Once again I ask... do these people actually have kids? Are these the issues with raising kids?
'It can conjure up a chore chart for a group of young siblings, tailoring the tasks so they're appropriate for each age. For example, a 7-year-old might start with picking up toys, while their 13-year-old sibling vacuums the living room.'
Making a chore chart is not the issue most families have with chores, its actually getting people to do the chores. That is where 9X% of the time and effort comes in, same with having a mermaid themed birthday party. Its not very hard to think of themed cake and cookies... and if it is you can just google mermaid themed party and get ideas quickly. Its making the cake, cleaning the house, putting up decorations etc that wear people out.
Also if you want to connect with your daughter you should spend time with her, not spend time talking to a robot about her.
The truth must be some tacit version of this (and certainly not limited to this example): “Hey acquaintance group, I’m writing a story about parents using AI to connect with kids, a topic I just made up when I threw the darts at the board and hit “AI” and “struggles of working families” - would it behoove any of you to see your name on the front page of the WSJ? Would that be the kind of PR any of you would want?”
Perhaps this is why you wouldn’t see a story like that in the bad dumb past, the reporters couldn’t so easily shop for it.
"I thought that we should attack demand, not supply. Years ago, the most prevalent spam messages had the subject line “Enhance your penis!” I suggested that instead of punishing the sellers of penis enhancement products, we should punish the buyers."
I guess that explains why we keep destroying the lives of people who consume illegal drugs - as if the drugs weren't doing a pretty thorough job of that.
That's a good point I hadn't thought about, either. I often think of spam being a problem because it is annoying, but I suppose the other problem is that some people actually pay money. They get punished by losing their money already, so punishing them more isn't really going to change things a lot.
Do like your "heart attack" tactic for going after misinformation demand. In the X (Twitter) case, however, this could result in >30% of their accounts being suspended. Misinformation always appeals to some viewpoint, else it would simply dry up.
I can't wait for the testers to start putting forward reasonable viewpoints of their political opponents out as "obvious misinformation" and suspending people who like it.
"Trump slams Biden's foreign policy, destroys mumbler's positions in debate."
More that what counts as "misinformation" is difficult to objectively measure, and so whomever makes the rules defines what is misinformation to their own tastes. Censorship targeting the reader instead of the writer, but roughly the same outcome. "I thought he was kidding" as a defense would be an option, though :D Then again, censors aren't known for their sense of humor, so they might not find that a compelling argument.
"But people keep falling for video game footage & old pictures. AI is overkill."
This statement isn't good for anything except it's good for illustrating how even a little imprecision in thought and writing can make a potentially good claim completely wrong.
The world of just yesterday was, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Not anymore, Lincoln!
Specifically, Mollick is using using those terms in a generalized, Boolean fashion when the crux of the issue for drawing conclusions is entirely a matter of degree. You can ask, what proportion of people, what kind of people, fooled about what, for how long, how easily, quickly, and commonly persuaded otherwise by demonstration of fakeness, what degree of time, expense, and expertise is needed to make such a persuasive demonstration, etc.?
And what it is about old photos and video games that is useful in fooling people? Old photos seem real because actually real, and the thing that is hard to tell about them without constant skepticism and willingness to research is their age and context. And which video games? No one is being fooled by 192 pixels of Super Mario. Those people are being fooled by incredibly good computationally intensive renderings of real-world scenarios which developers have been trying to make look as realistic as possible and better every year for decades. Indeed, they often try to include precisely the kind of imagery people are likely to encounter in real news footage, because that footage is the only mental connection people have to those kinds of situations. Those images viewed scrolling quickly on an app on tiny smartphone screens are pretty convincing in that context, but at least they can be easily falsified when one applies ordinary (but powerful!) software tools on more capable computers with bigger screens.
When you consider the limited degrees of all those factors, it's obvious that the world of just a few years ago was by no means whatsoever already completely saturated at the very ceiling of effectively misleading fakeries. That's what 'overkill' means. "The target was already dead at lower caliber, raising the caliber doesn't do anything because you can't make it more dead."
But the state of our broader information environment just a few years ago, while very damaged and injured from taking a steadily increasing barrage of tiny hits, was not nearly 'dead''.
But those projectiles were mere nerf foam darts compared to the super-heavy shells in the Mark A naval guns current-capability AI just pointed at us. In just a few years they'll be precision launching thermonuclear warheads hypersonically, and maybe THAT will be overkill.
The comparisons to the web are far and wide and, ultimately being unknowable, these comparisons are both hard to refute and (here’s my point), mostly optimistic. At some point (again?) we’ll need to revisit the www-humanity score card. As both an armchair economist, technologist, and creative type, I still see the vast network as a tool for good.. or as one man once called it: “the information super highway”. I’m not sure AI will be so childishly simplistic.
The demand will never go away as the environment around us, our parents/teachers, people who we live and work (our friends) with influence our lives more than we believe. Additionally, going against the grain is not what most people like to do. We are social animals and want to be part of a group. Each group has its misconceptions/misinformation. There is no easy way to overcome it.
Here is an example, I read today:
In 2015, residents in Woodland, N.C. expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would consume too much sunlight. One resident told the town council that the farm would steal sunlight that plants need, while another warned that it might “suck up all the energy from the sun.”
Do we call this lack of education/understanding of how the world works or, misinformation, or both?
When I was little, no sooner did we learn to write than some little girls started dotting their i’s with hearts. Later on those early bloomers congenial and pretty enough to have little boyfriends, liberally drew hearts everywhere, or etched them into the desk.
Forgive me if this talk of ferreting out misinformers by counting hearts strikes me as midwit(to use a favored AK term)-ascendant, not to say moronic.
We were really into rainbows too - easy to draw, uses all the markers - so I’d suggest making rainbows a promise of truth. Unicorns could be appended to things that are narratively true even if they do not factually check out. After all, I probably couldn’t identify hardly any animals when I was a kid, but I knew unicorns, so that makes them realer than real. In my childish truth. Also, I saw one at a fair one time.
I guess we should count our blessings as all this stuff posits a future population able and inclined to read (just not books - does it not seem funny and ridiculous, that people once fretted over the censorship of books lol).
Oh, and Mother’s going down. She slays at Jeopardy, but over the years these are things she has shared with me: write to the cereal company, they will give your child a $100 savings bond for no reason at all; something something microwave popcorn will kill you; ditto I think - peanut butter? Or was it pancake mix; tonight the moon will appear 100 times bigger than usual; here is a 100% unretouched picture of the day God spilled the paint; wherever you’re going, someone was shot or carjacked in that hundred block last week (actual encyclopedic knowledge of hundred blocks in her city of 4 million) etc. and if someone rear ends you at a light don’t get out of the car (okay, that was probably legit); my brother could get rid of his rosacea if only he would wash with dandruff shampoo, etc.
Regarding: "I said this years ago about the spam problem. I thought that we should attack demand, not supply." How would you deal with the "stupidity" defense from a consumer-defendant?
There used to be a meme of a highway patrolman saying, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to confiscate your license. You're just too stupid to be on the Internet."
How do you deal with the problem of defining what counts as misinformation, as opposed to merely a different viewpoint, or more difficultly satire? The Babylon Bee rides the line between satire and pre-news so well that it is hard to tell sometimes.
Try to understand the concept. I am not cutting off the suppliers of information. I am cutting off as readers the people who fall for misinformation that I know is misinformation because I deliberately created it. Break the market for misinformation on the demand side instead of the supply side,
When you say "I" deliberately created it what do you mean, exactly? When you say "I" do you actually mean "thousands of my employees"? Is it possible that your employees might, for example, start to put up technically untrue but entirely plausible posts and then suspend the accounts of people who heart those, and thereby train unaffiliated voters not to "fall for" advocacy of markets or race-neutral policies, criticisms of the current President's son, or criticisms of a currently former President's legal defenses?
I do appreciate the effort and creativity, though!
If the internet requires the production of lies for phishing purposes I’d argue it’s failed and at the very least ought to be thrown off the public infrastructure.
Sorry, I might have been a bit unclear in my post. As I understand the concept, it is basically the Twitter equivalent of the "phishing" emails your IT department sends out as a trap: if you click the link you get signed up to mandatory IT training, the goal being to test which people are not careful enough. Your version would be to have dummy accounts that do the same thing, put out obvious misinformation and see who hearts (likes? I am not a Twitter user) it, and if they do, not let them use the platform for a bit.
So the problem I see with that is "who do you get to run the dummy accounts, and how do you make sure what they are calling misinformation that they punish people for liking is actually misinformation?" When people disagree on facts you are still stuck with making someone the arbiter of what is true, you are just changing who gets punished.
There is also the problem of what happens when someone gets suspended and they reply "I light it because I thought it was funny satire." That's what I meant with regards to the Babylon Bee. In retrospect that was kind of confusing. Still, I can see a dummy account that sometimes spits out obviously silly things along with mostly reasonable stuff being non-obvious as to whether it is joking or not.
Once again I ask... do these people actually have kids? Are these the issues with raising kids?
'It can conjure up a chore chart for a group of young siblings, tailoring the tasks so they're appropriate for each age. For example, a 7-year-old might start with picking up toys, while their 13-year-old sibling vacuums the living room.'
Making a chore chart is not the issue most families have with chores, its actually getting people to do the chores. That is where 9X% of the time and effort comes in, same with having a mermaid themed birthday party. Its not very hard to think of themed cake and cookies... and if it is you can just google mermaid themed party and get ideas quickly. Its making the cake, cleaning the house, putting up decorations etc that wear people out.
Also if you want to connect with your daughter you should spend time with her, not spend time talking to a robot about her.
That couldn’t have been real.
The truth must be some tacit version of this (and certainly not limited to this example): “Hey acquaintance group, I’m writing a story about parents using AI to connect with kids, a topic I just made up when I threw the darts at the board and hit “AI” and “struggles of working families” - would it behoove any of you to see your name on the front page of the WSJ? Would that be the kind of PR any of you would want?”
Perhaps this is why you wouldn’t see a story like that in the bad dumb past, the reporters couldn’t so easily shop for it.
"I thought that we should attack demand, not supply. Years ago, the most prevalent spam messages had the subject line “Enhance your penis!” I suggested that instead of punishing the sellers of penis enhancement products, we should punish the buyers."
I guess that explains why we keep destroying the lives of people who consume illegal drugs - as if the drugs weren't doing a pretty thorough job of that.
That's a good point I hadn't thought about, either. I often think of spam being a problem because it is annoying, but I suppose the other problem is that some people actually pay money. They get punished by losing their money already, so punishing them more isn't really going to change things a lot.
Do like your "heart attack" tactic for going after misinformation demand. In the X (Twitter) case, however, this could result in >30% of their accounts being suspended. Misinformation always appeals to some viewpoint, else it would simply dry up.
I can't wait for the testers to start putting forward reasonable viewpoints of their political opponents out as "obvious misinformation" and suspending people who like it.
"Trump slams Biden's foreign policy, destroys mumbler's positions in debate."
*Heart*
"Enjoy your week off Twitter"
So what you’re saying is, heart attack does nothing for ironic sarcasm attempting to be funny.
More that what counts as "misinformation" is difficult to objectively measure, and so whomever makes the rules defines what is misinformation to their own tastes. Censorship targeting the reader instead of the writer, but roughly the same outcome. "I thought he was kidding" as a defense would be an option, though :D Then again, censors aren't known for their sense of humor, so they might not find that a compelling argument.
"But people keep falling for video game footage & old pictures. AI is overkill."
This statement isn't good for anything except it's good for illustrating how even a little imprecision in thought and writing can make a potentially good claim completely wrong.
The world of just yesterday was, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Not anymore, Lincoln!
Specifically, Mollick is using using those terms in a generalized, Boolean fashion when the crux of the issue for drawing conclusions is entirely a matter of degree. You can ask, what proportion of people, what kind of people, fooled about what, for how long, how easily, quickly, and commonly persuaded otherwise by demonstration of fakeness, what degree of time, expense, and expertise is needed to make such a persuasive demonstration, etc.?
And what it is about old photos and video games that is useful in fooling people? Old photos seem real because actually real, and the thing that is hard to tell about them without constant skepticism and willingness to research is their age and context. And which video games? No one is being fooled by 192 pixels of Super Mario. Those people are being fooled by incredibly good computationally intensive renderings of real-world scenarios which developers have been trying to make look as realistic as possible and better every year for decades. Indeed, they often try to include precisely the kind of imagery people are likely to encounter in real news footage, because that footage is the only mental connection people have to those kinds of situations. Those images viewed scrolling quickly on an app on tiny smartphone screens are pretty convincing in that context, but at least they can be easily falsified when one applies ordinary (but powerful!) software tools on more capable computers with bigger screens.
When you consider the limited degrees of all those factors, it's obvious that the world of just a few years ago was by no means whatsoever already completely saturated at the very ceiling of effectively misleading fakeries. That's what 'overkill' means. "The target was already dead at lower caliber, raising the caliber doesn't do anything because you can't make it more dead."
But the state of our broader information environment just a few years ago, while very damaged and injured from taking a steadily increasing barrage of tiny hits, was not nearly 'dead''.
But those projectiles were mere nerf foam darts compared to the super-heavy shells in the Mark A naval guns current-capability AI just pointed at us. In just a few years they'll be precision launching thermonuclear warheads hypersonically, and maybe THAT will be overkill.
The comparisons to the web are far and wide and, ultimately being unknowable, these comparisons are both hard to refute and (here’s my point), mostly optimistic. At some point (again?) we’ll need to revisit the www-humanity score card. As both an armchair economist, technologist, and creative type, I still see the vast network as a tool for good.. or as one man once called it: “the information super highway”. I’m not sure AI will be so childishly simplistic.
The demand will never go away as the environment around us, our parents/teachers, people who we live and work (our friends) with influence our lives more than we believe. Additionally, going against the grain is not what most people like to do. We are social animals and want to be part of a group. Each group has its misconceptions/misinformation. There is no easy way to overcome it.
Here is an example, I read today:
In 2015, residents in Woodland, N.C. expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would consume too much sunlight. One resident told the town council that the farm would steal sunlight that plants need, while another warned that it might “suck up all the energy from the sun.”
Do we call this lack of education/understanding of how the world works or, misinformation, or both?
When I was little, no sooner did we learn to write than some little girls started dotting their i’s with hearts. Later on those early bloomers congenial and pretty enough to have little boyfriends, liberally drew hearts everywhere, or etched them into the desk.
Forgive me if this talk of ferreting out misinformers by counting hearts strikes me as midwit(to use a favored AK term)-ascendant, not to say moronic.
We were really into rainbows too - easy to draw, uses all the markers - so I’d suggest making rainbows a promise of truth. Unicorns could be appended to things that are narratively true even if they do not factually check out. After all, I probably couldn’t identify hardly any animals when I was a kid, but I knew unicorns, so that makes them realer than real. In my childish truth. Also, I saw one at a fair one time.
I guess we should count our blessings as all this stuff posits a future population able and inclined to read (just not books - does it not seem funny and ridiculous, that people once fretted over the censorship of books lol).
Oh, and Mother’s going down. She slays at Jeopardy, but over the years these are things she has shared with me: write to the cereal company, they will give your child a $100 savings bond for no reason at all; something something microwave popcorn will kill you; ditto I think - peanut butter? Or was it pancake mix; tonight the moon will appear 100 times bigger than usual; here is a 100% unretouched picture of the day God spilled the paint; wherever you’re going, someone was shot or carjacked in that hundred block last week (actual encyclopedic knowledge of hundred blocks in her city of 4 million) etc. and if someone rear ends you at a light don’t get out of the car (okay, that was probably legit); my brother could get rid of his rosacea if only he would wash with dandruff shampoo, etc.
Regarding: "I said this years ago about the spam problem. I thought that we should attack demand, not supply." How would you deal with the "stupidity" defense from a consumer-defendant?
There used to be a meme of a highway patrolman saying, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to confiscate your license. You're just too stupid to be on the Internet."
How do you deal with the problem of defining what counts as misinformation, as opposed to merely a different viewpoint, or more difficultly satire? The Babylon Bee rides the line between satire and pre-news so well that it is hard to tell sometimes.
Try to understand the concept. I am not cutting off the suppliers of information. I am cutting off as readers the people who fall for misinformation that I know is misinformation because I deliberately created it. Break the market for misinformation on the demand side instead of the supply side,
When you say "I" deliberately created it what do you mean, exactly? When you say "I" do you actually mean "thousands of my employees"? Is it possible that your employees might, for example, start to put up technically untrue but entirely plausible posts and then suspend the accounts of people who heart those, and thereby train unaffiliated voters not to "fall for" advocacy of markets or race-neutral policies, criticisms of the current President's son, or criticisms of a currently former President's legal defenses?
I do appreciate the effort and creativity, though!
That was a shorter version of what I meant to say, thanks :D
If the internet requires the production of lies for phishing purposes I’d argue it’s failed and at the very least ought to be thrown off the public infrastructure.
Sorry, I might have been a bit unclear in my post. As I understand the concept, it is basically the Twitter equivalent of the "phishing" emails your IT department sends out as a trap: if you click the link you get signed up to mandatory IT training, the goal being to test which people are not careful enough. Your version would be to have dummy accounts that do the same thing, put out obvious misinformation and see who hearts (likes? I am not a Twitter user) it, and if they do, not let them use the platform for a bit.
So the problem I see with that is "who do you get to run the dummy accounts, and how do you make sure what they are calling misinformation that they punish people for liking is actually misinformation?" When people disagree on facts you are still stuck with making someone the arbiter of what is true, you are just changing who gets punished.
There is also the problem of what happens when someone gets suspended and they reply "I light it because I thought it was funny satire." That's what I meant with regards to the Babylon Bee. In retrospect that was kind of confusing. Still, I can see a dummy account that sometimes spits out obviously silly things along with mostly reasonable stuff being non-obvious as to whether it is joking or not.