I would say, at least it’s not as predatory and unethical as crypto, where the people involved are knowingly harming others.
But it seems like the current trendline for “AI” is going to be worse. Why be excited about building tools that will undermine democracy and cast doubt on the authenticity of every single photo, video, and audio clip. Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us.
And at the very least, if you think blogspam sucks now, wait until this becomes 99.9999% of all indexed content. It’s going to jam all of our comms with noise.
But hey it looks great on your resume, right?
Maybe I’m too cynical, would love for someone to change my mind. But you are not alone in your unease.
> Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us.
We shouldn't believe any form of media straight away. We only do so because we think faking it is hard and why should one do. Being able to produce it cheaply could make people more attentative and skeptical of things around them. Blogspam sucks mostly out of consumers belief that this is something that was written by a person who deeply cares about them. Average internet consumer consumes shitty internet not because he is ignorant, but because he or she doesn't know enough to care.
But maybe I'm to optimistic, I just think people are not aware of stuff around them
There is a state of emergency presidential address. In Video A, the politician says X Y Z. In Video B, the politician says A B C. Both videos have equal credibility. The videos show no artifacts from tampering. The alteration is undetectable by experts. The broadcast has dire consequences in a divided country.
50% of channels are pushing Video A, 50% of channels are pushing Video B.
We are now in a position where the public actually cannot determine which video is authentic. The politician could broadcast a new statement, to clarify the validity of the first video. But, you could just as easily fake that too, to publish a statement that declares the opposite.
So, then you load up Hacker News or wherever, to determine for yourself what the hell is going on. But someone spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video A, and someone else spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video B. These comments are all in natural language, all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. It's impossible to determine if the comment is a bot. And because the cost is essentially free, these bots can be primed for years, making mundane comments on trivial topics to build social credibility. Actual humans only account for maybe 1% of this discourse.
Now imagine: our entire world operates like this, on a daily basis, ranging from the mundane to the dramatic. How about broadcasting a deepfake press statement from a CEO to make a shorted meme stock crash. If there are financial/political incentives to do so, and the technological hurdle is insignificant, these tools will be weaponized.
So how do we "not believe the media", do we all have to be standing in the same room together where something notable happens?
I understand that there could be upsides, the world isn't all doom and gloom. But, I think engineers get myopic, and do not heed the warnings.
If some person A decides to pay person B in crypto money instead of dollars or pesos, because it's more convenient/cheaper/faster, how is that harming you? That's their business. Nobody is forcing you to use crypto.
Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.
All of that multimedia experimentation was a good time. I remember kirupa.com being the destination for tutorials and actionscript snippets, I built dozens of Flash sites. It was also popular for awhile to burn Flash packages to mini CDs, they would autoload as a multimedia brochure or portfolio etc.
I'm glad we moved beyond this. It was ultimately the wrong direction for the web, but we had some fun along the way.
I prefer the higher information density of earlier designs. The surface-level styles make them seem old, but structurally, these sites provided a lot more utility.
When I hit your homepage, I don't care about the fullscreen photo and bland headline. I'm blind to it, these things don't even register. Please give me a list of news headlines, a full product lineup, top support articles, etc.
I think many of the old designs would scale quite well. The elements on screen were absolutely huge when 20 inch monitors had resolutions like 800x600. Websites would've needed to redesign their CSS for wide/tall screens, but old designs could work.
I think it's just part of the evolution of the web. When CSS2 and CSS3 became widely supported and screens went beyond CRTs, their layout changed. The era of early mobile screens had websites that were very difficult to scale and adapt, so special mobile web pages were created (that often had a kind of slimmed-down look, later replaced by fake-iOS CSS and then more experiments). That then developed into responsive design because maintaining two websites was a pain; at that point, designs also happened to become flatter and less distinguishable, eventually leading to the bland sea of whitespace we see today.
I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments.
The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back.
Same here. First time order, and it was poor quality so I requested a return. They refunded and didn’t even want it back. It was $200 but I guess they knew it was junk and not worth the shipping.
When there are little to no consequences, it will keep happening. We need severe penalties for losing sensitive data, as in, an actual threat to the survival of a company, not some minuscule fine.
I somewhat like the macOS dock. But eventually, on KDE, with all the freedom in the world, I realized that it just makes sense to have everything integrated.
Maybe they realized during a QA meeting that it was too good for their standards.
I wonder how having evidence of fraudulent transactions publicly accessible on the blockchain will affect the investigation time. It seems like once they figure out exactly which addresses to look for, they'll have timestamped fingerprints that trace back to all sorts of irrefutable evidence.
But it seems like the current trendline for “AI” is going to be worse. Why be excited about building tools that will undermine democracy and cast doubt on the authenticity of every single photo, video, and audio clip. Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us.
And at the very least, if you think blogspam sucks now, wait until this becomes 99.9999% of all indexed content. It’s going to jam all of our comms with noise.
But hey it looks great on your resume, right?
Maybe I’m too cynical, would love for someone to change my mind. But you are not alone in your unease.