You know how in Minecraft (and other games) how they have infinite maps? You just keep on exploring and the game generates new lands for you to explore? That is what the future of social networks will be.
Probably the only people who'd bother to engage are some geeks who've confused themselves into thinking a social network is just about generating messages for consumption.
Also, such a fake social network might be able to replicate BS political slapfights, but I'd think it would fall on its face when touching on anything that's not repetitive or baroquely self-referential. It'd get old fast.
Because it's 2023, and GPT, while impressive in its way, still sucks. Even if you generated the text with GPT, you're still operating it and I'm interacting with you.
> Like you are assuming I'm a real person, but you don't know it. You can't ever really know it.
That's a little sophomoric. No one needs to know with perfect clarity. If bots ever get good enough and prevalent enough most social media users are fake, there will be a little lag as people figure it out. Then people who keep using social media will get mocked for wasting their time, and it will die.
I didn't hand-wave it away, I just labeled it correctly and addressed it.
A mind-blowing trump card of an "argument" it wasn't.
I truly don't understand how you are interpreting this conversation.
That makes sense, because you're pretty badly misunderstanding me (which your summary makes perfectly clear).
I mean, 1 was part of a direct answer to your own question "how do you know that you are talking to an actual human right now and not a GPT powered hackernews bot." Emphasis mine. Your 2 is just a total misunderstanding. Hint: I was talking about social knowledge, not "smart people just knowing" in any particular case.
I think it is pretty widely accepted that corporations and governments already conduct astroturfing, but those operations were limited in that you had to open an office somewhere and pay people hourly to write propaganda. Now you only need an API key.
I'd be really surprised if there are not conversations happening right now at Facebook and its competitors about injecting generated comments into people's feeds to increase engagement.
What would be the point of that? I thought the purpose of social media was to interact with people.