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The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I’m sure there were moments or clues before that.
This was when the “you’re the product if its free” arrangement metastasised into “you’re a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not”.
Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it … the internet, IE other people’s content isn’t valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.
The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically “live” and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.
I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet … whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn’t thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.
But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.
Especially coming from Google, who was one of the good guys pushing open standards and interoperability.
We ruined the world by painting certain men or groups as bad. The centralization of power is the bad thing. That’s the whole purpose of all Republics as I understand it. Something we used to know and have almost completely forgotten
Well said! I’m still wondering what happens when the enviable ouroboros of AI content referencing AI content referencing AI content makes the whole internet a self perpetuating mess of unreadable content and makes anything of value these companies once gained basically useless.
Would that eventually result in fresh, actual human created content only coming from social media? I guess clauses about using your likeness will be popping up in TikTok at some point (if they aren’t already)
I dunno, my feeling is that even if the hype dies down we’re not going back. Like a real transition has happened just like when Facebook took off.
Humans will still be in the loop through their prompts and various other bits and pieces and platforms (Reddit is still huge) … while we may just adjust to the new standard in the same way that many reported an inability to do deep reading after becoming regular internet users.
You’re absolutely right about not going back. Web 3.0 I guess. I want to be optimistic that a distinction between all the garbage and actual useful or real information will be visible to people, but like you said, general tech and media literacy isn’t encouraging, hey?
Slightly related, but I’ve actually noticed a government awareness campaign where I live about identifying digital scams. Be nice if that could be extended to incorrect or misleading AI content too.
It should end up self regulating once AI is using AI material. That’s the downfall of the companies not bothering to put very clear identification of AI produced material. It’ll spiral into a hilarious mess.
I’m legit looking forward to when Google returns completely garbled and unreadable search results, because someone is running an automated Ads campaign that sources another automated campaign and so on, with the only reason it rises to the top is that they put the highest bid amount.
I doubt Google will do shit about it, but at least the memes will be good!
Hasn’t it already happened? All culture is derivative, yes all of it. And look at how much of it is awful, yet we navigate fine. I keep hearing stats like every one second YouTube gets 4 hours more content and yet I use YouTube daily. Despite being very very confident that all but a fraction of a percent of what it has is of any value to me.
Same for books, magazines, news, podcasts, radio programs, music, art, comics, recipes, articles…
We already live in the post information explosion. Where the same stuff gets churned over and over again. All I am seeing AI doing is speeding this up. Now instead of a million YouTube vids I won’t watch getting added next week it will be ten million.
Tik Tok was banned so it ain’t coming from there. Can’t get universal healthcare but we can make sure to protect kids from the latest dance craze.
But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.
I didn’t think so either. The funny thing is, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and the whole cyberpunk genre was warning us…
Yea but this feels quicker than anyone expected. It’s easy to forget, but alpha Go beating the best in the world was shocking at the time and no one saw it coming. We hadn’t sorted out what to do with big monopoly corps yet, we weren’t ready for a whole new technology.
Nice to hear I’m not the only one who thought the same exact thing.
Oh yea, it’s basically a vibe now for those who see it, which I was mostly channeling.
"AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”
So delusional.
Do they think that their AI will actually dig the cobalt from the mines, or will the AI simply be the one who sends the children in there to do the digging?
if
This word is like Atlas, holding up the world’s shittiest argument that anyone with 3 working braincells can see through.
It will design the machines to build the autonomous robots that mine the cobalt… doing the jobs of several companies at one time and either freeing up several people to pursue leisure or the arts or starve to death from being abandoned by society.
Have you seen the real fucking world?
It’s gonna make the rich richer and the poor poorer. At least until the gilded age passes.
I agree and I gave that option as the last one in the list.
either freeing up several people to pursue leisure or the arts or starve to death from being abandoned by society.
You know EXACTLY which one it’s gonna be.
Big fail to forget the /s here…
It isn’t the intelligence of the machine designer that is the issue, it is the middlemen and the end user.
Continuously having to downgrade machines. Wouldn’t want some sales rep seeing something new.
it isn‘t delusional, it is a lie
It’s a big year in robotics, so, the former.
Nah, they’re probably planning to do what Amazon did with their “Just Walk Out” stores… force children into mines and just claim it’s actually AI. As NFT’s, Cryptocurrency, and so many other hype tech fads have taught us: marketing is cheaper than development.
Let’s not forget this is all driven by people with the right skillset, in the right place at the right time, who are hell-bent on making vast amounts of money.
The “visionary technological change” is a secondary justification.
Permission granted to scrape this comment too, if you like.
The very first prompt this AGI is given will be “secure as much wealth as possible without breaking any laws that might see us punished”.
Quote from the subtitle of the article
and you can’t stop it.
Don’t ever let life-deprived, perspective-bubble wearing, uncompassiontate, power hungry manipulators, “News” people, tell you what you can and cannot do. Doesn’t even pass the smell test.
My advice, if a Media Outlet tries to Groom you to think that nothing you do matters, don’t ever read it again.
god, i love this statement. it’s so true. people have to understand our collective power. even if the only tool we have is a hammer, we can still beat their doors down and crush them with it. all it takes is organization and willingness.
our collective time would be better spent destroying capitalism than trying to stop AI. AI is wonderful in the right social system.
On the other hand, assuming the social system isn’t the right one, hypothetically AI fully realized could make it more unreasonable and more tightly stuck the way it is.
Exactly. I know it’s easy to automatically froth at the mouth with rage when seeing “AI”, and here anything mentioning it gets automatically rejected, but there are genuinely good usecases.
Amazing speech synthesis and recognition is useful for anybody, but especially people with certain disabilities.
Much better translation, spell checking, help with writing. Helping people understand texts that are written in a complicated way (legalese, technical jargon, condensing EULA’s, etc)
Infrastructure planning and traffic control.
Grid energy usage and distribution.
Image recognition, useful for anybody for things like searching a photo library for a specific thing, but also for people with visual issues who previously had to rely on awful screen reader software that can’t tell you the content of images unless it was properly tagged (as someone with a blind sister who uses computers - rare!)
Spotting fake reviews, a massive issue online. Flagging bot accounts.
The potential for them to take over some jobs and free up people to pursue other things in life.
This technology, if trained ethically, and not used to siphon more data from people, is amazing. It’s how megacorps are using it that’s the problem.
“Yeah, let’s go up against the woman who sued Disney and won What could go wrong!?”
The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
It’s just so fitting that microsoft is the company most fervently wallowing in it.
I mean, that’s just how it has always worked, this isn’t actually special to AI.
Tom Hanks does the voice for Woody in Toy Story movies, but, his brother Jim Hanks has a very similar voice, but since he isnt Tom Hanks he commands a lower salary.
So many video games and whatnot use Jim’s voice for Woody instead to save a bunch of money, and/or because Tom is typically busy filming movies.
This isn’t an abnormal situation, voice actors constantly have “sound alikes” that impersonate them and get paid literally because they sound similar.
OpenAI clearly did this.
It’s hilarious because normally fans are foaming at the mouth if a studio hires a new actor and they sound even a little bit different than the prior actor, and no one bats an eye at studios efforts to try really hard to find a new actor that sounds as close as possible.
Scarlett declined the offer and now she’s malding that OpenAI went and found some other woman who sounds similar.
Thems the breaks, that’s an incredibly common thing that happens in voice acting across the board in video games, tv shows, movies, you name it.
OpenAI almost certainly would have won the court case if they were able to produce who they actually hired and said person could demo that their voice sounds the same as Gippity’s.
If they did that, Scarlett wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court, she cant sue someone for having a similar voice to her, lol.
She sure can’t. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.
So where is she? …
Right.
Get real. They have made it like her deliberately. Not anybody “nearly alike”. They even admitted it.
That was the point… Did you reply to the wrong comment?
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That’s flattering, but I was actually just expecting a press release. So where is it?
Scarlett actually would have a good case if she can show the court that people think it’s her. Tom Waits won a case against Frito Lay for “voice misappropriation” when they had someone imitate his voice for a commercial.
Well, in the “soundalike” situation you describe people were getting paid to voice things. Now it’s just an AI model that’s not getting paid and the people that made the model probably got paid even less than a soundalike voice actor would. It’s just more money going to the top.
I wish I had enough bandwidth to be angry at a new voice actor being hired to play in a children’s movie franchise.
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I hate that I have to keep saying this- No one seems to be talking about the fact that by giving their AI a human-like voice with simulated emotions, it inherently makes it seem more trustworthy and will get more people to believe its hallucinations are true. And then there will be the people convinced it’s really alive. This is fucking dangerous.
It’s still just LLM and therefore just autocomplete
Some days I’m just an autocomplete
OpenAI should have given some money to the people who own the movie “Her”. Then they could have claimed they were just mimicking the character.
It doesn’t work like that. It will soon if Disney has their way, with actors selling away their likeness rights for perpetuity with their contracts.
What do you think the actor’s strike was about? And what do you think one of the key agreements the actors wrung out of the studios was? They were not about to allow their likenesses to be sold for all of eternity for pennies on the dollar.
Oh I know, that’s what I was refering to.
That’s very interesting… can you suggest a good article covering this topic?
For example this: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/08/disney-reportedly-creates-task-force-to-explore-ai-and-cut-costs.html and this: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/sag-aftra-amptp-studios-contract-artifial-intelligence-details-1234877093/ The second article details how due the strike the actor can consent to digital copies of themselves or not and reimbursed for their use but those digital actors are still coming.
Thank you, that was very interesting, especially the second article. It’ll be worth watching the details of how this plays out over the coming years.
Doesn’t sound anything like Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson is a troublemaker. “Sounds eerily similar”. It’s not like she has such a unique voice after all.
