Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their primary business of advertising.

Before, at least they were trying to downrank all the crap "word aggregators". After, they stopped caring at all.

AI gives even better tools to page rank. Detection of AI generated content is not that bad.

So why don't we have "a new Google" emerge? Simple, because of the monopolistic practices Google did to make the barrier to entry huge. First, 99% of the content people want to search for is behind a login wall (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube), second almost all CDNs now implement "verify you are human" by default. Third, no one links to other sites. Ever! These 3 things mean a new Google is essentially impossible. Even duck duck go has thrown the towel and subscribed to Bing results.

It has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with Google. In fact AI might give us the tools to better fight Google.

The flip side was, calligraphy was sufficient evidence for both his education to whoever hired him, and for a recipient of a document, of its official nature. Calligraphy itself or course didn't make him efficient or smart or fair.

That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics. I am reminded of the Reddit story about an AI-generated mushroom atlas that had factual errors and lead to someone getting poisoned. We can no longer assume that a book is legit simply because it looks legit. The story of course is from reddit, so probably untrue, but it doesn't matter - it totally could be true.

LLMs are fantastic at breaking our heuristics as to what is and isn't legit, but not as good at being right.

The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet".

I was speaking to a librarian the other day who teaches incoming freshman how to use LLMs. What was shocking to me is that the librarian said a majority of the kids trust what the computer says by default. Not just LLMs, but generally what they read. That's such a huge shift from my generation. Maybe LLM education will shift people back toward skepticism - unlikely, but I can hope.

In the 90s we could reasonably trust that that the major news sites and corporate websites was true, while random forums required a bit more critical reading. Today even formerly trusted sites may be using LLMs to generate content along with automatic translations.

I wouldn't necessarily put the blame on LLMs, this just make it easier. The trolls and spammers was always there, now they just have a more powerful tool. The commercial sites now have a tool they don't understand, which they apply liberally, because it reduces cost, or their staff use it, to get out of work, keep up with deadlines or to cover up incompetence. So, not the fault of the LLMs, but their use is worsening existing trends.

Yep - or they're commingling promotional content with their journalism, a la Forbes / CNN / CNET / About.com / etc. There's still quality content online but it's getting harder to find under the tidal wave of garbage.

I think that previous generations were not any different. For most people, trusting is the default mode and you need to learn to distrust a source. I know many people who still have not learned that about the internet in general. These are often older people. They believe insane things just because there exists a nicely looking website claiming that thing.

Now it's not even the website of undetermined providence that is believed; positions are established based on just the headline, shared 2nd or 3rd hand!

I received the same warnings, actually it was more like “don’t trust everything you read on the internet”, but it quickly became apparent that the last three words were redundant, and could have been rephrased more accurately as “don’t trust everything you read and hear and see”.

Our parents and teachers were living with their own fallacious assumptions and we just didn’t know it at the time, but most information is very pliable. If you can’t change what someone sees, then you can probably change how they see it.

Indeed. When I was 14-18 in the UK, the opinion pieces in the news were derogatorily describing "media studies" as "Mickey Mouse studies".

In retrospect such courses were teaching critical analysis of media sources, in much the same way that my history GCSE went into the content of historical media and explored how both primary and secondary sources each had the potential to be either accurate or biased.

Even now, even here, I see people treat the media itself as pure and only the people being reported upon as capable of wrongdoing — e.g. insisting that climate scientists in the 70s generally expected an imminent ice age, because that's what the newspapers were saying.

Similar story! Family lore has it that he was from a farming family of modest means, but he was hired to write insurance policies because of his beautiful handwriting, and this was a big step up in the world.

What?! Someone just made up something and then got mad at it. This is specially weird when you even acknowledge its a made up story. If we start evaluating new things like this nothing will ever progress.

To quote someone about this:

>>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.

A book looking legit, a paper being peer reviewed, an expert saying something, none of those things were _ever_ good heuristics. It's just that it was the done thing. Now we have to face the fact that our heuristics are obviously broken and we have to start thinking about every topic.

To quote someone else about this:

>>Most people would rather die than think.

Which explains neatly the politics of the last 10 years.

So, same as it ever was?

Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That’s what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes—it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again—the same old round. The wind blows south, the wind blows north. Around and around and around it blows, blowing this way, then that—the whirling, erratic wind. All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up. The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do it again. Everything’s boring, utterly boring— no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing. Does someone call out, “Hey, this is new”? Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story. Nobody remembers what happened yesterday. And the things that will happen tomorrow? Nobody’ll remember them either. Don’t count on being remembered.

c. 450BC

And there's more reasons not to simply compare the modern challenges of image and media with the ancient grappling with impermanence. Tech may only truly change the human condition rarely, but it frequently magnifies some aspect of it, sometimes so much that the quantitative change becomes a qualitative one.

And in this case, what we're talking about isn't just impermanence and mortality and meaning as the preacher/quester is. We'd be lucky if it's business as usual for old planet earth, but we've managed to magnify our ability to impact our environment with tech to the point where winds, rivers, seas, and other things may well change drastically. And as for "smoke", it's one thing if we're dust in the wind, but when we're dust we can trust, that enables continuity and cooperation. There's always been reasons for distrust, but with media scale, the liabilities are magnified, and now we've automated some of them.

The realities of human nature that are the seeds of the human condition are old. But some of the technical and social machinery we have made to magnify things is new, and we can and will see new problems.

Bots are now blocked because they've been abusive. When you host content on the internet, it's not fun to have bots bring your server down or inflate your bandwidth price. Google's bot is actually quite well-behaved. The other problem has been the recent trend in AI, and I can understand blockers being put in place, since AI is essentially plagiarizing content without attribution. But I'd blame OpenAI more at this point.

I also don't think you can blame Google for the centralization behind closed gardens. Or for why people no longer link to other websites. That's ridiculous.

And you should be attributing them the fact that the web is still alive.

I mean the AI is trained and modeled on this excrement. It makes sense. As much as people think AI content is raw garbage… they don’t realize that they are staring into a mirror.

Things have not changed much really. This was true since the dawn of man-kind (and woman-kind from the man-kind rib of course) even before there writings was invented, in the form of gossip.

The internet/AI now carries on the torch of our ancestral inner calling, lol.

Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate.

PR and ad culture was there to support that. The goal was to change values and behaviours to get people to Buy More Stuff. OK.

Then around the time the Internet arrived, industry was off-shored, and the culture started to become one of appearance and performance, not of substance and action.

SEO, adtech, social media, web framework soup, management fads - they're all about impression management and popularity games, not about underlying fundamentals.

This is very obvious on social media in the arts. The qualification for a creative career used to be substantial talent and ability. Now there are thousands of people making careers out of performing the lifestyle of being a creative person. Their ability to do the basics - draw, write, compose - is very limited. Worse, they lack the ability to imagine anything fresh or original - which is where the real substance is in art.

Worse than that, they don't know what they don't know, because they've been trained to be superficial in a superficial culture.

It's just as bad in engineering, where it has become more important to create the illusion of work being done, than to do the work. (Looking at you, Boeing. And also Agile...)

You literally make more money doing this. A lot more.

So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever.

AI might one day be a tool for creating substance. But at the moment it's reflecting and enabling a Potemkin busy-culture of recycled facades and appearances that has almost nothing real behind it.

Unfortunately it's quite good at that.

But the problem is the culture, not the technology. And it's been a problem for a long time.

I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.

Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.

[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...

I much prefer a focus on effectiveness (or impact or outcomes, or alternatives). It plays to human strengths, is far less prescriptive and is way more fun!

Some of the most effective actions are incredibly inefficient; sometimes inefficiency is a feature. I received a letter mail thank-you card from our CEO a few years ago. The card has an approx. value of zero dollars, but I know it took the CEO 5-10 mins to write a personal note and sign it, and that she did this dozens of times. The signal here is incredibly valuable! If she used a signing machine, or AI to record a deep fake message I would know or quickly learn, and the value would go negative - all for the sake of efficiency.

There isn't enough meaningful work to go around because work is still predicated on delivering some useful transformation. But when 80% of the useful transformations can be done by 20% of the people and we have enough to keep civilization going, you don't need full employment any more. But due to the moral hazard doctrine, the elites want to retain control and discipline as is.

For being afraid of a world where people don't care about maintaining the system anymore because it's not needed to house and feed everyone and people can just do art or learn or rest, the system keeps inventing meaningless work.

We're shipping fruit half way across the world to be packaged and then halfway back to be consumed. None of this is efficient or necessary. But it keeps the control system intact and that's the goal.

The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irrefutably fast and effective at (e.g. writing tests).

I do agree with the missing substance with modern generative AI: everyone notices when it's producing things in that uncanny valley, and if no human is there to edit that, it makes people uncomfortable.

The only way I can reconcile the almost existential discomfort of AI against my actual day-to-day generally-positive experience with AI is to accept that AI in itself isn't the problem. Ultimately, it is an info tool, and human nature makes people spam garbage for clicks with it.

People will do the equivalent of spam garbage for clicks with any new modern thing, unfortunately.

Getting the most out of latest information of a society has probably always been a cat and mouse game of trying to find the areas where the spam-garbage-for-clicks people haven't outnumbered use-AI-to-facilitate-substance people, like here, hopefully.

This stuff is a perfect candidate for LLM generation.

I agree with your theory about tests. The reality of it is most code is garbage - often including my own - and in a lot of environments, the task is to get the job done in a way that fits in with what's there.

1) This consuming of the host is only possible on the one hand because the host has grown so strong, that is the modern global industrial economy is so efficient. The doing stuff side of the equation is truly amazing and getting better (some real work gets done either by accident or those who have not-succumbed to PR and ad culture), and even this drop of "real work" produces enough material wealth to support (at least a lot of) humanity. We really do live in a post scarcity world from a production perspective, we just have profound distribution and allocation problems.

2) Radical wealth inequality profoundly exacerbates the problem of PR and ad culture. If everyone has some wealth doing things that help many people live more comfortably is a great way to become wealthy. But if very few people have wealth, then doing a venture capital FOMO hustle on the wealthy is anyone's best ROI. Radical wealth inequality eventually breaks all the good aspects of capitalist/market economies.

For a very short period between 1945 to 1980 while the generation who remembered the great depression and WWII was in charge. It's been longer since that's not been the case. And it wasn't the case for most of history before then.

How graciously the womenfolk leave us to our tragic autopoiesis.

The primacy of these artforms is subjective, and there's no accounting for taste.

Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."

Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.

In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

And what did that get us? Radium poisoning and microplastics in every organ of virtually all animals living within thousands of miles of humans. Our reach has always exceeded our grasp.

I was speaking to a design lecturer the other evening. His fascinating insight was that:

1. The best designers get so much fulfilment out of practicing the craft of design.

2. With the advent of low cost “impression making”, the role has changed to one of “review a lot of mediocre outputs and pick the least crap one”

3. This is robbing people of the pleasure and reward associated with craftsmanship.

I have noted this is applicable so many other crafts, and it’s really sad!

Edited afterthought… Is craftsmanship being replaced by “clickandreviewmanship”?

In summary, China makes useful things in mass and sells them to get out of a recession,the West prints money instead and shits on China for doing it better. They preach free trade while it helps them and put up tariffs when it doesn't.

I'm not Chinese or some mega fan but it really struck me how corrupt and full of propaganda western culture is becoming and people don't seem to recognize it.

10 years ago? Try 40-50 years ago.

Cultural commentary that makes complex long term trends simple to understand isn’t often this clear or concise. What really makes it powerful though is that it manages to stay in a relatively detached observer-mode without becoming an angry rant. And so rather than provoking (understandable!) anger in others, hopefully it’s inviting more reflection.

People who haven’t thought about it this way might take a harder look at what they are doing and who they really want to be. People that are already thinking along these lines will probably benefit from a reminder that they aren’t crazy.

I see this type of reasoning in all the AI threads. And yes, I think this time is different.

It is an arms race between the people generating crap (for various nefarious purposes) and those trying to separate find useful content amongst the ever growing pile of crap. And it seems to me it is so much easier to generate crap, that I can't see how the good guys can possibly win.

Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

While the professional looking text could have been already wrong, the likelihood was smaller, since you usually needed to know something at least in order to write convincing text.

For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption has evaporated, and job searching has become a meaningless two-way spam war, where having your AI-generated application selected from hundreds or thousands of other AI-generated applications is little more than a lottery.

When it becomes obvious, though, is when people let the LLM do the writing for them. The job search bit is definitely rough. Referrals, references, and actual accomplishments may become even more important.

The noise ground has been elevated 100x by LLMs. It was already bad before but it's accelerated the trend.

So, yes, we should have never been trusting anything online but before LLMs we could rely on our brains to quickly identify the bad. Nowadays, it's exhausting. Maybe we need a LLM trained on spotting LLMs.

This month, I, with decades of experience, used Claude Dev as an experiment to create a small automation tool. After countless manual fixes, it finally worked and I was happy. Until I gave thr whole thing a decent look again and realized what a piece of garbage I had created. It's exhausting to be on the lookout for these situations. I prefer to think things through myself, it's a more rewarding experience with better end results anyway.

"Human-curated encycolpedias are a great onramp to filling in knowledge gaps", that I can go with.

Maybe I should have worded it better as a "beginner" or "intermediate" knowledge onramp and/or filler. For example, I have asked it on occasion to translate into traditional Mandarin in parallel for every English response. It helps tremendously in trying to rebuild that bridge that may have been burned long ago.

I've been using Zed recently with its LLM integration so assist me in my development and its been absolutely wonderful, but one must control tightly what to present to the model and what to ask for and how.

I know not to trust it to be as precise as good research papers need to be, so I don't take its output, it usually helps me reorder points or use different transitions which make the material much more enjoyable to read. I also find it useful for helping to come up with an opening sentence from which to start writing a section.

1. I use dictation software to get my thoughts out as a stream of consciousness. 2. Then, I have ChatGPT or Claude refine it into something coherent based on a prompt of what I'm aiming for. 3. Finally, I review the result and make edits where needed to ensure it matches what I want.

This method has easily boosted my output by 10x, and I'd argue the quality is even better than before. As a non-native English speaker, this approach helps a lot with clarity and fluency. I'm not a great writer to begin with, so the improvement is noticeable. At the end of the day, I’m just a developer—what can I say?

I don't criticise you for it, because that strategy is both rational and popular. But you never checked the accuracy of your information before so you have no way of telling if it has gotten more or less accurate with the advent of AI. You were testing for whether someone of high social intelligence wanted you to believe what they said rather than if what they said was true.

Now we'll need to be fully diligent, which means more work, and also there'll be way more things to review.

AI does indeed threaten people's ability to identify whether they are reading work by a high status human and what the group consensus is - and that is a real problem for most people. But it has no bearing on how correct information was in the past vs will be in the future. Groups are smart but they get a lot of stuff wrong in strategic ways (it is almost a truism that no group ever identifies itself or its pursuit of its own interests as the problem).

Plenty of people care about the truth in order to get advantages over the ignorant. Beliefs aren't just about fitting in a group, they are about getting advantages and making your life better, if you know the truth you can make much better decisions than those who are ignorant.

Similarly plenty of people try to hide the truth in order to keep people ignorant so they can be exploited.

There are some fallacious hidden assumptions there. One is that "knowing the truth" equates to better life outcomes. I'd argue that history shows more often than not that what one knows to be true best align with prevailing consensus if comfort, prosperity and peace is one's goal, even if that consensus is flat out wrong. The list is long of lone geniuses who challenged the consensus and suffered. Galileo, Turing, Einstein, Mendel, van Gogh, Darwin, Lovelace, Boltzmann, Gödel, Faraday, Kant, Poe, Thoreau, Bohr, Tesla, Kepler, Copernicus, et. al. all suffered isolation and marginalization of some degree during their lifetimes, some unrecognized until after their death, many living in poverty, many actively tormented. I can't see how Turing, for instance, had a better life than the ignorant who persecuted him despite his excellent grasp of truth.

When dealing with almost everything you do day by day, you have to rely on the credibility of the source of the information you have. Otherwise how could you know that the can of tuna you're going to eat is actually tuna and not some venomous fish? How do you know that you should do what your doctor told you? Etc. etc.

But isn't your third sentence True?

The best we can hope for is prioritizing which things are worth checking. But even that gets harder because you go looking for sources and now those are increasingly likely to be LLM spam.

Unfortunately it's not clear how this could be adapted to the internet and international commerce without harming some of the open-ness aspects we'd like to keep.

They didn't say that and that's not a fair or warranted extrapolation.

They're talking about a heuristic that we all use, as a shorthand proxy that doesn't replace but can help steer the initial navigation in the selection of reliable sources, which can be complemented with fact checking (see the steelmanning I did there?). I don't think someone using that heuristic can be interpreted as tantamount to completely ignoring facts, which is a ridiculous extrapolation.

I also think is misrepresents the lay of the land, which is that in the universe of nonfiction writing, I don't think that there's a fire hose of facts and falsehoods indistinguishable in tone. I think there's in fact a reasonably high correlation between the discernible tone of impersonal professional and credible information, which, again (since this seems to be a difficult sticking point) doesn't mean that the tone substitutes for the facts which still need to be verified.

The idea that information and misinformation are tonally indistinguishable is, in my experience, only something believed by post-truth "do you own research" people who think there are equally valid facts in all directions.

There's not, for instance, a Science Daily of equally sciency sounding misinformation. There's not a second different IPCC that publishes a report with thousands of citations which are all wrong, etc. Misinformation is out there but it's not symmetrical, and understanding that it's not symmetrical is an important aspect of information literacy.

This is important because it goes to their point, which is that something has changed, in the advent of LLMS. That symmetry may be coming, and it's precisely the fact that it wasn't there before that is pivotal.

I suppose a related problem is that we can't know if the human who posted the article, actually agrees with it themselves.

(Or if they clicked "Generate" and don't actually care, or even have different opinions)

All of that is gone now. You have LLMs spitting their excrement directly onto the web without so much as a human giving it a once-over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

That is pretty much true also for other media, such as audio and video. Before digital stuff become mainstream pics are developed in the darkroom, and film are actually cut with scissors. A lot of effort are put into producing the final product. AI has really commoditized for many brain related tasks. We must realize the fragile nature of digital tech and still learn how to do these by ourselves.

How did you know this unless you also had the same or more knowledge than the author?

It would seem to me we are as clueless now as before about how to judge how skilled a writer is without requiring to already posses that very skill ourselves.

AIs are good at writing professional looking text because it's a low bar to clear. It doesn't require much intelligence or expertise.

AIs are getting good at precisely imitating your voice with a single sample as reference, or generating original music, or creating video with all sorts of impossible physics and special effects. By your rationale, nothing “requires much intelligence or expertise”, which is patently false (even for text writing)

They give a superficially smart look, but really they regurgitate without deep understanding.

...or...the likelihood of text being really wrong pre-LLMs was worse because you needed to be a well-capitalized player to pay your thoughts into public discourse. Just look at our global conflicts and you see how much they are driven by well-planned lobbying, PR, and...money. That is not new.

Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI?

Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff now.

All one needs today is a laptop and an internet connection and a few hours, they can wreak havoc. In the past, you'd need TV or newspapers to spread bad (and good) stuff - they were expensive, time consuming to produce and had limited reach.

This can only be done with a sentiment that was, at least partially, already there. And may very well happen naturally eventually

It takes a bit more than that.

If you can place a rumor or lie in front of the right person/people to amplify, it will be amplified. It will spread like wildfire, and by the time it is fact checked, it will have done at least some damage.

Did the person who posted do the manipulation, or did JD Vance and Donald Trump do it?

Reading was a form of connecting with someone. Their opinions are bound to be flawed, everyone's are - but they're still the thoughts and words of a person.

This is no longer the case. Thus, the human factor is gone and this reduces the experience to some of us, me included.

They're not connecting with the relative correctness of each note, but feeling a human, creative connection with an artist expressing herself.

If you wanna advocate for unplugged music being more gratifying, I don't disagree, but acting like the autotune is what people are getting out of Taylor Swift songs is goofy.

I think that says more about media-technology, corporate ecosystems, and overall population-growth than about music itself.

What I think OP was saying and I agree with is that connection, that knowing no matter what was said or how flawed or what motive someone had I trusted there was a human producing the words. I could guess and reasons the other factors away. Now I don’t always know if that is the case.

If you’ve ever played a multiplayer game, most of the enjoyable experience for me is playing other humans. We’ve had good game AIs in many domains for years, sometimes difficult to distinguish from humans, but I always lost interest if I didn’t know I was in fact playing and connecting with another human. If it’s just some automated system I could do that any hour of the day as much as I want but it lacked the human connection element, the flaws, the emotion, the connection. If you can reproduce that then maybe it would be enjoyable but that sort of substance has meaning to many.

It’s interesting to see a calculator quickly spit out correct complex arithmetic but when you see a human do it, it’s more impressive or at least interesting, because you know the natural capability is lower and that they’re flawed just like you are.

I like to think of these ambiguities of "trust" as something like:

1. Trusting their identity

2. Trusting their intentions

3. Trusting their judgement about what to do

4. Trusting their competence to execute the task

AI otoh can produce texts that are quite accurate globally with some totally random hallucinations here and there. It makes it quite harder to identify

Imagine that AI tools sway generated sentences to be slightly close, in summarisation space, to the phrase "eat dirt" or anything. What would happen?

Nope. A lot of people just wrote stuff. There were always plenty of word salad blogs (and arguably entire philosophy journals) out there.

A good part of society, the foundational part, is trust. Trust between individuals, but also trust in the sense that we expect things to behave in a certain way. We trust things like currencies despite their flaws. Our world is too complex to reinvent the wheel whenever we need to do a transaction. We must believe enough in a make-believe system to avoid perpetual collapse.

On second thought, perhaps AI/LLM generated content is better illustrated with it being like eating the regurgitated sludge called cud. Nothing new, but it fills the gut.

Now it's mostly zero effort LLM-generated SEO spam, and the low-wage workers lost their jobs.

However with AI anyone can generate absurd torrential flows of bullshit at a rate where, with your finite human time and energy, the only winning move is to reject out of hand any piece of media that you can sniff out as AI. It's a solution that's imperfect, but workable, when you're swimming through a sea of slop.

We are all becoming QA of this super automated world.

Nor is trust meant to mean something is absolute and unquestionable. I may trust someone, but with enough evidence I can withdraw trust.

I also did, but LLM increased the volume of content, which forces my brain first try to identify if content is generated by LLMs, which is consuming a lot of energy and makes brain even less focused, because now it's primary goal is skimming quickly to identify, instead of absorbing first and then analyzing info

You already know some of the more trustworthy sources of information, you don't need to read a random blog which will require a lot more effort to verify.

Even here on hackernews, I ignore like 90% of the spam people post. A lot of posts here are extremely low effort blogs adding zero value to anything, and I don't even want to think whether someone wasted their own time writing that or used some LLM, it's worthless in both cases.

You might question new information, but you certainly do not actually verify it. So all you can hope to do is sense-checking - if something doesn't sound plausible, you assume it isn't true.

This depends on having two things: having trustworthy sources at all, and being able to relatively easily distinguish between junk info and real thorough research. AI is a very easy way for previously-trustworthy sources to sneak in utter disinformation without necessarily changing tone much. That makes it much easier for the info to sneak past your senses than previously.

A human communicator is, in a sense, testifying when communicating. Humans have skin in the social game.

We try to educate people, we do want people to be well-informed and to think critically about what they read and hear. In the marketplace of information, we tend very strongly to trust non-delusional, non-hallucinating members of society. Human society is a social-confidence network.

In social media, where there is a cloak of anonymity (or obscurity), people may behave very badly. But they are usually full of excuses when the cloak is torn away; they are usually remarkably contrite before a judge.

A human communicator can face social, legal, and economic consequences for false testimony. Humans in a corporation, and the corporation itself, may be held accountable. They may allocate large sums of money to their defence, but reputation has value and their defence is not without social cost and monetary cost.

It is literally less effort at every scale to consult a trusted and trustworthy source of information.

It is literally more effort at every scale to feed oneself untrustworthy communication.

If one spends a lot of years reading a lot of stuff, they come to this conclusion, that most of it cannot be trusted. But it takes lots of years and lots of material to see it.

If they don't, they don't.

Even ignoring the AI, if you look at the movies and books that come out these days, their quality is significantly lower than 30-40 years ago (on an average). Maybe people's attention spans and taste is to blame, or maybe people just don't have the money/time/patience to consume quality work... I do not know.

One thing I know for sure - there is enough high quality material written before AI, before article spinners, before MFA sites etc. We would need multiple lifetimes to even scratch the surface of that body of work. We can ignore mostly everything that is published these days and we won't be missing much

Old books that we're still printing and are still talking about have stood the test of time. It doesn't mean that are no great recent books.

I'm sorry but this is just nonsense.

I only listen to interviews from 50 years ago (interviews that have stood the test of time), about books from 100 years ago. In fact, how am I reading this article? It's not 2074 yet?!

What AI is going to teach people is that they don't actually need to trust half as many things as they thought they did, but that they do need to verify what's left.

This has always been the case. We've just been deferring to 'truster organizations' a lot recently, without actually looking to see if they still warrant having our trust when they change over time.

I don’t go double checking civil engineers work (nor could I) for every bridge I drive over. I don’t check inspection records to make sure it was recent and proper actions were taken. I trust that enough people involved know what they’re doing with good enough intent that I can take my 20 second trip over it in my car without batting an eye.

If I had to verify everything, I’m not sure how I’d get across many bridges on a daily basis. Or use any major infrastructure in general where my life might be at risk. And those are cases where it’s very important to be done right, if it’s some accounting form or generated video on the internet… I have even less time to be concerned from a practical standpoint. Having the skills to do it should I want or need to are good and everyone should have these but we’re at a point in society we really have to outsource trust in a lot of cases.

This is true everywhere, even in science which these days many people just trust in ways akin to faith in some cases, and I don’t see anyway around that. The key being that all the information should exist to be able to independently verify something but from a practice standpoint it’s rarely viable.

I am writing regularly and I will never use AI. In fact I am working on a 400+ pages book right now and it does not contain a single character that I have not come up with and typed myself. Something like pride in craftmanship does exist.

Seems like there are uses for AI other than “please write it all for me”, no?

• are there any redundant sentences or points in this chapter?

• i’m trying to remember an expression used to convey X, can you remind me what it is?

• i’m familiar with X from my industry Y, but i’m trying to convey this to an audience from industry Z. Can you help brainstorm some words or examples they may be more familiar with?

Things like that. I think of it like having a virtual rubber duck that can help you debug code, or anything really.

Obviously these are just some suggestions. If you don’t find any of this useful, or even interesting, then carry on. :)

Add to it that not all LLMs are equal: at work I have access to the latest GPT models and can customize them myself. At home anything I tried in LM studio feels very limited/inflexible. All models i tried running were useless except one codestruct, which was half decent at answering clarification questions about c# code from tutorial, but failed the task i initially tried it for: generating bespoke tutorials that fit my knowledge gaps, which would have been my ideal scenario because most tutorials aren't written for someone like me.

It's another reason LLMs are a bit disappointing to me, they don't seem to be good at handling queries I couldn't solve with a web search, and have similar issues as search results when they do have answers - this makes sense since that's how they are trained, but often defeats the purpose for me.

So there's a human in the loop who is prepared to vouch for those sentences. They're not 100% human-written, but they are 100% human-approved. I haven't just connected my blog to a Markov chain firehose and walked away.

Am I still adding to the AI smog? idk. I imagine that, at a bare minimum, its way of organising text bleeds through no matter how much editing I do.

At the moment I'm using it for local history research. I feed it all the text I can find on an event (mostly newspaper articles and other primary sources, occasionally quotes from secondary sources) and I prompt with something like "Summarize this document in a concise and direct style. Focus on the main points and key details. Maintain a neutral, objective voice." Then I hack at it until I'm happy (mostly I cut stuff). Analysis, I do the other way around: I write the first draft, then ask the AI to polish. Then I go back and forth a few times until I'm happy with that paragraph.

I'm not going anywhere with this really, I'm just musing out loud. Am I contributing to a tragedy of the commons by writing about 18th century enclosures? Because that would be ironic.

Reading and writing are mental processes (with or without advanced technology) that shape our collective mind.

I included a few more "private" words than I should and I even tried to narrate things to prove I wasn't an AI.

https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/

Not sure what else I should do, but it's pretty clear that it's not AI written (mostly because it's incoherent) even without grammar mistakes.

Gemini just could not do it. It kept trying to avoid being explicitly negative. It wanted me to instead focus on the positive. I think it evidently just told me no, and that it would not do it.

This is as everything else, machine produced has a flawlessness along some dimension that humans tend to lack.

I'm listening to a slightly wonky early James Brown instrumental right now, and there's certainly a lot more error than you'd get in sequenced computer music (or indeed generated music) but the force with which humans wrest the wonkiness toward an idea of groove is palpable. Same with Zeppelin's 'Communication Breakdown' (I'm doing a groove analysis project, ok?).

I can't program the AI to have intention, nor can you. If you do, hello Skynet, and it's time you started thinking about how to be nice to it, or else :)

yeah well sumtimes spellling and grammer erors just make thing hard two read. like i no wat u mean bout wanting two kno its a reel person, but i think cleear communication is still importint! ;)

I enjoyed all the belter dialogue in the expanse

Are you sure you don't mean if you write regularly in one particular subclass of writing - like technical writing, documentation etc.? Do you think novel writing, poetry, film reviews etc. cannot keep up in the same way?

There seems to be an upcoming wave of adult content products (once again, being on the bleeding edge users of new abilities) based on this principle, as hitting very specific niches/kinks/fetishes can be quite effective in that business, but it should then move on to romance novels and pulp fiction and then, over time, most other genres.

Similarly, good pedagogy, curriculum design and educational content development is all about accurately modeling which exact bits of the content the target audience will/won't know, and explaining the gaps with analogies and context that will work for them (for example, when adapting a textbook for a different country, translation is not sufficient; you'd also need to adapt the content). In that regard, if AI models can make personalized technical writing, then that can be more effective than the best technical writing the most skilled person can make addressed to a broader audience.

Lowering the bar to write books is "good" but increases the noise to signal ratio.

I'm not 100% certain how to give another proof-of-work, but what I've started doing is narrating my blog posts - though AI voices are getting better too.. :\

Said the scribe upon hearing about the printing press.

Even technical books like Hardcore Java: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hardcore-java/059600568... are god-awful, and even further away from the seminal texts on computer science that came before.

It does feel like authorship was once heralded in higher esteem than it deserves today.

Seems like people agree: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18cvy9e/rant_bestsel...

It's like dealing with a pathological liar who produces very convincing looking code for me to review, but actually there is a bug in it 50% of the time. It's like it's trying to trick me into committing bugs.

Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.

It doesn’t matter that my writing is more considered, more accurate and of a higher quality when my coworkers are all openly using AI to perform five times the work I am and producing outcomes that are “good enough” because good enough is quite enough for a larger majority than many likely realise.

It’s the same with writing. If you find yourself writing a boring introduction section to a paper with a bunch of meaningless blabla, then why wouldn’t you use AI for that? There is simply no good reason, especially when you see mediocre researchers publishing at three times your rate and getting promoted over you.

you could totally compete on quality merit, but nowadays the volume of output (and frequency) is what is prioritized.

I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence.

But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, for hundreds of years.

If it’s fluff, why do you put it there? As an App Store user, I‘m not interested in reading marketing fluff.

I’ve released over 20 apps, over the years, and have learned to add some basic stuff to each app.

Truth be told, it was really sort of a self-deprecating joke.

I’m not a marketer, so I don’t have the training to write the kind of stuff users expect on the Store, and could use all the help I can get

Over the years, I’ve learned that owning my limitations, can be even more important, than knowing my strengths.

The ability to speak the same language or understand cultural norms are no longer barriers to publishing pretty much anything. You don't have to understand a topic or the jargon of any given domain. You don't have to learn the expected style or conventions an author might normally use in that context. You just have to know how to write a good prompt.

There's bound to be a significant increase in the quantity as well as the quality of untrustworthy published text because of these new capacities to produce it. It's not the phenomenon but the scale of production that changes the game here.

Your comment about the fluff is exactly what I mean. I read some fluff that is AI-generated and some kind of disgust happens in my stomach, and I wish there was nothing written there at all. I just feel like it’s be best to not read anything than read something that’s AI-generated… it’s almost like the author is trying to trick me with a fake version of reality. I wonder if there’s such a thing as the uncanny valley for text?

As a lifelong engineer, I “grew up” with a somewhat antagonistic relationship with Marketing, so became used to disparaging their work, even if I had to change hats, myself, and act in a Marketing capacity.

I should have probably used the word “copy,” instead.

But you have a good point.

I think that one “legitimate” use for AI-generated text, will be for non-native speakers of a language, using it to correct their vocabulary.

For things like patents and papers, this is probably a good thing. AI can generate clear, concise vernacular. I often specify the reading level, in my prompts (usually tenth grade), so that the prose is accessible.

For things like presentation proposals; not so much. You may get a proposal that reads like it was written by an English professor, and the actual presentation is barely comprehensible.

So it is like saying my champaigne bottle cant keep up with the tap water.

Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.

Cheer up. Things usually get better, we just don't notice it because we're so consumed with extrapolating the negatives. Humans are funny like that.

And it also makes things a lot better. Overall we lead better lives than people just 50 years ago, never mind centuries.

AND, we had fewer computers and life was not so hectic. YES, some things have gotten better, but on average? It's arguable.

Fact: Life has improved for the majority of people on the planet in the last 50 years.

Most objective measurements of basic quality of life have improved: life expectancy, food security, education, etc.

On the other hand there's a lot on youtube for example that is obviously ai - weird writing and speaking style and I'll only watch those if I'm really interested in the subject matter and there aren't alternatives.

Maybe people will gravitate more to the stuff like PaulG or Elon Musk on twitter or HN and less to blog style content?

The best you can hope for is not "a human wrote this text", it's "a human vouched for this text".

But the real problem is that having the poster's identity verified is no proof that their output is not coming straight from a LLM.

It certainly will affect the reputation of people that are consistently publishing untruths.

Oh? I thought there are a lot of very well identified people making a living from publishing untruths right now on all social media. How would PKI help, when they're already making it very clear who they are?

You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten. I was talking to someone about Taylor Swift recently. They thought that she wrote all her songs. I commented that one cannot really know that, that the entertainment industry is very going at generating seemingly "authentic" product at a rapid pace. My colleague looked at me like I had just killed a small animal. The idea that TS was "genuine" was a cornerstone of their fandom, and my suggestion had attacked that love. If you love music or film, don't dig too deep. It is all a factory. That AI is now part of that factory doesn't change much for me.

Maybe my opinion would change if I saw something AI-generated with even a hint of artistic relevance. I've seen cool pictures and passable prose, but nothing so far with actual meaning, nothing worthy of my time.

I'm reminded of 'Under The Silver Lake' with this reference. Strange film, but that plotline stuck with me.

I think music brings about a connection between the composers, lyricists, performers, and listeners. Music lets us participate in something uniquely human. Replacing any of the human participants with AI greatly diminishes or eliminates its value in my eyes.

At the same time I use copilot on a daily basis, both for coding as well as the normal chat.

It is not perfect, but I'm at a point I trust AI more than the average human. And why shouldn't I? LLMs ingest and combine more knowledge than any human can ever do. An LLM is not a human brain but it's actually performing really well.

I spent a lot of time analyzing the track myself and fixed everything to the point that experienced drivers agreed with my description. If I hadn't done that, most visitors would probably still accept our guide as the truth, because they wouldn't know any better.

We know that not everyone cares about whether what they put on the internet is correct and AI allows those people to create content at an unprecedented pace. I fully agree with your sentiment.

As a creator of any kind, I think that simply relying on LLMs to expand your output via straightforward uses of widely available tools is inevitably going to lead to regression to the mean in terms of creativity. I'm open to the idea, however, that there could be more creative uses of the things that some people will bother to do. Feedback loops they can create that somehow don't stifle their own creativity in favor of mimicking a statistical model, ways of incorporating their own ingredients into these food processors of information. I don't see a ton of finished work that seems to do this, but I see hints that some people are thinking this way, and they might come up with some cool stuff. It's a relatively newly adopted technology, and computer-generated art of various kinds usually separates into "efficiency" (which reads as low quality) in mimicking existing forms, and new forms which are uniquely possible with the new technology. I think plenty of people are just going to keep writing without significant input from LLMs, because while writer's block is a famous ailment, many writers are not primarily limited by their speed in producing more words. Like if you count comments on various sites and discussions with other people, I write thousands of words unassisted most days

This kind of gets to the crux of why these things are useful in some contexts, but really not up to snuff with what's being claimed about them. The most compelling use cases I've seen boil down to some form of fitting some information into a format that's more contextually appropriate, which can be great for highly structured formatting requirements and dealing with situations which are already subject to high protocol of some kind, so long as some error is tolerated. For things for which conveying your ideas with high fidelity, emphasizing your own narrative voice or nuanced thoughts on a subject, or standing behind the factual claims made by the piece are not as important. As much as their more strident proponents want to claim that humans are merely learning things by aggregating and remixing them in the same sense as these models do, this reads as the same sort of wishful thinking about technology that led people to believe that brains should work like clockwork or transistors at various other points in time at best, and honestly this most often seems to be trotted out as the kind of bad-faith analogy tech lawyers tend to use when trying to claim that the use of [exciting new computer thing] means something they are doing can't be a crime

So basically, I think rumors of the death of hand-written prose are, at least at present, greatly exaggerated, though I share the concern that it's going to be much harder to filter out spam from the genuine article, so what it's really going to ruin is most automated search techniques. The comparison to "low-background steel" seems apt, but analogies about how "people don't handwash their clothes as much anymore" kind of don't apply to things like books

It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you know AI is shaping so much of the content around us. Writing used to be a deeply personal exchange, but now, it can feel mechanical, like it’s losing its essence. The pressure to keep up with AI can be overwhelming for human writers, leading to this shift in content creation.

At the same time, it’s worth considering that the human element still exists and will always matter—whether in long-form journalism, creative fiction, or even personal blogs. There are people out there who write for the love of it, for the connection it fosters, and for the need to express something uniquely theirs. While the presence of AI is unavoidable, the appreciation for genuine human insight and emotion will never go away.

Maybe the answer lies in seeking out and cherishing those authentic voices. While AI-generated writing will continue to grow, the hunger for human storytelling and connection will persist too. It’s about finding balance in this new reality and, when necessary, looking back to the richness of past writings, as you mentioned. While it may seem like a loss in some ways, it could also be a call to be more intentional in what we read and who we trust to deliver those words.

What? No! Content volume only matters in stupid contests like VC app marketing grifts or political disinformation ops where the content isn’t even meant to be read, it’s an excuse for a headline. I personally write all my startup’s marketing content, quality is exquisite and due to this our brand is becoming a juggernaut

There have always been human writers I don’t waste my time on, and now there are AI writers in the same category.

I don’t care. I will just do what I want with my life and use my time and energy on things I enjoy and find useful.

AI generated crap is one thing. But human generated crap is there - just because human wrote something it is not making it good.

Had a friend who thought that if it is written in a book it is for sure true. Well NO!

There was exactly the same sentiment with stuff on the internet and it is still the same sentiment about Wikipedia that “it is just some kids writing bs, get a paper book or real encyclopedia to look stuff up”.

Not defending gen AI - but still you have to make useful proxy measures what to read and what not, it was always an effort and nothing is going substitute critical thinking and putting in effort to separate wheat from the chaff.

Of course, gen AI is just a tool that can be used for good or bad, but spam, targeted misinformation campaigns, and garbage content in general is one area that will be most amplified because it became so low effort and they don't care about doing any review, double-checking, etc. They can completely automate their process to whatever goal they've in mind. So where sensible humans enjoy 10x productivity, these spam farms will be enjoying 10000x scale.

So I don't think downplaying it and acting like nothing changed, is the brightest idea. I hope you see now how that's a completely different game, one that's already here but we aren't prepared for yet, certainly not with traditional tools we have.

It's not the best analogy because there's already more junk out there than can fit through the limited bandwidth available to my brain, and yet I'm still (vaguely) functional.

So how do I avoid the junk now? Rough and ready trust metrics, I guess. Which of those will still work when the spam's 10x more human?

I think the recommendations of friends will still work, and we'll increasingly retreat to walled gardens where obvious spammers (of both the digital and human variety) can be booted out. I'm still on facebook, but I'm only interested in a few well-moderated groups. The main timeline is dead to me. Those moderators are my content curators for facebook content.

One cannot be DDOSed with junk when not actively trying to stuff as much junk into ones head.

The junk gets thrown at you in mass volume at low cost without your permission.

Let's say a relative of yours who isn't too tech literate is using a search engine to lookup some information, could be presidential election, COVID, some news story. If one of the results on the first page deviate from others, it's easy to notice. But if all of them agree, they became the truth. Of course your first thought is to say search engines are shit or whatever off-hand remarks. But this example is just to illustrate how the volume alone can change things.

The medium doesn't matter, these things could come in many forms, book reviews, posts on social media, ads, false product description on amazon, the problem is the volume.

Of course, these things exist today but the scale is different, just like the difference between firearms and drones or weapon of mass destruction. If you think that it's the same old game and you can defend against the new threat using your old arsenal (in this example: infantry against drones), I admire your confidence but you're in for a surprise.

Sadly, you seem to not be looking further than your nose. We are not talking about just you and me here. Less tech literate people are the ones at a disadvantage and need protection the most.

The social media algorithms are the content curators for the technically illiterate.

Ok, they suck and they're actively user-hostile, but they sucked before AI. Maybe (maybe!) AI's the straw that breaks the camel's back, and people leave those algorithm-curated spaces in droves. I hope that, one way and another, they'll drift back towards human-curated spaces. Maybe without even realizing it.

Feels like people drop into spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt too quickly.

The problem is that wheat:chaff ratio used to be 1:100, and soon it's going to become 1:100 million. I think you're severely underestimating the amount of effort it's going to take to find real information in the sea of AI generated content.

Fundamentally AI changes nothing for masses and for individuals alike and there was nothing you could "just trust" because it was written on a website or in a book. That is why I call it silly.

It also doesn't make it easier or harder for people in power that have vast resources to plant what they want - they have money and power and will do so anyway.

yes, obviously. But AI slop makes those proxy measures significantly more complicated. Critical thinking is not magic - it is still a guess, and people are obviously worse at distinguishing AI bullshit from human bullshit.

And I also predict that many responses to you will say “it was always that way, nothing changed”.

My optimistic and enthusiastic view of AI's role in Human development is that it will create selection pressures that will release the dormant psychological abilities of the species. Undoubtedly, wide-spread appearance of Psi abilities will be featured in this adjustment of the human super-organism to technologies of its own making.

Machines can't do Psi.

working theory: writers have taste and LLM writing style doesn't match the typical taste of a published writer.

AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points

We need to stop being impressed with long documents.

As you say, if the subject is worth being written about, there should be no issue and writing will come naturally. If it’s a struggle, maybe one should step back and figure out why that is.

There may some argument for speed, because writing quality prose does take time, but then the question becomes a matter of quantity vs. quality. Do you want to write high quality pieces that people want to read at a slower pace or churn out endless volumes of low-substance grey goo “content”?

Like, you can write a bunch of text, then ask an LLM to improve it with minimal changes. Then, you read through its output and pick out the improvements you like.

I'm personally not as gloomy about it as the parent comments but I fear it's a trend that pushes towards a samey, mass-produced style in all writing.

Eventually there will be a counter culture and backlash to it and then equilibrium in quality content but it's probably here to stay for anything where cost is a major factor.

Why do you say people have to do it?

People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is not worth wasting time and resources on. There will always be side effects to making those decisions, but its well within everyone's right to make them.

Gotta eat, yo

Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?

People don't have to use LLMs (they don't seem to be AI yet) because they can simply choose not to. For authors, write books that you want to write because you believe you have a story to tell. Worry about perfecting your stories and enjoy the process of writing, don't be an author just for the sales. Once you peek behind the curtain and learn the economics of the book industry, you'll realize there's very little opportunity for making enough cash to even worry about shotgunning a mountain of LLM books into the world anyway.

Something happened around 2010 and it all got shit. I think everyone becoming massively online made global cultural output reduce in quality to meet the interests of most people and most people have terrible taste.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.

Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.

It’s simply more nuanced. If you’re writing a couple of articles a day to pay for your bills, what will stop you from writing actually 10 or 20 articles a day instead?

I can bang on about older games being better all day long but it doesn't stop Fortnite from being popular, and somewhat rightly so, I suppose.

I agree with you that having elite writing skills will be useful for a long time. But the bar for proof reading seems to be quite low on average in the industry. I think you overestimate the writings skills of your average journalist.

So everything an AI writes will eventually be nothing more than some kind of internal representation.

If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.

The problem is this kind of content is flooding the internet. Before you know it becomes extremely hard to find non AI generated content...

At what point do we consider some entity alive? At what point do we decide to consider it a species (of living thing)?

If we find out there are aliens, biological and therefore similar to us? Sure. What if we meet aliens whose physical forms are synthetic? What if we meet the synthetic creations of biological aliens?

I'm not saying that LLMs are alive, of course. But I am saying that I'd consider LLMs to be a precursor to AGI, along with all our our historical artificial intelligence experiments, in the same way that prokaryotes were the precursors to...us.

Everyone is going to have to get over that very soon, or they're going to start sounding like those old puritanical freaks who thought Elvis thrusting his hips around was the work of the devil.

This has nearly always been true. "Manufacturing consent" is way older than any digital technology.

I guess it depends on scope. I'm imaging scientific or education. Ie things we probably shouldn't have relied on Blogs to facilitate, yet we did. For looking up some random "how do i build a widget?", yea AI will probably make it worse. For now. Then it'll massively improve to the point that it's not even worth asking how to build the widget.

The larger "scientific or education" is what i'm concerned about, and i think we'll need a new paradigm to validate. We've been getting attacked on this front for 12+ years, AI is only bringing this to light imo.

Trust will have to be earned and verified in this word-soup world. I just hope we find a way.

Some of the bigger issues you're raising I think have less to do with technology and more to do with how our economic system is currently structured. AI will be a tremendous accelerant, but are we sure we know where we're going?

Only if you're competing on volume.

(it will get into the dark places like spam though, which seems dumb since they know how to make meth instead, spend time on that you wankers)

There could be resurgence in reading the classics, on paper, since we know they are not AI.

For ex, calculate the hash of all important books, and publish that as the “historical authenticity” check. Put the hashes on some important blockchain so we know it’s unchanged over time.

The commodity end of the writing market may well have been automated, but was that really the kind of writing you or the author or I ever sought out in the first place?

I can get mass-manufactured garments from Shein if I want, but I can also still find tailors locally if it’s worth it to me. I can buy IKEA or I can still save up for something made out of real wood. I can “shoot a cinematic digital film” on my iPhone but the cineplex remains in business and the art film folks are still doing their scrappy thing (and still moaning about its economics). I can lap up slop from an academic paper mill journal or I can identify who’s doing the thinking in a field and read what they’re writing or saying.

And the funny thing is that none of those human-scale options commands all that much of a premium in the scheme of things. There may be less human-scald work to go around and thus fewer small enterprises plying a specific trade, but any given one of them just has to put food on the table for a number of humans roughly proportional to the same level of output as always.

It seems to me that there’s no special virtue in the specific form that the mass publishing market took over the last century or however long: my local grocery store chain’s division producing weekly newspaper circulars probably employed more people than J Peterman has. But there was and remains a place for quality. If anything—as you point out—the AI schlock has sensitized us to the value we place on a human voice. And at some level, once people notice that they miss that quality, isn’t there a sense in which they become more willing to seek it out and pay for it if necessary?

It is actually happening now.

I've noticed amazon reviews have an AI summary at the top, reading the reviews for you and even pointing out shortcomings.

Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human".

I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off.

Rinse and repeat.

Until LLMs exceed the very best of human quality there will be human content in all forms of media. This claims follows because there is always (some) demand for top quality content.

I agree that many writers might use LLMs as a tool, but good writers who care about quality will ensure that such use is not detrimental (e.g., using the LLM to identify errors rather than having it draft copy).

My point is that I do not agree that LMM output will degrade all media (as there is always a demand for top quality content). So we either have bad LLM output and then people who care about quality avoiding such works. Or good LLM output and hopefully some form of post scarcity society (e.g., Iain Bank's Culture Novels).

it's depressing.

A spellchecker makes guarantees about accuracy. So does a calculator. Broad, sweeping guarantees.

Imagine if we built a tool that could automatically do all the electrical work in a new home from the breaker box to every outlet, and it could do it in 2 hours. However, what if that tool made no guarantees about its ability to meet electrical code? Would people use it anyway? Of course they would. Many dangerous errors would slip through inspection and many more house fires would ensue as a result.

This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc.

The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software.

Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct.

Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.

This statement strikes me (a writer) as ridiculous. LLM slop is sloppy. I would expect anyone who reads a reasonable amount to spot it immediately.

Are you saying you are literally unable to distinguish LLM cliches?