AI automation to bury civilization in noise
AI automation to bury civilization in noise
Notes From the Desk: No. 17 - 2023.12.12
Notes From the Desk are periodic posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary that might otherwise be a tweet or note.
The AI automation wars
A post on X recently goes over details of how AI was utilized to steal site traffic from a competitor. Using AI automation, a site was created with the same content, but simply all reimagined using AI.
1800 articles were written and posted in only a few hours. A rather small investment to then obtain 490K in monthly traffic.
Beginning of this year I predicted what I called AI clone wars …
Anything that you create can be replicated without investment cost while also being unique in design as well as delivering the same function or experience.
Intellectual property laws essentially have no function any longer in this new environment and there isn’t an obvious remedy.
AI is adding no value to society when utilized for such purposes. No new insights are being created. It is simply an amalgam of what already was combined with likely hallucinations creating a worse end product. It is a burden of generated noise that becomes increasingly difficult to sort through.
Since AI has also failed at being a reliable filter of AI generated content, it becomes difficult to automatically rid ourselves of this valueless monstrosity of auto-generated noise.
Also, it is not only unknown fake websites that are attempting to leverage this capability as Sports Illustrated and CNET have also stepped into the controversy recently.
Why should we care if AI eventually creates content just as well as any human? There are 3 issues that we will likely struggle with in such case:
The question of meaning. If AI is writing all the content, what purpose do humans find after being replaced?
Bias and social engineering. All of these models are being constructed with the social and ethical views of large tech institutions. They will continue to shape the world as they have with social media.
Model collapse. It may be that AI generated content does appear convincing enough to be human, but subtle differences we don’t observe compound after it begins consuming its own generated content until eventually it begins to create nonsense.
Government surveillance Christmas present
December is often the government’s favorite time to pass bills that might have significant public opposition while everyone is distracted by the holidays.
This year we have the House Intelligence Committee’s Section 702 “reform” bill which would expand the surveillance state greater than anything since the Patriot Act.
A summarization of the identified problems. In short, it would allow warrantless spying on you through any company and communication.
A few thread discussions in more detail:
https://twitter.com/LizaGoitein/status/1734249938333167889
https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1734320114407768320
No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …
