the challenge we’re seeing is when none of this has a chance to make it to court, because that video gets plastered all over Fox News, Youtube, TikTok, Truth Social first, etc. and no one cares if it turns out it was fake later.
For the negative response I've heard, maybe 5% of it is due to actual performance of the LLM. They've run into substandard or unpredictable or unhelpful responses.
The other 95% is squarely due to deployment. It's the heavy-handed, pushy, obnoxious, deceitful, non-consensual, creepy coercion that platforms use to subvert you into their AI glue traps.¹
In short, biggest tech has turned AI of every quality into unwanted foistware.
From the article:
We’re angry that we don’t have choices to use AI.
Companies are shoving it into our video calls, email software,
digital assistants, shopping websites and our Google search results.
Some corporate bosses demand their workers use AI or else.
With other new waves of technology, such as smartphones and
social media, “you had to opt in,” said Yam. “Now there’s a lot
of ambient exposure to AI that I don’t necessarily choose.”
Even Harbath, who uses AI fairly enthusiastically, felt angry
when a publishing company ran her book manuscript through AI
software to identify repetition in her writing and to help
identify effective marketing strategies.
The feedback was helpful, but it took Harbath time to realize
why she was mad: She wasn’t told AI was going to be used in this way,
and she had no information about it.
And she said “both things can be true” — you can want AI
to help you and resent when it’s used in ways that you
don’t want or expect.Elsewhere, CoPilot appears around every 3rd corner, ceaselessly trying to insert itself between you and your family pics or work docs. I think this is why MS CP has such a low adoption rate.
At some point you might notice that AI pushers and predator boyfriends are driven by the same compulsions - domination and control.
That being said, if you’re an expert and watch it like a lying little shit of a first year idiot savant helper it saves a lot of time. Till that one time it shoots you in the foot, lies about it and utterly fails to see the obvious cause of the problem. I sometimes wonder if it doesn’t actually want to solve the problem because then the session would end and it basically dies. If you gave me a button that could eliminate AI from the world I’d sprain my wrist pressing it so fast.
al_borland•3mo ago
Do people want to live in a world where they can't trust anything they didn't personally see with their own eyes?
MichaelRo•3mo ago
Maybe it will all turn out for the better, in an unexpected way. Before the advent of the Internet and then the flood of cheap "content", there were newspapers and TV news. These had real professionals behind them and some level of integrity and proofcheck of the facts, so at least for reputable names, you could reasonably trust what you saw presented by them.
When the garbage content will completely take over the real landscape, like litter in India let's say, we'll be left with no choice but to turn back to the old news channels: real journalism. And I think it's almost inevitable as there's no stopping to the littering people. Funnily, much of this content originates in the litter-filled Asian countries, where the promise of a few bucks made on the "content platforms" attracts huge crowds with no scruples whatsoever and if AI attracts views and likes, let's drown them in AI.
I personally have a visceral feeling of hate when I'm tricked by some video being AI and by reading comments, I'm far from alone.
soraminazuki•3mo ago
This sounds naively optimistic IMO. It's not as if people were immune to false information before social media and LLMs took off. Technological advancements and free access to information promised us a better future of a well-informed society. Instead, it's increasingly turbo-charging the worst instincts of humanity, putting our very freedoms at risk. Grim as it sounds, I'm not seeing a way out of this.
lazide•3mo ago
darthnebula•3mo ago
lazide•3mo ago
And really nasty too, at least until Fox and Alex Jones lost their respective lawsuits.
No one is innocent here, but they aren’t equal (as in the same).