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I agree. Also, it's not like the whole internet will be under ID check. One can still opt out and don't use the main stream social media? My hope is that ID check is targeting never ending feeds of crappy content.

That said, I am very concerned about how things work privacy wise today (even without ID check).

While I see the point, I think I more often encounter the opposite. Duplication, but not exactly duplication. Then the "sunk cost fallacy" is not an issue but there is huge maintenance cost and no-one feels like refactoring it. I'd rather refactor bad abstraction than 10x duplication.

> The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

I love the post. I feel generating AI content is like doing informational compression (weirdly enough, by bloating up the size).

When giving it a prompt, the "normalized AI brain" guesses the intent based on what's the most plausible. All the diverse human brains get filtered, bucketed, here you go, this is the "standard artifact".

And yes, it is a compression because real life is not one shot prompt. If I get an unclear message from my colleague, I ask for clarification. If the message is bloated by AI and some information is added, it already scraped some of the real intent by bucketizing it. Sometimes it may be what the original author meant. Sometimes not.

I don't know what is anyone's motivation in compressing the facts by making text longer and harder to read. This whole.email generation idea is bizarre.

> Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies.

Exactly. A few weeks ago, there was an article about the age limit for social media. And everyone was full of criticism on how it affects privacy. But when there is a post about how browser profile serves de facto as a user identifier, then people are "Of course, what's the problem? We all know that, that's the way it has to be".

I am still fascinated by how convincing the AI slop can be. I saw way too much code and documentation which made no sense. But it's often not obvious. I read it, I don't get it, I read it again, am I just stupid? I can grab some threads from it, but overall, it just doesn't make sense, it doesn't click for me. And that's when I often realize, it doesn't click, because it's a slop. It's obvious in pictures (e.g., generate a picture of a bike with labels). But in code? It requires more time to look at it than to actually write it. So it just slips reviews, it sometimes even works as it should, but it's damn hard to understand and fix it in the future. Until eventually, nothing can fix it.

For the record, I use AI to generate code but not for "vibecoding". I don't believe when people tell me "you just prompt it badly". I saw enough to lose faith.

I'd like to see some examples of when it struggles to do summaries. There were no real examples in the text, besides one hypothetical which ChatGPT made up.

I think LLMs do great summaries. I am not able to come up with anything where I could criticize it and say "any human would come up with a better summary". Are my tasks not "truly novel"? Well, then I am not able, as a human, to come up with anything novel either.

> I'd also question how you know that ants have zero knowledge of what they do. At every turn, animals prove themselves to be smarter than we realize.

Sure, one can't know what they really think. But there are computer simulations showing that with simple rules for each individual, one can achieve "big things" (which are not possible to predict when looking only to an individual).

My point is merely, there is possibly interesting emergent behavior, even if LLMs are not AGI or anyhow close to human intelligence.

> To your interesting aspect, you're missing the most important (IMHO): accuracy. All 3 are really quite important, missing any one of them and the other two are useless.

Good point. Or I would add alignment in general. Even if accuracy is perfect, I will have a hard time relying completely on LLMs. I heard arguments like "people lie as well, people are not always right, would you trust a stranger, it's the same with LLMs!".

But I find this comparison silly: 1) People are not LLMs, they have natural motivation to contribute in a meaningful way to society (of course, there are exceptions). If for nothing else, they are motivated to not go to jail / lose job and friends. LLMs did not evolve this way. I assume they don't care if society likes them (or they probably somewhat do thanks to reinforcement learning). 2) Obviously again: the scale and speed, I am not able to write so much nonsense in a short time as LLMs.

I think there are 2 interesting aspects: speed and scale.

To explain the scale: I am always fascinated by the way societies moved on when they scaled up (from tribes to cities, to nations,...). It's sort of obvious, but when we double the amount of people, we get to do more. With the internet we got to connect the whole globe but transmitting "information" is still not perfect.

I always think of ants and how they can build their houses with zero understanding of what they do. It just somehow works because there are so many of them. (I know, people are not ants).

In that way I agree with the original take that AGI or not: the world will change. People will get AI in their pocket. It might be more stupid than us (hopefully). But things will change, because of the scale. And because of how it helps to distribute "the information" better.

It always surprises me when someone predicts that keyboards will go away. People love typing. Or I do love typing. No way I am going to talk to my phone, especially if someone else can hear it (which is always basically).