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Ask HN: Long-term approach for distinguishing AI content?
1 point by hackyhacky on Jan 3, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
The way AI is going, it seems inevitable that the internet will soon be awash in untold quantities of AI-generated content which will be of low value, but impossible to distinguish from human-generated content. This will cause problems for anyone who wants to limit their contact to authentic content: for example, curl [0] has been receiving bogus bug reports from AI, which uselessly consume maintainer time. To say nothing of the fact that social network sites, already full of low-value content, will have an even lower signal-to-noise ratio as effective filtering becomes impossible.

So, I turn to the HN community: like, what's the plan? Five years from now, how will the internet still be usable?

- Will we need to have locked-down hardware platforms that cryptographically sign all "authentic" content?

- Will the promise of the open internet be lost as we restrict communication to only those sources we know personally?

- Will we rely on "trustworthy" third parties to mediate content via opaque means?

It seems like something big has to change and I'd love your perspective.

[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/




We will just change mindset, instead of filtering out crap.

We will filter in genuine content.

You can browse Twitter using only custom lists for example.


The internet already is awash in untold quantities of crap-quality content, generated by humans and non-AI programs. And that's been the case for quite a few years now.

Emotionally, "AI-generated content" makes a good boogeyman.

But rationally, "you can have your free cake (internet content), and trust it too" was always a techno-utopian/libertarian delusion. If that's your "promise of the open internet", then it was always a lost cause.




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