The amount of trust and safety work that depends on google translate and the humble regex, beggars the imagination.

It’s agents all the way down - until you have liability. At some point, it’s going to be someone’s neck on the line, and saying “the agents know” isn’t going to satisfy customers (or in a worst case, courts).

> It's not like humans aren't already deflecting liability

They attempt to, sure, but it rarely works. Now, with AI, maybe it might, but that's sort of a worse outcome for the specific human involved - "If you're just an intermediary between the AI and me, WTF do I need you for?"

> or moving it to insurance agencies.

They aren't "moving" it to insurance companies, they are amortising the cost of the liability at a small extra cost.

That's a big difference.

At some point, the risk/return calculus becomes too expensive for insurance companies.

Usually thats after the premiums become too high for most people to pay.

You should see the account recovery workflows.

Oh come now - globalizations was great at the regional level.

It was not that great for sub groups within developed nations.

The original thesis believed that people would be retrained into other equally well paying roles.

Turns out people can’t retrain into new domains, and led to under employment.

Why not, because they're too old to learn, or because the support infrastructure is not there? I believe most people are capable of continued learning, but they might need help (financial etc.) to make the transition.

Even with support infrastructure/money it didn’t work.

You aren’t going to transition into the same level of experience in a new industry.

If it’s jumping into tech/code, for example; even with the best resources, it’s a slog to get back to similar levels of renumeration.

Add in the fact that you have obligations, bills and dependents?

Theres never going to be enough money to keep people afloat while they change domains mid-life.

Check out the programs to retrain miners. Aside from fraud, there were also unrealistic promises.

However, leaving aside leakages - there weren’t that many entry level jobs for code in those regions in the first place.

The cultural differences (trades, physical labour vs code, abstract problems, sedentary work) were sizable barriers to success.

Eh, AITA works very well for the more common and obvious situations.

I wonder how MUCH better Claude really is when compared to AITA. Also people are mixing up relationship advice with AITA.

AITA is one of the few subreddits which is studied often.

I wouldn’t say it’s great, but more that it makes clear the bell curve of collective accuracy online.

It’s one of the better examples of online communities that work.

Dismissing research because one part of the prompt set comes from AITA is a form of prejudice born out of unawareness.

Anecdote:

I used to use LLMs for alternate perspectives on personal situations, and for insights on my emotions and thoughts.

I had no qualms, since I could easily disregard the obviously sycophantic output, and focus on the useful perspective.

This stopped one day, till I got a really eerie piece of output. I realized I couldn’t tell if the output was actually self affirming, or simply what I wanted to hear.

That moment, seeing something innocuous but somehow still beyond my ability to gauge as helpful or harmful is going to stick me with for a while.

The difference is that SOME humans do this. As you mentioned, people have lost relationships over telling others what they didn’t want to hear.

Conflating this with how LLM chatbots behave is an incorrect equivalence, or a badly framed one.

The same methods that are used for gambling are a good start.

I know lootboxes in video games are regulated in some countries. Not sure if they are banned in some places, but I do know that they have to show the odds in some places, and in others they have to be deterministic.

The crux of the issue is personalization and behavior psychology. If you move to a boring feed design, you end up addressing most of the current issue.

Another option is to allow for interoperability between social media platforms, which is a competition respecting way of giving people the ability to move to platforms that “work” for them better.

I’d hazard that Civil liberties are not really at risk here, only the bottom line of social media platforms. However, theres enough money to protect the bottom line even if it costs civil liberties.

The traditional solution worked for traditional problems.

I suspect most people don’t remember WHY free speech itself is valued. It’s often treated in a talismanic sense.

At least in America, a good part of the value of Free speech comes because it is a fundamental building block to having a vibrant market place of ideas.

Since no one has a monopoly on truth, our best model is to have a fair competitive market place that allows good ideas to thrive, even if they are uncomfortable.

The traditional risk to the free exchange of ideas was government control; the suppression of trade.

However, in the era we live in, we have evolved to find ways to shape the market through market capture. Through overwhelming the average user, instead of controlling speech. Bannon called this “flooding the zone”.

The traditional solution ensured a working and vibrant marketplace for its era. I don’t know what tools we will develop for the modern era.

Do note, we depend on content moderation to keep forums like HN running. The fundamental power of content moderation is censorship. Without the exercise of these censorial powers, we would not be able to have this discussion.