Schooling and mass media are expensive things to control. Surely reducing the cost of persuasion opens persuasion up to more players?
Sure the the Big companies have all the latest coolness. But also don't have a moat.
Sure AI could democratise content creation but distribution is still controlled by the elite. And content creation just got much cheaper for them.
We no longer live in the age of broadcast media, but of social networked media.
- elites already engage in mass persuasion, from media consensus to astroturfed thinktanks to controlling grants in academia
- total information capacity is capped, ie, people only have so much time and interest
- AI massively lowers the cost of content, allowing more people to produce it
Therefore, AI is likely to displace mass persuasion from current elites — particularly given public antipathy and the ability of AI to, eg, rapidly respond across the full spectrum to existing influence networks.
In much the same way podcasters displaced traditional mass media pundits.
That was only for a short fraction of human history only lasting in the period between post-WW2 and before globalisation kicked in, but that was only a short exception from the norm, basically a rounding error in terms of the length of human civilisation.
Now, society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth and ruling the masses of people by wars, poverty, fear, propaganda and oppression.
The wealth inequality we have today, as bad as it is now, is as best as it will ever be moving forward. It's only gonna get worse. And despite all the political talks and promises on "fixing" wealth inequality, housing, etc, there's nothing to fix here, since the financial system is working as designed, this is a feature not a bug.
EDUCATION:
- Global literacy: 90% today vs 30%-35% in 1925
- Prinary enrollment: 90-95% today vs 40-50% in 1925
- Secondary enrollment: 75-80% today vs <10% in 1925
- Tertiary enrollment: 40-45% today vs <2% in 1925
- Gender gap: near parity today vs very high in 1925
HUNGER
Undernourished people: 735-800m people today (9-10% of population) vs 1.2 to 1.4 billion people in 1925 (55-60% of the population)
HOUSING
- quality: highest every today vs low in 1925
- affordability: worst in 100 years in many cities
imagine someday there is a child that trust chatgpt more than his mother
What is AI if not a form of mass media
My concern isn't so much people being influenced on a whim, but people's beliefs and views being carefully curated and shaped since childhood. iPad kids have me scared for the future.
My fear is that some entity, say a State or ultra rich individual, can leverage enough AI compute to flood the internet with misinformation about whatever it is they want, and the ability to refute the misinformation manually will be overwhelmed, as will efforts to refute leveraging refutation bots so long as the other actor has more compute.
Imagine if the PRC did to your country what it does to Taiwan: completely flood your social media with subtly tuned han supremacist content in an effort to culturally imperialise us. AI could increase the firehose enough to majorly disrupt a larger country.
However, exactly the same applies with, say, targeted Facebook ads or Russian troll armies. You don't need any AI for this.
It seems to me that it's easier than ever for someone to broadcast "niche" opinions and have them influence people, and actually having niche opinions is more acceptable than ever before.
The problem you should worry about is a growing lack of ideological coherence across the population, not the elites shaping mass preferences.
intermerda•27m ago
> Musk’s AI Bot Says He’s the Best at Drinking Pee and Giving Blow Jobs
> Grok has gotten a little too enthusiastic about praising Elon Musk.
andsoitis•21m ago
> “For the record, I am a fat retard,” he said.
> In a separate post, Musk quipped that “if I up my game a lot, the future AI might say ‘he was smart … for a human.’”
ben_w•12m ago
He's also claimed "I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth"…
spiderfarmer•6m ago
lukan•8m ago
Hard to tell, I have never been surrounded by yes sayers all the time praising me for every fart I took, so I cannot relate to that situation (and don't really want to).
But the problem remains, he is in control of the "truth" of his AI, the other AI companies likewise - and they might be better at being subtle about it.