The thing that concerns me about this perspective is that it completely ignores human connection and our need to connect as beings.
Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.
But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.
> Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?
No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.
I'm personally not as interested in understanding the synthesis involved in the AI. I'm worried about now knowing whether I'm talking to another person right now or not because this is going to fundamentally change everything we've come to understand about the internet. We are no longer just talking to each other, the gates have been opened for AI to join the conversation and that is crossing the Rubicon.
It absolutely matters. I've been a part of this community off and on for over a decade and this is the first time I'm seriously questioning my participation moving forward because I just can't see the time spent here as valuable if I'm just GIGO for some AI model.
Serious question: how are we going to know if we're talking to people on forums like these in a year or two and not some AI model piped in via a script or web service? And what is that going to mean for online discourse moving forward? I feel like the era of knowing that you're talking to an actual human on the internet is rapidly ending.
I've toyed around with the idea of creating a service that logs into HN and replies to posts just to see how easy it would be to get people to respond and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought about doing that.
> The diffusion art models make it very clear that these technologies go from toys to replacing people’s jobs very very quickly.
Do you have any evidence that art jobs are being replaced now? I was talking with a designer friend of mine recently and he's not heard of Stable Diffusion, etc. replacing jobs yet. This is something that people keep bringing up but I haven't yet seen any evidence to back it up.
> I’m not an Apple dev, but their app store is around 60% of global market share for apps and I don’t fault people for choosing food on the table over platform ideology.
I don't either, but if that's the decision, then where do people come off thinking that they're owed something for participating in a market that they never had a controlling share of in the first place? That's what I don't get. I don't judge people for wanting to put food on the table, but don't act like you're then owed goodwill or whatever for making the rich people richer if that's the way you truly see it. You're supporting capitalism upfront and expecting some sort of vague socialism on the back end. How many times are people gonna get disappointed before they realize that big corporations don't care about them and never have?
Perhaps you haven't, but what are your customers doing? Even if you're not directly building ad products, you're likely not far removed from the businesses that are.
I'm not trying to make an excuses here, I'm simply pointing out that the entire foundation of the internet economy is built on the premise that what you do on the network can and should be tracked for profit, and to complain about one of the wealthiest companies on the planet finally in the game demonstrates naivety. Business does not care about morals, business cares about making money. That is how businesses are incentivized to behave. There's no legitimate counteracting force (sorry but individuals angrily venting frustration on an internet forum is not a threat to their business) to motivate Apple to behave any differently. They know that they just need to keep providing a better service than the alternatives and as long as the ads are slightly less crappy than Android, people aren't going to leave Apple.
Argue right or wrong all you want, but this is the reality.
I have very mixed feelings about all of this. Obviously, it's disappointing news to see. But at the same time, it's hard to be surprised.
Let's be honest here, the internet runs on ads, full stop. I have no concrete data but if you were take an aggregate of tech workers whose salary is made either fully or partially on ad revenue either directly by their employer OR customers, it would have to be a significant percentage, right? I'm not gonna guess but it's gotta be significant. Hell, FAANG alone is tremendously ad-driven, and those are largely considered the most prestigious jobs in the industry.
If you've spent 10 years working in tech, what are the chances that you've never taken a dollar that was earned through an online ad? Maybe I'm overly cynical here and I'm no Apple cheerleader here, but we see this same pattern emerge over and over and over again. Companies have to grow or else. That's always been the game, how did we honestly think it would go any other way than this?
> We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks,
This sounds great, but:
A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?
B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)
and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?
The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.
> It’s insulting to the dev community who drove the success of the app store and arguably iOS in general. No amount of “we love our devs” PR can reconcile this.
Apple built this market to control it completely, you could see it coming from miles away. It seems like the big move nowadays is build your market (i.e. "platform") and you get to be judge, jury and executioner. How did you see something like this playing out? I just don't understand how people still aren't cynical enough to see this kind of thing coming.
Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.
But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.