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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now






  • I thought Apple’s WWDC keynote showed some good uses for it, but you’re right, it kind of is just incremental, and may or may not be worth the privacy/compute cost. I personally am mostly excited that Siri will be able to contextualize my calendars, notes, messages, etc. There are lots of bits of information I’ve lost over the years, that isn’t actually lost, but just buried, and current search just isn’t up to the task of finding it. Or searching through notes: instead of having to remember when I took a note and where I asked it, I can just ask Siri a question and it’ll basically search through my notes and find the answer.

    I also think it’s going to completely change academic research. Instead of going to Jstor and using a traditional search bar, you could just tell the AI assistant what you’re thinking about, what your theories are, etc, and it will search the catalog and find relevant sources for you. It removes a layer of friction, which I think will make a lot of people more efficient/effective.

    The main argument I see against it is “well that is all well and good, but none of that will matter when the internet is full of AI-generated crap.” I mean yeah, that’s true, but the internet is already full of non-AI-generated crap. Sifting through the shitty ads and “sponsored posts” has already made the internet nearly unusable IMO. That’s a bigger problem that we need to deal with, that’s separate from AI.


  • I think healthy skepticism is always a good thing. A lot of people seem to be looking at this tech as a panacea, which it absolutely isn’t. It’s still really important that we have the ability to identify when it may be hallucinating, just like we really need the ability to think critically about literally anything on the internet.




  • I think most people underestimate how big of a deal it’s going to be when this tech is pervasive in things like search engines or digital assistants. There are many times when I can’t figure out the right combination of words to put into a search engine to find the results. ChatGPT is already my go to when I want to figure out a movie or song from some random combination of foggy memories. Imagine after 10 more years of cpu/gpu innovations, and chat applications that have actually been designed for information retrieval, how much that is going to transform how we interact with data and information.

    Full disclosure, I didn’t watch the video. I just can’t imagine that that headline isn’t going to look silly in 30 years.