as seniors. But they've been getting scammed for a very long time.
The difference is that the traditional spam is relatively easy to detect for you and me. It is badly written. Now, this is the interesting part: it isn't badly written because the spammers are stupid, it is badly written as a screening tool to find gullible candidates for the next part of the scam, as that is traditionally more labor intensive, 1 to 1 work. Once the AI can conduct the whole scam right through to collecting payment, the imperative to make the spam detectable disappears.
That's fair and I'm sure people will fall for this sort of thing.
But my overall point is the reviews and spam process has been a failed process for a while now. The badly written reviews and spam have been so numerous that I think most have lost faith in the entire process.
If we're not reading the reviews, spam and so on in the first place then it doesn't matter how convincing they are.
That said I have seen a growing number of spam emails and such which seem more legitimate. Though I just use those as excuses to simply ignore all messages that are not from my contacts.
I suppose this is a process where as the attacks rise in capabilities and become more convincing, there will be a growing market for defense.
My phone for example is very good at identifying spam and marketing it as such. That ability should grow along with the quality of the spam.
If we can't tell, that doesn't mean AI can't.
Well, here's the thing. In the business world at least, people do get better at detecting spam/scams.
The incentive for spam are huge in B2B. However, customers aren't making dumb purchases and agreeing to pointless meetings and introducing shoddy sales reps to C-suite execs. In fact, things like answering cold calls and e-mail open rates and even downloading white papers are going down over time. Even sales reps that put time and research into this outreach are noticing just how difficult it is to get people's attention with so much channel spam.
And when new channels do arrive (such as social media) things follow a typical pattern: for the first few months the early adopter spammers get meetings and sales they don't really deserve, customers start to catch on, the spammers ramp up the activity to chase the laggards and gullible, these customers catch on, then activity dwindles to a trickle. Happened with email, happened with SDRs, happened with online software demos, and is happening with social media.
So what is going to happen is that even if LLM spam gets ultra-sophisticated, it will have a limited shelf life. A few managers and engineers get their heads bitten off for falling for these tricks in the early years, and LLMs just become another stupid pet trick like television ads.
People are generally quite simple so its not hard to replicate
Reddit needs a captcha test for every comment, it's the only solution.
Proof of Personhood (PoP) is coming to everything soon. Reddit is dead without it. same with twitter, facebook, etc.. hell, even the Instagram models will be totally faked.
Wow