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In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Arti
by hermitShell 12d ago
In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity.
AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans. The problem is further compounded by the fact that searching and accessing the internet will be noticed by AI agents that will generate still more swamp content in response.
Unfortunately, it seems that this fiction ended up being prophetic. The open internet will fall to entropy, not legislation or one-sided international trade agreements. I think we need more projects like Anna's Archive, where the public uses torrents and distributed infrastructure to save and organize the world's information. Google has abjectly failed in its original mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- pjot 12d ago1008 pages, wow!
- 28304283409234 11d agoHandwritten!
- kridsdale1 12d agoPerhaps there is a nonfinacial future for blockchain after all. Certified human provenance.
- dyauspitr 12d agoYou can’t certify human unless there is some sort of ID check. Even then a human could willfully pass off any AI work as their own.
- AndrewKemendo 12d agoWhy do you think Altman wanted to build world coin to have biometric capture
- dyauspitr 12d agoSo he could sell the data? It’s almost certainly not because he cares so much about certifying human versus AI. Even then the biometric data is not going to be enough. Any human could still use the biometric data to pass AI work off as their own.
- AndrewKemendo 11d agoIndeed and the data is worth much much more if it is tied to a biometric. And if you assume that in the future there will be crypto banks globally then you want to be that final authority layer between the real and the computer world
- dyauspitr 11d agoYeah but my original comment was talking about being able to reliably mark something as AI generated or human generated. Crypto, encryption etc. whatever you throw at it it’s just not possible (other than media that can be watermarked at the generation source).
- lxgr 12d agoWhy blockchain? Any old public key signature scheme would do for that (and conversely, a blockchain doesn't solve the sockpuppet problem either).
- evolve2k 12d ago“Git” again earning its name.
- wayeq 12d ago> The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans. turns out we didn't even need AI for that
- nullbio 12d agoIt doesn't help when you have Anthropic destroying books so that no one else can use them. These are crimes against humanity as far as I'm concerned.
- boredhedgehog 12d ago> we need more projects like Anna's Archive How would that be immune? It already has many copies of the same books and no way to tell which ones are erroneous or incomplete. A malicious actor could easily flood it with garbage.
- hermitShell 6d agoIt will happen eventually, especially with AI generated books published electronically. I wonder if there is a cutoff date or something to try and avoid this problem of low effort books.
- altcognito 11d agoIf it is a torrent it is protected with hashes, but you have to get the hashes now
- lxgr 12d agoIt's a recurring theme in Stephenson's books. "Fall" had a similar take on the same idea. It's one of his most impressive theories/predictions to me.
- nicbou 12d agoThere's a bit of that in Ameristan, in his "Fall" novel. This whole part of the book feels prophetic now.