We are witnessing the last years of the human internet. In the near future AI generated news reports, articles, blogs, comments and eventually even pictures and videos will become increasingly indistinguishable from that produced by real humans operating in the real world.
Powerful groups will mass populate the internet with fake content to skew public perception. Imagine the power of being able to generate a million realistic comments from realistic profiles across social media websites with the click of a button. Today they already control the online narrative via selective moderation and algorithms which only show you certain posts, but being able to mass generate human-level content will be a game changer. Its already happening on websites like Reddit where bots are rampant and blend in with other users, occasionally referencing brands or pushing a narrative.
Today, you can be reasonably sure I'm not a bot, but in 2040 you won't be so sure. This is why its important that a service like the Wayback Machine or, even better, the Ethereum blockchain exists, to timestamp webpages and media for future observers. Content provably produced before 2022 will be considered more likely to be human produced.
"This is why its important a service like the Wayback Machine or, even better, Ethereum blockchain exists, to timestamp webpages and media for future observers."
Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) uses much data from Common Crawl. GPT-3 was trained with Common Crawl and Wikipedia dumps. Arguably, under this prediction, the "live" web after 2022 will be an automated regurgitation of the web before 2022, e.g., going back to only 2009, the year of Common Crawl's first public archive. (Strangely, there is no archive for 2011.)
This again assumes that quantity is more valuable than quality. one tweet from a major influencer, like say elon musk, will have more of an impact than one million ai generated comments.
Not to mention that the returns on generated content are diminishing. Ten fake accounts spreading a message will be more effective than one. But at some point, the value from adding a new one goes down.
It doesn't matter if ai makes it cheap to mass produce good enough versions of anything, at least not over the long term. The dynamics of creative content consumption aren't driven by quantity alone
I'd argue that the incredibly fast rise in quality over the last year alone is what most people are interested in. DALLE and GPT-2 were always able to make heaps of trash. The trajectory of the quality of DALLE-N and GPT-N is what interests me in terms of the AI internet...
>one tweet from a major influencer, like say elon musk, will have more of an impact than one million ai generated comments.
So all I need to achieve Musk's level of influence is to generate a million comments with AI? At 12 comments per second, the AI would do it in a day. That's a scary power, if you ask me.
Difference is that Musk issues one message to all his followers
A million comments generated by a few hundred thousand GPT accounts say a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and you exercise very little control over that. The dumb bots that just like and retweet the messages from your main account(s) until people start organically taking notice of them are more useful for influence-generating.
I don't see any danger or any difference between the situation now and the situation in a world with eloquently writing AIs.
There are millions of shouted out opinions. Twitter ist build for that. This is not interesting at all. I can look for opinions I agree with to get a kick from the feeling of confirmation. To get that kick it is not important how the opinion snippet was produced.
On the other hand there are interesting stories with thoughts new to me. I am thankful to read something like that. When some day AI will be able to enrich the intellectual world with fresh ideas, why should I be afraid? I'll be excited.
But also in this case the same is true: why should it matter to me who wrote the thought-provoking essay?
Will it be like: ...oh, that's an interesting idea... But no, an AI wrote this, OMG, it's tainted and worthless!
I don't think so.
It won't be just a text and image generation model, the train ride doesn't stop. They are also learning how to act.
Soon the GPT's will learn video, which includes the video itself, the audio and the subtitles. There are billions of hours of video content on YouTube, this new modality will make it easier to learn the procedural knowledge (how we do things) that is not apparent in text or static images. The new GPT will be able to play games, use computers, control robots and do all sorts of reinforcement learning tasks. There are already a few papers, for ex: learning MineCraft from YT videos (https://openai.com/blog/vpt/).
Of course they will also generate long format videos. The problem with video is cost, it's very expensive.
> increasingly indistinguishable from that produced by real humans operating in the real world.
Hell, I imagine it is going to surpass even the most creative, talented humans "pretty soon"(5-10 years), to the point where people will actively search out AI generated content.
My concern is whether this will trigger the end of human creativity, or if humans will use it to inspire themselves and still go on to continue creating art.
Over the last 20 or so years musicians have gotten used to using a lot of prerecorded riffs and samples. It's now possible for someone that can't play any instruments to create very goods songs. Unfortunately, the use of these same samples has given us a situation where lots of modern music sounds the same[1].
I suspect that's where we are headed with all the coming automation. A lot of human creativity is going to slow. I don't think that's a good thing. But unfortunately, we have no choice. It's coming at a furious pace.
Musk has been saying for years that AI will damage/destroy society. We've all thought that for that to happen AI would some how need to be sentient. But given what we've seen lately, all that's needed is a tool like GPT-3 to be used as a weapon against each other. Good luck to us.
Good point, the tech will destroy us trope has been around for a long time and has been better articulated by others. I picked him because he came to mind. But you're right. He's just repeating what others have said.
> Over the last 20 or so years musicians have gotten used to using a lot of prerecorded riffs and samples. It's now possible for someone that can't play any instruments to create very goods songs. Unfortunately, the use of these same samples has given us a situation where lots of modern music sounds the same[1].
Coming form various EDM genres and spending time online and in the clubs with many of the producers growing up and now also studying AI and ML I think this is the closest analogue: but it fails short to encompass the entire scope of the situation; I think for now it's apt, but in time it will be able to do much more and that and that is what I think is what we are in for a hard landing.
I don't think it will be 'the bots took our jobs' but more like moating will be ever more precocious and wide-spread as a means to maintain relevance, 'if you can't moat then you can't float' will be a common maxim which was always implied in startup land if you wanted to go the VC route, but is difficult for 99% of projects for who that is impossible. This has dire implications that I'm not entirely sure we can really be aware of until it happens.
To follow the earlier mentioned music analogy: why learn to learn 10 different instruments to compose when you can jump on youtube and learn how to sample and add the effects you're looking for and then be on your way?
I think this will also apply to various things in the Arts, and possibly in the Sciences (like co-pilot is for programming) which in theory should lower the barrier of entry to produce: people keep going on about Elon, but Grimes has been talking about this for sometime, too.
She attributes her entire music career to being able to get on Ableton and sampling and harmonizing ad-hoc to create her compositions, I don't follow her but I've met people who have and her live stuff is more performance art than it is a typical musical concert and she has managed a way to stay relevant even in a sea of similar sounding artists--I've since seen similar acts, many of whom I think are far more talented than Grimes (Sierra or Meg Myers) who simply don't get the recognition they deserve because of other factors like PR.
But in the end: you can auto-tune a IG influencer all you want, but if they aren't able to make a connection using the medium it doesn't matter how polished the product is if it just plain sucks. They could probably be used for commercial teen idol pop stuff to sell stuff, but that isn't a very high barrier of entry, either. The 90s boy band craze proved just how low that bar is, while still being a commercial success.
My point is, that while the barrier of entry may be lowered if the art itself doesn't have appeal it won't suddenly be comparable to Led Zeppelin or Mozart.
I remember in the early days of Bitcoin, like 2010, their were a ton of programmers (mainly who wrote in C+) who wanted to contribute but had no direction or idea of where to begin, they had all the skills to be able to jump on a project but because they lacked any vision they didn't know where to begin.
I think the advent GPT and Dall-E is comparable, though it must be noted that very few have actual access to it right now: the access seems to have some non-chronological factor, and apparently you have to provide social media and linkedin accounts, which makes it all the more creepy.
Personally speaking, I really wish Altman had just focused on how to best deploy this instead coming up with World Coin, he could have raised so much more awareness and funding maybe even launched his own token within this ecosystem and maybe even created a real usecase for 'web3,' instead he will always be seen as the guy trying to scam you for your biometrics. And as cool as this is, I doubt it has that potential anymore because of that.
I think it will be a huge boon for human creativity. Imagine if anyone could create a high budget movie with less effort than it takes to write a novel today. Might take a while, but that's the direction we're trending in.
About two decades back, I knew a B-list Hollywood director who wanted that. He'd found out that Reboot, the first all CG cartoon show, took a staff of about 30 people to produce an episode each week. . He wanted to be able to make a movie with about $10 million and maybe 50 people. Because then he could direct. Making a $100 million movie with a thousand people on staff is project management. He was spending far more time in meetings than on-set.
That didn't happen, though. Productivity did not go up for Hollywood. Movies became all big scenes, all the time. Production costs went through the roof. TV shows had to upgrade to production values previously seen only in film. Movies are now made twice, once as "pre-visualization" to get approval to spend the money for the full version. Look at the end credits scroll by on a effects movie. There's no longer a cast of thousands, there's a staff of thousands. Since nobody can afford a failure, everything is a predictable sequel.
Yet, at the same time, there are people on YouTube making broadcast-TV-quality content with nothing more than a camera and a laptop.
Modern movies are expensive to make because they can afford to be expensive to make, not because they need to be. As technology improves, the gap between what independent creators can do and what high budget studios can do will continue to narrow until, for certain types of content, there'll be no discernible difference.
AI is very bad when it comes to making a linear narrative due to it's memory limitations. I doubt we will be seeing long form content that is made 100% by AI even in 10 years.
I can see a sub genre being born where authors let AI auto complete every few sentences though.
I am willing to bet up to $1 USD that AI will be able to generate a 5,000 word essay on an arbitrary but common topic which is indistinguishable from human writing to a panel of 5 normal humans, all by Jun 28, 2032.
What are ‘normal humans’? If I take 5 humans at random from a non university town, I am willing to bet up to $1 they cannot distinguish this now when generated with gpt3.
I struggled with that phrasing because it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to describe a class of people capable of judging the problem but who wouldn't be biased in some manner. I'd readily submit that no human could determine the difference, but I'm not ready to pay the testing costs...
I wonder if we'll get an AI D&D dungeon master anytime soon. It could be maybe given an over-arching plot, and then just let it riff off the player actions (so, hopefully the players act in a way that imposes the linear narrative and common sense, by staying in character).
Maybe even filter these, edit a bit, and sell 'em as stories.
Huh, I tried it out. It seems like a neat proof of concept/prototype, but not much of a game of course. I'm sure someone is working on pairing it with more of a proper game system.
> eventually even pictures and videos will become increasingly indistinguishable from that produced by real humans operating in the real world.
I was just thinking the other day that Rick and Morty's interdimensional cable could become a real thing. Not through having infinite dimensions, but because it's not that far fetched now to think "A hard hitting cop show in a universe where man evolved from corn" could be a prompt you give to AIlexa or NetflAIx and it'll just spit out a whole show for you.
I'm not envisaging this as a utopia of good screenwriting...
One could argue that we're already there. If machines are already dictating what gets seen by the majority of internet users is the author's humanity (or lack thereof) really relevant anymore?
The future will probably be every online account being tied to some government issues ID. It could even be done in a reasonably privacy protecting way so you don’t know _who_ the person is but you do know it is associated with a real person and they only have one account.
This is sort of how phone numbers are getting used now.
However, there is no way in hell the government would implement a privacy preserving manner, it is way too useful to have it linked to your identity. I’m such a future every opinion you have a comment made will be known by the government (+/- any third worries they wish to share it with). An authoritarian governments dream and a dystopian future for me.
On the other side there won't be any reason to cancel any show ever, we'll have infinite runs of our favorite show. And at some point you'll be able to set the protagonist and the mod to get personalized entertainment on demand.
Future hasn't to be all bad, we have to make sure tho that it isn't built around brainwashing, advertisement or gambling
> Powerful groups will mass populate the internet with fake content to skew public perception.
You're naive if you think this hasn't been happening for at least 8-10 years now. All of Reddit and Twitter are heavily targeted by nation states to foment various anti-America and disunity agendas. The power of the United States is its unity, so they will take any and every opportunity to strike at that. The most obvious being Russia attempting to influence election outcomes.
There are certainly organic humans caught in the mix, but all that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, "America is so divisive", Marxist BS you hear repeated constantly across Reddit and Twitter is broadly manufactured far more than it is truly organic.
What's unfortunate is you scatter enough seed and eventually it will find roots somewhere. The earlier the better when it comes to influencing middle school kids, etc. Capture the undiscerning early who don't consider their sources or motives behind information and they just gargle it as truth and start regurgitating it because it feels right or confirmation bias takes over.
If people truly knew how many of their aggressive political "views" were primarily driven by manufactured echo chambers it'd be embarrassing.
> There are certainly organic humans caught in the mix, but all that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, "America is so divisive", Marxist BS you hear repeated constantly across Reddit and Twitter is broadly manufactured far more than it is truly organic.
I think the situation with content is similar to protests. There are all sorts of people at a major protest. There's a good chunk of "organic protesters", who are there for the original cause. Then some are there because they like the feeling of something happening, the buzz of a crowd, the hype. You could call this the bandwagon effect for example. There will be people there, leader types, who see it as an opportunity to further a goal of theirs. There will be people who want to fuck things up, and feel that this will be a good opportunity for them to let go. And there might be people, who are planted there to start an actual riot - for example, in order to dismiss the original group as being overly violent and thus their goal reprehensible.
It's hard to guess what percentage of that whole crowd is "organic" to the original cause. But it can be seen that a good lot of them aren't.
This is evidence that state actors influence the internet, which I think is uncontroversial. However, the specific statement here was that these left-wing communities were the result of this influence, which I find highly doubtful and in itself perhaps an attempt to de-legitimize their cause.
Well then, good thing this is a fucking discussion board and not a dissertation defense where I'm on the stand and you're the committee. You can toss your hat in the ring and explain your views as well, still waiting for you to add something to the discussion Socrates. Let's uncover another fact which is that you've said nothing substantive so far and the absence of my desire to explain things to a zero-effort internet poster doesn't therefore rationally conclude the evidence doesn't exist.
I'm not really sure that I'd judge Authentic Human Qanon Believer (2020) to be of greater value than GPT-5 Written News Summary (2026) though.
When it comes to people populating the internet with fake content to skew public perception and people replicating fake content because their perception has been skewed, I'm not sure how the bots are supposed to make the actual content worse. Granted, it might be more interesting to grapple with the psychology of why an account promotes puppies, cookies, Jesus and the belief that Donald Trump is going to rip off the Joe Biden mask and start the mass executions soon when you're pretty sure there's an actual human that likes puppies, cookies, Jesus and mass murder of political rivals and not just a machine-derived replication of popular sentiment, but it's not like human-generated social media is a paragon of quality content. Frankly, if trust in social media is about to die, long live our AI overlords.
Powerful groups will mass populate the internet with fake content to skew public perception. Imagine the power of being able to generate a million realistic comments from realistic profiles across social media websites with the click of a button. Today they already control the online narrative via selective moderation and algorithms which only show you certain posts, but being able to mass generate human-level content will be a game changer. Its already happening on websites like Reddit where bots are rampant and blend in with other users, occasionally referencing brands or pushing a narrative.
Today, you can be reasonably sure I'm not a bot, but in 2040 you won't be so sure. This is why its important that a service like the Wayback Machine or, even better, the Ethereum blockchain exists, to timestamp webpages and media for future observers. Content provably produced before 2022 will be considered more likely to be human produced.