How is it a crisis? I’m expecting/hoping LLMs will just get increasingly worse as they are fed on their own slop, until they collapse into unusability and the world finally returns to sanity.
The crisis is that if the internet is bad enough that they can’t train LLMs on it, it’s also useless for us human. And if the LLMs leave because there is no information and we come back, eventually we will generate enough content that it will be worth it again
This is said as though it isn’t an immensely expensive endeavour to run these things and the only reason they’re this prevalent right now is the overspeculation and starved growth of US tech companies.
I don’t get the point you are trying to make. I never said any of that. my point is that the information crisis caused by LLMs that they are referring to, affects everyone. Nothing else. Not hidden meanings
Your original comment sparks fear that failure of LLMs as a mass producer of knowledge would only be temporary until humans repopulated the internet with quality content.
Why would they come back after they fail if it costs billions of dollars to run them in the first place? You literally just agreed with someone else making the same point. Jfc.
I don’t have time to write (and filter out) my opinions right now, but basically I think LLMs will find their place and will settle into a duopoly or tripoloy
I didn’t ask for them.
You really did. But whatever.
Eventually is doing some heavy lifting. The costs of these data centers and the power plants to run them has to come from somewhere.
I don’t know if or when the chickens come home to roost, but it could go badly for the US and China to find out their spent trillions to make a million versions of AI shrimp Jesus.
I want to believe that the silver lining is that HOPEFULLY MAYBE (Now these words are doing the heavy lifting. For sure)this will mean that when the ai craze goes away they will have spent so much on infrastructure that we will great cheap energy, cloud computing, and GPUs.
That’s possible, very optimistic, but hey, good luck to us.
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The crisis is that companies will have to pay fair prices for human labor again, which will lead to less profits for the precious shareholders
Not just precious shareholders, it’s a massive bubble that will impact the economy and peoples retirement when it bursts. They keep dumping more money into AI even though there are no returns.
Everything converges to generic sameness
When I hit this sentence in the OP, I realized AI is going to remain very popular with the average joe for a long time.
People who are tech literate, actively curious about the natural world, and do crazy shit like care about humanity (so most people reading this, most likely) will still reject it for the junk it is. But it seems the vast majority of people around me are not like Lemmy users. I mean, they are called normies for a reason, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.
Generic sameness seems to be what the rat race pushes people towards. Maybe being burned out and having the economy constantly innovating new ways to bleed you dry makes the pre-packaged commoditized comforts from the advertisements too easy to accept. I look around and I see people anger-driving their pickup trucks and luxury SUVs to their jobs that they hate so that they can afford the cars they drive to get there. Plus they need to be able to afford beer and snacks for the game after they fill up those gas tanks!
These people don’t care if the stories and tiktoks scrolling past their glazed-over eyes are AI generated. It only matters if those things can shake that stubborn drop of dopamine loose that just won’t fall from the faucet. Just get through the day so we can do it again tomorrow.
On top of this, the scrapers that feed the AIs are creating more and more traffic, and therefor load on sites that did not have them before.
Could you guys stop dumping your trash in the forest please? It obstructs my garbage trucks which I send to the forest to dump garbage in.
I can not prove it but i think that already since a long time that most articles are copy + pasted and some kind of summary. Which might have happend automatically. Like someonr might write a real article on anything and then hundreds of sites copied it, without adding anything
The Huffington Post Effect.
Unfortunately, there’s another side of this coin. The “original” content sources value freshness to grab attention and hyperbole to generate interest. The end result is Drudge Report / Brietbart / Alex Jones / Joe Rogan journalism that mills out innuendo, conspiracy theory, and quack medicine as Breaking News. And that becomes the “original journalism” all the other copypasta outlets reproduce ad nauseum.
Yeah I get the main theory you’re going with and it’s been rampant without AI bullshit. When sites became traffic driven to an extreme they started trying to grab whatever was the most rage enduring, verified or not. I forget the exact example but there was a guy that back traced a rage bait article and it was like 10 articles deep, and at the bottom it was a misquoted tweet that was complete misinformation.
The problem is that the resource they consume to feed the AI, (human generated content) has become a limited resource, completely mined.
they could pay people to write, IE, news agencies pay writers to write and AI site are one of their clients.
you should get DMs from anthropic offering 50$ for your weeks posts and comments…
Instead they want to pretend they have still room to grow for free. but they can’t
(That is just basic economic theory, I want those companies to fuck off already)
There’s no way an AI generated article costs less than a cent.
So humans writing articles cost more than the billions they’re pumping in to AI? I very much doubt it.
Well, technically, the AI companies aren’t making any profits so the actual cost is higher, and also the revenues from the AI articles are declining because people aren’t interracting with them.
Time to start working on the Blackwall
Except they know this and the vast majority don’t train ai with ai data.
Where do you guys get this stuff from?
I’m old enought to remember when people were freaking out the exact same way when the internet came out. History repeats itself I guess.
https://surrealevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Internet-6-1024x694.png
The march of progress stops for nobody, yall are gonna be like boomers who still can’t use a computer.
If AI replaces humans then why would they need to continue training them? You don’t believe in the AGI hype do you? You don’t think our system is about anything other than efficiently racing to the bottom, do you?
Besides, humans will always figure out a better way, a new way, a fresh take. And there’s your training data.
I don’t get why it says “training AI on AI content makes it dumb” when people literally use synthesized data to carefully tune models. Today. I’m sure they’ll improve training by the time the internet is fully replaced.
This all assumes that it won’t take a human-like AI to replace humans. Whatever replaces us will be pitiful, but it will be supported by our institutions, trillionaires, and enough personal data to create fun headlines like “Elon knows so much about you that if each datum was a grain of sand it would be bigger than Saturn!”
The good news is that AI will eventually eat itself. The bad news is that all we need to do to make that happen is not exist anymore.
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I’m still baffled about the expected outcome of replacing all content creation with AI for new events or ideas, like news articles.
If there are no humans to write the story first, where are the bots going to get the new information to plagiarize?
The expected outcome is internet collapse. The internet is a mass communication tool that allows bothersome peasants to organize and educate themselves if they are inclined to do so. Which means it must be destroyed.
The poor, disenfranchised, and uneducated are significantly easier to manipulate. So the goal of the 1% is to break society, eliminate the ability to educate, eliminate the ability to organize, and the use their near total control over mass media to assure everyone that they are better off under the thumb of the technocratic state.
Apart from being hit with what seemed like random ban hammers, that was one of the reasons I left Reddit.
It just seems so “the same”. Every comment chain is filled with the same predictable comments and they’re all predictably commenting on the same predictable content.
I hear lots of Lemmy newbies saying they stay on Reddit because of the user base in their niche communities. I hope those same people post or comment here a little bit in their niche instances before buggering off back to the black hole of bots.
I love that I can spot individual users again without tagging them.
I love the guy who uses that ye olde symbol instead of typing the letters “th”
This place is awesome because of the limited user base IMO. Very rarely have I been met with negativity here.
I joined Reddit in 2008. I saw it devolve year by year. When it got big enough, it attracted the attention of the capital. Then it quickly became a propaganda mouthpiece of the money. I had big subs on there, now I’m aggressively permabanned, every single account I’ve ever had, easily a hundred of them. If you don’t play along, you don’t belong, it’s become just another controlled media outlet. It will happen here too, as soon as it becomes big enough to become a problem, they will find a way. It’s extremely scary.
Who could have imagined the Illuminati were a bunch of pimplefaced billionaire nerds acting all out in the open.
It’s wild that most people don’t understand this is happening. And it’s being manifested in a Mafia type way.
I honestly have no hope for society. People really are ignorant and arrogant to the point that they are basically like farm animals.
Yep. That about sums it up. It’s a bit worse than that though, because they can also actively poison the AI and make it express more positive right wing sentiments too. For now that’s still a bit tricky, because the AI goes mecha-Hitler, but don’t worry, they will fix that glitch in the coming months.
It doesn’t even matter if it does a poor job. I see people scrolling endlessly, 24/7, they’re already zombified. The amount of people who can filter the bullshit or think critically about what they are fed online are in an extreme minority. It doesn’t matter for the ruling class if there’s some single digit percent of the population that don’t buy it, fooling most people most of the time is absolutely enough to rule absolutely.
Anyone else inhabiting a very dark mindspace lately? We should start a club.
That’s a good point. The internet collapse also helps this new age of " information capitalism" to spread even further: any information that you may seek will be behind a paywall or intermediate by an AI that you have to pay a subscription to access. In fact, that’s the best case scenario for all these AI companies: to kill free and reliable information.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
This is not a conspiracy to destroy the internet. This is a tragedy of the commons. It doesn’t take many bad agents to ruin it for everyone. AI slop is so cheap and has the potential to make profit, so it’s a no brainer if you don’t have a better way to make money.
The only reason the AI companies are crying is because now they need humans in the loop somehow. They’ll need to source data from only known and verified real-person sources (like reputable news sites, magazines, personal blogs, and podcasts), manually verify data is not slop, and/or pay people to generate data for them.
Capitalism will kill civilization. We can’t escape it. If we tear it down, we go down with it. If we don’t, it will collapse under its own weight, and soon, and it will crush us all under the flaming rubble.
I know I sound all doomsday-y. Sorry.
Once Ai becomes Super Aware AI^TM then we will have no need for original stories…We just need a trillion more dollars of funding, all your power, fresh water, and for you to rewrite all intellectual property laws. Trust me bro, we are sooo close.
I swear tech bro billionaires forgot they were the ones who wrote the checks to the marketing department that dream this stuff up and have just been getting high on their own supply. The amount of people in silicon valley that actually believe AI is going to evolve into some version of the 40k Omni Messiah is too damn high.
I think it’s the greatest sunk cost fallacy the world has yet seen.
“We’ve poured trillions of dollars into this, and convinced a bunch of people it’s going to fundamentally transform humanity, so it MUST be a good idea!”
None of them want to be the first to admit that it was a bad bet.
A bad bet? It is earning them billions. Why would they stop?
Unchecked profit motive is what is going to destroy civilization- it already is. It already did. We are governed by a bizarre set of rules where aggressive competition is supposed to somehow bring about the best outcomes for humanity, which is just an absurd proposition, it’s all a racket, a game that has superseded rule of democracy and law, it is what controls every nation and every decision on the planet- the economy, profit, money.
It is about to great filter us.
Oh for sure some people are getting rich, but do you think openai will ever be profitable?
Someone’s got to be left holding the bag when the bubble bursts
Yeah, it just doesn’t make any sense. There hasn’t even been a legitimate scheme to make AI profitable in the long run. The only thing these idiots can dream about is cutting down labour cost at any conceivable level.
Like okay even if that were possible, we now have infinite cheap production but with no consumer demand?
The means of production are cannibalizing themselves, like the Lemongrabs in Adventure Time
Yeah…the whole thing is incredibly short-sighted, and that’s being charitable.
The capitalists have such a raging hard-on at the thought of not having to pay workers, they don’t want to listen to anyone who might give them a dose of reality.
That’s the thing that I wonder about. Like I know people who think all coding is going to be ai in the next couple of years. But where do they get data? Come up with better programs? Llama are, like you said, machines that just steal what’s already there. So if they are doing all the coding, we’re stuck right now? Nothing new or better?
Why do you think they store and analyze everything you do on your computer, like when you use Windows? “Would you like a permanent spell checker that you can’t turn off make sure anything you write is spelled correctly? No? Too bad, go use Linux. Oh shit sorry, it’s in the hardware now, you can opt out if you want, but not really, we are going to read everything you write on your computer and your phone and analyze every conversation you have on your phone and it’s all going to be processed and then eventually sold for scraps after we’ve extracted what we want from it”.
That’s where, and it’s been happening for way over a decade already.
Llama being the LLM corrected to is amazing
Most likely the only goal is getting short term massive investment like everything else. Just the capitalism playbook of find resource, hype it up and exploit it, draining all value before discarding it. Pump and dump.
There are legitimately AI researchers who are investigating “how can we make models that can be trained on AI generated data”. These researchers know about model collapse (LLMs recursively trained on generated data will degenerate after a few iterations) for over a year now
… I hope I was joking
Wait, maybe that’s the sustainable endgame. If the problem is that there is no new human contect for AI to learn from, then the AI companies can hire some humans to create literature, art, music, memes, etc. to carry on a stream of data for the AI to consume. They said that once AI had taken all the shit jobs, humans would be able to spend their time on art - maybe this is how it all ties together!
Haaaaaa…
The internet I loved died like 15 years ago anyway. It got replaced by ads and misinformation bots and hatred.
I’m deeply jealous of people who experienced the early internet. For me it has always been like this.
People say that early internet was like the wild west, and I agree. And I feel like a weathered old cowboy who saw my homestead on the frontier get surrounded by buildings, cars, industries, smog, noise, and the never ending growth of the population.
Capitalism fucked us all, and it keeps fucking us, and it will kill us.
In the early days, there were a lot of porn ads before ad blockers came along. There’s a nice sweet spot somewhere between that invention and the internet of today.
I lived through the transition from BBSes to the publicly available internet. I had to go in person to pick up the equipment and software on a floppy.
The first thing I found was the Church of the Subgenius which I found hilarious.
I was there when people when people were sending around Goatse pics and all our info came from Alta Vista.
It was pretty sweet, apart from the prolapse.
My dude, YouTube used to not have ads
Yes and the earliest meme was to comment “FAKE!” under every video. Now they are.
lol right
The only time in my life I have ever seen ads on youtube is when I’ve watched videos on someone else’s computer or through “smart” TVs.
I am genuinely shocked that anyone puts up with it. Then again, I get it, not everybody knows how to get around it, and, more importantly, they are working very hard and will succeed at eliminating the possibility to circumvent it.
I learned if you report an ad for being offensive it cancels all the ads after as well as ending the current ad immediately. And it just takes an extra 2 seconds and 3 clicks. Works on smart tvs, phones, and my Xbox.
I don’t even feel like I’m lying because ads inherently are offensive to me.
And Facebook used to just literally have your friends statuses show up on it and that was it. No ads or sponsored content.
But I’m also old enough to remember when getting somewhere involved using a map and asking for directions at gas stations.
Dude I saw a group of college-aged kids walking on the sidewalk using their GPS. I mean even if you’re new to the city, don’t you know the basics of NSEW, how addresses work? I felt like an alien telling them that if you’re at 1234 Ste-Catherine, well, 1234 Maisonneuve is just one street up that way. What the hell do you need a portable satellite-based navigation system for?
Facebook was only glorious when it was made for college kids. The restricting of boomers and children was what made it great. It was the perfect app to boost/record the college experience.
But I’m also old enough to remember when getting somewhere involved using a map and asking for directions at gas stations.
Man, for all the advancements in technology, I fucking did this last week lmao.
My GPS was telling me to “continue to the intersection of Grand and 12th” then “take the third exit in the roundabout” when Grand and 12th was a stoplight and there was no roundabout in sight.
Well at least you’re well versed in the old ways.
I experienced a weird middle period because my parents had kids really late in their lives compared to most people. I experienced a lot of old tech because they liked to hold on to it. I remember my parents using maps to get around on a road trip and remember our VHS player but the first console I used was an xbox (though they never let me own a console 😔) and, because my parents were concerned about internet access, I didn’t get online until quite late in life compared to my peers. So I am very familiar with the old tech native to the millenial and gen X generations but have only experienced the internet post centralization. Bless my parents for keeping me offline as long as they did, I think this was a net good, but damn it I wish I could have experienced the wild west age of the internet. It wish being online felt like an exploration.
Wtf? How did they make money?
They didn’t
It actually cost them a couple of billion a year to run it. Goal was to monopolize online video distribution before monetizing.
Oh my sweet young man. The internet in the early days was very open source and about proving connectivity, at least with the little people like us. Monetization drove people away like crazy and we segregated to places that didn’t have crazy pop up porn ads every time we clicked on something.
In my opinion Bill Gates is the most responsible for ruining the internet. He used his money to go around to universities and governments and private entities around the world and convince them to start monetizing what used to be all open source hobby work that was bettering mankind.
“You don’t really know what it is you have until it’s gone. Gone…gone.”
Hate to disagree but like this is the Internet and it’s pretty great and there are no ads and most of us are not bots and there’s a lot of love here
Lemmy is an exception to the rule.
It won’t stay that way for long.
Nah, if it remains unpopular enough it’ll be fine.
Beep boop
I love love love model collapse. It’s the absolute perfect conclusion to our Internet and this AI bubble.
The make AI. They realize that we’re not ready for it. But short term profits overlook any and all ethical concerns. So they business bro and release anyway, unleashing a flood of slop and garbage content. All of which is impossible to tell if it is human made or not. But the only way to make their business continue is to train new models, which needs more human created content, of which they already destroyed and made imperceivable from their slop.
It’s honestly just pure poetic justice. The ones who are hiring the next generation of AI models are AI companies.
