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Comment by eightman | Hacker News Reader

The use case for AI was, is and always will be spam.

You forgot the initial use case for the internet: porn.

For language models, spam creation/detection is kinda a GAN even when it isn't specifically designed to be: a faker and a discriminator each training on the other.

But when that GAN passes the human threshold, suddenly you can use the faker to create interesting things and not just use the discriminator to reject fakes.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

I can't believe this went all the way to AI...

Civilization is an artifact of thermodynamics, not an exception to it. All life, including civilized life, is about acquiring energy and creating order out of it, primarily by replicating. Money is just one face of that. Ads are about money, which is about energy, which fuels life. AI is being created by these same forces, so is likely to go the same way.

You might as well bemoan gravity.

We might question the structural facets of the economy or the networking technology that made spam I mean ads a better investment than federated/distributed micropayments and reader-centric products. I would have kept using Facebook if they let me see the things my friends took the trouble to type in, rather than flooding me with stuff to sell more ads, and seeing the memes my friends like, which I already have too many cool memes, don't need yours.

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