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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

> which does not sound true to me.

Which part? Smart kids who grow up with social media will understand from experience that the artifacts of online popularity have a direct and significant effect on their real lives, so...

> "[...] the artifacts of online popularity and the real are necessarily separate things"

...is definitely not a true statement. A "real" separate from the interference of newfangled technologies is just middle-aged reaction. We don't pretend that things said on telephones don't have an effect on our real lives, or announcements made on television won't affect us.

edit: honestly thought we moved from "irl" to "afk," then dropped them both as we accepted that we would carry keyboards with us 24 hours a day.

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This is a good analogy. I'd argue that what social media did was give kids a strategic and meta understanding of popularity, where there is very much a public and private self. AI will give kids a strategic and meta understanding of language and ideology.

The phone reference is not right as people specifically use telephones to "pretend," because to commit it to writing makes it consequential and 'real', whereas to say something on the phone is he-said-she-said. The phone is explicitly the domain of pretending. Regarding TV: a min-30% of people demonstrably ignore what is announced on television as well, so yes, something on television will affect us because it affects others, but that doesn't make it true.

A friends argument was, "just because you believe Santa Claus is a lie doesn't mean xmas isn't going to come every single year, and you'd be dumb to ignore that reality." The counter to this is, "Christmas does come every year, and when sustaining the dissonance of the crassness and lies about the season becomes too much, a few more people recognize what it exists to celebrate."

I'm saying that AI is making it untenable to believe narratives spread via the internet over what you see and physically experienced, and this is a cause for optimism.

I see your point. But couldn't you use the same argument without AI? The internet already has multiple mutually-exclusive narratives, and all of them have people that take them as reality.

I would argue that kids that grow up in that context either pick a side and engage in the eternal narrative war, or become cynics and despair, thinking that there's no objective truth.

Adding more narratives, now generated by AI, doesn't (IMO) change the current playing field that much. My bet would be that kids will become even more cynical: "if a machine can make anything sound like truth, there probably isn't any objective truth"

What's unique about LLM's is that they break the idea that consciousness is a function of language and its narratives, and a whole bunch of other anxieties go with it. My optimism is that it clicks that truth does not come from internet narratives, or any ideology or narrative for that matter, and that more people are driven to develop competence and real experiences instead of imagined ones.

Optimism is rarely rational but it's always risk taking, and that's worthwhile, imo.

I agree with the first sentence, I think we only differ in the second one, where you assign more probability to that "click" happening than I do.

But anyway, I can 100% agree with optimism being worth it. Thanks for the discussion!

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