None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Yes more than 70% of Tinder profiles are already probably bots at this time. The CEO said they had an AI strategy.
People will be more and more lonely.
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Will be very hard to tell the difference until you are intimate
To extrapolate the theme of that movie just a little bit further?
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
(Honest question, I'm not arguing you're wrong)
Pure cope, but whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Except, you know, actually playing the game well. The bots all play aggro decks and get lower than average winrates.
> I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Why? Their presence makes climbing the ladder easier, so you get more rewards.
So it had positive effect in the end. I wish I had something like this that would stop me use any social media.
We must be looking at different social medias as this is pretty much all I see.
And then you generate one more, and it's the greeting you came up with.
(and no, it's not genuine)
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it would not have taken place.
In fact, even if no LLM was involved in this particular case (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the environment very casual), it would be beyond silly to assume that this would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason, and when these signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. I personally do not see that as a positive thing.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
If you're paying for it, how genuine is it really?
The fans make the person famous. The famous person isn't doing a favor for the fans. They should remember that
The whole ecosystem is toxic and, at the risk of sounding like a prude, should be banned.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
It's not all black and white.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
Please speak for yourself only.
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
But that does not make it "inevitable".
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
Market forces demand it, and people are beholden to the market so long as they exist within its sphere.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
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[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
In the OF/pet rock/pidgeon trio, the pidgeon is actually the odd one out; the other two are all about making money by exploiting people's need for socializing.
Alas, "e-celebs" are a step worse than "e-prostitutes". Both exploit parasocial relationships to trap customers, but in the end, OF performers provide customers actual value in exchange for money, while vloggers and influencers also try to sell you all kinds of random shit - their actual business is advertising.
(It's similar to analog world prostitutes vs. telemarketers; the former engage in voluntary exchange of value for money, the latter just try to scam you. That the society scorns the former while accepting the latter is some perverse inversion of morality, if you think about it. One could argue that the value prostitutes provide is poison - but then so is what telemarketers sell, too, and prostitutes don't cold-call you to trick you into buying.)
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
My devices should work for me, not the other way around.
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.