Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.
did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
Got 'em
Sure, not for the same reason, but... got'em.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
It’s already often difficult to get a human on the phone.
Go to the insurance company web site.
Several years ago a law was passed requiring insurance companies to keep their provider lists accurate and up-to-date.
There's a regulatory window for freshness, and every insurance company web site is required by law to show you when the data was last updated.
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
Your cast iron detection mechanism will be gone!
AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.
More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.
Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
Varelion•1h ago