There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth.
These were always poor proxy metrics for "good content," but in a lot of environments, especially professional ones, they were how work was evaluated. Naturally others used LLM to generate content that satisfies these metrics.
The slop epidemic is a consequence of what people erroneously valued for so long. Now they have it, and it's meaningless, and even if most of it was always meaningless, they can't easily tell the difference between "fluff with something meaningful" and "fluff with only fluff" anymore.
But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.
The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction.
If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
The issue is we have let the attention economy overrun us. It’s not people being too verbose. Shorter content is the objective these days.
You are more consistently rewarded, typically financially, for putting out 100 terrible blog posts than 10 great ones. The terrible ones tend to be short too.
Your time is saved letting ChatGPT write all your emails. The recipient’s time is wasted by emails with little to no substance that the sender couldn’t even bother to spend time on.
Hell there are people using LLM’s to comment on forums now. That’s not what I come here for. This has always existed to some degree but it has, as another person pointed out, been so democratized that it’s becoming a bigger problem. Now I have to constantly expend mental effort questioning if I’m talking to actual people. When I discover it’s a bot, it’s infuriating. It’s disrespectful, frankly.
We all came here to talk to each other. Not be duped by facsimiles of each other. I want to talk to you.
Exactly. People often forget that Congress can only exercise a limited domain of enumerated powers. The big one is regulating Interstate Commerce, which is already huge because of how interconnected the country is today, and is even bigger because of creative stretching of its reach (did you know that the Civil Right's Act's ban on discrimination by businesses is within Congress's Interstate Commerce power, because somebody might patronize your business from out of state?).
Anyway, I suspect Bob Hacker has a strong case that such a law as applied to himself would be beyond the scope of Interstate Commerce. Until he tries to sell or make his OS widely available, at least.
Given how broadly the commerce clause has been interpreted I don't think we can rely on that to save us here. Criminalizing Bob publishing his OS on GitHub is still too authoritarian for my liking.
Just off the top of my head, something like "physical hardware with web access sold in the US without an ID check at the checkout counter must include this feature in its preinstalled OS" would be a better way to write the law in my opinion. Plenty of ways around it if you're a hobbyist or for some reason really don't want to comply, but a big enough hassle that all the major commercial OS providers would probably find it easiest to just include the feature. (Especially since this is a feature most parents would probably appreciate anyway.)
why do you think any court in MAGA America would allow this?
we know, for sure, that Clarence Thomas takes bribes. You think Facebook wouldn't cut him a check? Ditto for plenty of other Trump-installed justices on all levels.
If your child needs a helmet to use the internet, as the politicians announcing HR8250 seem to think[1], Apple or whomever is free to offer that as a feature. There is no need for this to be legislated, especially when the legislation does not work in open source environments.
[1] Not hyperbole. They said that. It was an analogy, but one that highlights how ignorant of the technology the authors of these bills are.
It means you have the option to not save transcripts in the first place, or have a deletion schedule. There's no tampering because there was no evidence to tamper with. Authorities show up after the fact.
In theory you can have the same on incognito sessions (never stored, that's part of what Italian privacy regulator forced on OpenAI to do) and same for right to deletion as per GDPR.
This is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"Meta bad, so government good" is an oversimplified model that will cause you to wake up and suddenly realize everything has changed for the worse anyway.
> I don't want someone else to use AI to do my job.
This is just hypocrisy quite honestly.
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