What could be more representative of this community than the hubris of believing a simple algorithmic change could fix something that's actually deceptively complex and better off living with?
People are so desperate for this to be true. Maybe it comes from a subconscious recognition that their own self-imposed deskilling will inevitably catch up with them.
Twitter and Reddit were already on their way to being terrible, but the automation of the worst of what those places were becoming is now available to everyone.
A growing problem is that there are whole generations of younger people who have no lived experience with or imagination about certain benefits we used to have, so the world you're describing is all they effectively know. It's so easy to fall for the midwit take that the past could not have actually been better in some ways, that it's only nostalgia when people claim it was.
It's been weird finding out how many people don't see media past its finished surface text. People for whom the subtext of its creation is so unimportant that the concepts of coming up with a prompt and creating a work are mutually fungible.
I have usually permitted that when it comes up and sometimes declined it. But when I permitted it I didn't have to worry about them entering everything I say into a permanent history from which a random sentence could get used, datamined, hallucinated into something that could be used against me years later.
Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.
Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.
I wonder if that's because there's a downward price pressure on physical inventory because it needs to get liquidated to free up physical space for new inventory.
We talk too much about hallucination and too little about the more mundane elephant in the room that AI, whatever its effectiveness, will simply be used more for scam and deception than positive uses.
One of the scariest things to me about getting older is that there's entire generations younger than me who don't realize a growing number of things we used to have and lost. Because, like you said, they grew up without it.
And they don't believe things even can be better because they regularly hear one of the dumbest ideas of our time: that the past wasn't actually better, we only remember it that way.
Dropbox did this to me with my actual data. I misunderstood it as a service where I could upload some data, uninstall the client, and expect the data to be there as long as the company still exists.
Advertisement or idea. In whatever ways they can make it subtle enough.
It's not like brand names and arbitrary ideas won't have ways they regularly show up in LLM output organically. So how would we ever know when they become ad placements?
It's very true that successive generations of technology innovate qualitatively worse hostilities that people accept in exchange for the surface convenience or novelty.
Regular TV has non-targeted commercials you can skip. Streaming has surveillance and unskippable ads.
AI can take it a step further and make promoted editorial content a seamless part of a conversation, without disclosure. It's the holy grail of advertising. To think they'll leave that money on the table is ridiculous.
Tools can also dull human capability. Calculators made it less important to be able to do math in your head. But how many people are pulling out their calculator at the grocery store or in other everyday situations where it would be helpful but not crucial? Now imagine this effect but for general thinking and creating.