AI is a weapon to surpass Metal Gear
xeiaso.net
xeiaso.net
Probably, we'll end up with a new paradigm for web browsers that involves a lot of filtering on top of the morass of raw internet. Dunno exactly what it'll look like, but it'll probably involve multiple LLMs and some kind of abstraction on top of 'web pages'.
The end result with be a south park type of human centipede that few sane people will want to be a part of. I expect communities to become more segregated - as in real life where small communities isolate away from criminals - and more closed. It makes sense considering rampant theft, misinformation and ever increasing dubiousness that plagues the internet as a medium - in no small part thanks to procedural content generators that are schizoidly compared to human intelligence.
> even with massive amounts of noise it's still better than nothing
Nothing isn't the alternative. If the web literally vanished tomorrow, we still have other existing ways of communicating, researching, and recreating.
Is your friend running a phone app that's identifying the people around them and the topics they are interested in, all while earning a few dollars?
Where are you getting news from that's not just the firehose of falsehood? Do you really trust the people sending it to you, or are they profiting off of shoveling bullshit in to the feed?
For me, this is already about 80% true. The web is largely a vast wasteland at this point.
Obviously there ARE points to doing so, but it feels ultra-shitty that you're consigning yourself to having your work stolen if you're good enough.
In my experience, ChatGPT has a very distinctive writing style that's easy to identify, even if you "prompt engineer" to get something a little less generic. It also tends to not write anything of substance. The very few GPT-generated comments I've seen tend to get downvoted into oblivion.
That's already degrading the quality of all online discussions all by itself.
They weren't even bad comments. They fit in to the discussion, yet seeing it cheapened the experience.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was especially prescient, it's even more relevant today than it was at the time. It seemed like crazy babble at the time but now it's just like, "wow, ok, this all came true wtf".
A company basically created a large quantity of AI generated content in order to get SEO ranking for terms related to another company.
If/When this strategy becomes prominent (and if it's more successful/cheaper than current SEO approaches, I'd expect it will ), then we may see even more artificial content and less "real" content...
I've read that Google is desperately trying to adjust their algorithms to prevent SEO-optimized GPT from rising to the top, but they seem to be struggling in that battle.
You can go to GitHub and grab a repo that documents Linux manual pages and convert that into 10,000 articles overnight. You can do the same with Wikipedia and their 5M+ articles.
The hard part is getting Google to crawl and index those pages, and unless you’re willing to burn an established site then your other option is to buy either an expired domain or a site, which won’t be cheap and will block a lot of people from even attempting this.
And Google has rolled out numerous updates this year to combat this kind of spam also, from my own research they definitely clipped a lot of sites just this year alone.
But what you say is correct. This will only keep getting worse as more people get on the bandwagon. And that tweet won’t help the situation as it will get more people interested to try it. Nice little black hat marketing campaign for their product.
If generated content becomes so prevalent online, I suspect people will put more weight onto real world interaction. Or at least real-world validation on online interactions. I can imagine a world where user tokens are handed out at a conference and required to access a forum. Sure, someone could hand their token off to a bot, but that'd tank their credibility.
What you're suggesting is already implemented on Reddit. If you look at a user's page it'll show their shadowbanned comments. But if you click on the "show all comments" and view the whole thread they won't display. Reddit can't detect when you ctrl-f on a comment thread.
If you control the opinions of the youth, you have their votes for at least a few election cycles before their opinions might soften with the stressors of western adulthood. You also significantly influence how they spend money and get their parents to spend money. Its a very powerful position.
The downside is that it would probably just end up increasing fringe and dangerous behaviors
Don't ask when publications will begin using tricks like these to pad their wordcount; they already are.
https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers
Note: An attacker needs to be stronger than one defense, that is unlike being stronger than the sum of all defenses.
Note2: What we now see as a collective ie. a generated reality, existed before now, and is documented, the following comes to mind 1984, Good Bye Lenin, The Village M. Night Shyamalan, and IIRC Gate to Avalon, by Mamoru Oshii.
edit: added squared brakets.
Whether MGS2 was truly prescient or Kojima just happened to come up with an eerily relevant plotline is up for debate (wouldn't be the only time, either... Death Stranding came out right before the pandemic!), but in the context of our AI-and-deepfakes conundrum you could argue that the Patriots were kind of right.
In-universe, they're bad for a lot of other (extremely convoluted) reasons, among them the "forever war" thing, but the information control aspect is at least well-intentioned, if not incredibly paternalistic.
So is there a way to prioritize quality and veracity without stooping to that level of total control?
The anime list is still the best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkaAZE_UGMo&t=83s
....
hopefully /s
AI: "No problem then, here is your list of dissidents"
I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I find the thoughts expressed in this article to be deeply unsettling.
We might go out with a whimper indeed.
EDIT why the fuck was this article flagged?
Doomers conveniently forget that AI has tremendous sorting powers (why else would it spook google into change) so it can easily sort through the information traffic jam/muck how you want so long as it hasn't been deliberately misaligned by MoM away from the user. That kind of unfavorable misinforming over the future capabilities AI would not be tolerated by an AI MoM.
but it always has been targeted at something/someone specific - drown a piece of info in ocean of bullshit (see Stanislaw Lem's 'Voice of the sky'), or deceive the enemy, Lao Tzu style..
But, this time it's about society drowning itself without any particular goal. Or, is there some?
----
Added: maybe it's all.. fighting boredom? Like those well-funded ~aristocratic people of the past that "tried" all kind of diseases out of.. boredom..
(To the helpful commenters, imagine this in a gravelly voice)
The kind of person who has animefurry pictures all over their blog would probably assume everybody knows about it.
Maybe some formatting would help, like: "Metal... Gear...?
But there is something dangerous and seductive about things that almost work,
https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0...
has a chapter about the most dangerous trap in product development where you are chasing some asymptote such that you can work hard, harder and hardest and you just converge on something that is 97% correct which in the end is just useless.
This is what makes me extremely anxious about investing time in AI. I've seen things that make me want to keep going, but I also see the dragons in the corners.
Would 97% correct be good enough? I am not actually sure. Even with direct understanding of specifics for our business and use cases, I can't say for certain.
Humans don't get it right 100% of the time either.
I think the nuance is things like "Use AI (LLM) for summarization & classification, not direct English->SQL conversions". If you scope the system correctly, you can maybe push the failure modes into a "meh, not a big deal" bucket.
Recommender systems, full text search and such have always been “subjective” in that everyone knows there is not really a right answer. There is a large toolbox of methods for deciding if one of these is better than another, if it is “good enough” and when I called up 20 or so major vendors of full text search systems (e.g. OpenText) I found these were rarely used in practice because they made sales on the basis of having 387 connectors to suck in data from every product and not on the basis of the results being any good.
The trouble w/ summarization is it may all seem OK until it screws up bad enough to get passed around in screenshots, get in the newspaper, and cause somebody important in the organization to cross the chain of command to expedite doing ‘something” about it.