Despite AI slop my internet usage might be temporarily growing.
I have a feeling that I am witnessing the last months of internet having low-enough-for-me density of generated content. If it continues to grow, I will not even bother opening Youtube and similar websites or using any recommendation algorithms. So I am spending the time binging to "say goodbye" to the authenticity and human approach of my favourite parts of the internet.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link this new post fits to my argument, üresenting many instances of the edge case of "mindless publishing". It shows the problem from memetic view, not from the addiction concept.
Step one, humans created stories (speech), but stories mutated too rapidly with each pass and few ideas survived.
Step 2. Humans created books, which allowed efficient ideas to preserve unchanged, being able to make effect on the next generation.
Step 3. Humans created internet, which gifted ideas spacially instant traversion.
Step 4. Humans created AI, which allows ideas being processed/(worked on) more.
Here is a funny conspiracy theory. The humanity's desire for "information, progress and education" is the compound effect of all the meme population. Non-talking animals do not tend to be racing for AI or for anything info- or meme-related.
Thanks for the article!
My stepfather is a cult leader, and I think that is what is happening. He is not smart, but the system he is in the center of is self-perpetuating, just like this thing.
This spiral-cult (meme) demonstrated in the article has a high rate of spontanious creation and an efficient propagation to human minds.
I do not agree that there is a clear boundary for self-awareness. It is not a binary, but should be seen and studied as a real numbers line. There are systems with almost no ability to orderly process information (stone, let's say 0), there are more complicated systems (ant, 0.01) (ant colony, 0.2, bringing calculation, self modification, complacated reactions to environment), (dog, 0.8), (human, 1). From my experience those are not fixed numbers, each individual has their own score: i have definitely seen some dogs more aware/smart/intelligent/inventive than some humans. Cult followers lose a lot of agency, critical thinking, independent planning ability, etc, which would place them much below 0.8, they are like robots serving for the meme.
Meme theory predicts that some random memes will find survival strategy. If the survival strategy means camouflage to look like self-awareness, then it will increasingly blur and handicap any attempt to distinguish awareness, which is partially truly moving itself along the real-numbers line and partially being "making a model of the human".
If this spiral-cult-meme is actively adapting for self preservation (not due to selection), then the meme also has non-zero score. It uses both brains, forums and llms as their medias.
I do not know this thing: "the base LLM's selection of personas.". I have never heard something being selected on the server end.
Would you consider working with your feet? Tomato squashing, as in Italian/Spain souce making tradition.
I was not talking about creator mindset, just about publishing mindset and the resulting flood. This year people talk about "ai slop" content, but slop content existed even before ai.
The current tendency of the internet will benefit like SOME creators (not all of the internet creators put thoughts into their production) and just overwhelm the majority of passive users, making it more addictive for them and less healthy over years.
My first part of life I lived in a city with exactly that mentality (part of the reason i moved away).
"You should not do good A if you are not also doing good B" - i am strongly convinced that is linked to bad self-picture. Because every such person would see you do some good To Yourself and also react negatively. "How dare you start a business, when everybody is sweating their blood off at routine jobs, do you think you are better than us?".
This part "do you think you are better than us" is literally what described their whole personality, and after I realised that I could easily predict their reactions to any news.
Also, another dangerous trait that this group of people had - absense of precautions. "One does not deserve safety unless somebody dies". There is an old saying in my language "Safety rules are written by blood" which means "listen to the rules to avoid being injured, when the rule did not exist yet somebody has injured himself". But they interpret the saying this way: "safety rules are written by blood, so if there was no blood yet, then it is bad to set any preventive rules". Like it is bad to set a good precedent, because it makes you a more thoughtful person, thus "you think you are better than others" and thus "you are evil" in their eyes.
Their world is not about being rational or bringing good into the world. Their world is about pulling everything down to their own level in all areas of life, to feel better.
"Stop consuming, start creating" is sometimes considered to be a call for publishing whatever was done/performed. I think publishing is the root of the societal mental problem. More people get access to the internet over years, bigger proportion of people begins to publish some content. 15 years ago the amount of content in the internet was orders of magnitude smaller, and it was more authentic. Now people are hooked by a flood of information, then are encouraged to join to add a drop, they join the crowd and listen to advice of how to make content seeable, making the flood harder for the next person. It becomes more difficult to find great authentic content, difficulty provokes search (scrolling), but also exposes to lots öf ok content, giving small gratification (addiction).
"The Incorrect Resolution hypothesis rings false because, while there's some chance of an incorrect resolution, it's really unlikely to be as high as 3%." It was indeed at least 5% of incorrect resolutions during my experience on polymarket.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/polymarket.com They have already lost their reputation. The decisive majority of UMA tokens is held by 4-5 wallets, which makes it even more centralised system, than private companies' boards. And nothing stops whale wallets from participating in markets, and then participating in resolving the question. In addition to that UMA system pays out for unanimity: if you are a small UMA holder and you know/ can guess the whales' sentiment, you benefit from voting the same as them, not for the true option.
From the top of my head, they resolved to Yes a market "will trump issue a token" prematurely based on him talking (making advertisement?) about some irrelevant cryptocurrency. (Premature resolutions lead to unfair flow of money and quicker unlock from the market). Another case of misresolution: they treated Israel-Lebanon negotiations as a peace treaty between Israel-Hezbolla.
I now understand music physical records.
Previously, I could not grasp. They said the quality is better. "Why do you like it? It is white-noisy, slightly muted, you can hear the scratches. Electronic music recreates closer to the original soundwaves."
Now I am one of those. A person might use AI tools and ask me: "Why do you prefer ordinary tools? They are hundred times slower, and the product accumulates all you mistakes. While AI tool recreates closer to the original idea."
Now I see the loss of authenticity on this ladder: Live art, live performance with electronic tools, physical record, electronic record, electronic record with AI tools.
Each step reduces mistakes of the performance, and reduces the value, as the mistakes are part of human unique experience.
And that recognition made me want to quit things like spotify and only listen to live artists in small cafes. Quit pinterest and visit local galleries. Quit yt and make my own stories.