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The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

None of those things directly harm the resources being "grazed", and none of them are inevitable consequences of AI. If you think they are then you're actually arguing against AI in general and not the specific way in which they've been trained.

[–] Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You think the internet being flooded with articles, comments etc. all being written by AI whose only goals are selling shit, disseminating misinformation, and manipulating elections and opinions - with no way to know what is human and what is AI - is going to be a great environment to continue to train your AI?

You might be interested to read about Model Autophagy Disorder.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That is not a problem caused by "overgrazing" those open resources. It's a separate problem with AI training that needs to be addressed anyway. You're just throwing out random AI-related challenges regardless of whether they're relevant to what's being discussed.

Simply put, quality control is always important.

[–] Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you pump toxic waste onto the field nobody gets to graze it.

Fuck you're being pedantic.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And you're completely missing the point.

Whether or not toxic waste is pumped into the field is completely independent of whether anyone is "grazing" on it. AIs are going to be trained and AIs are going to be generating content, regardless of whether those "commons" are being used as training material. If you wish to keep those "commons" high-quality you're going to have to come up with some way of doing that regardless of whether they're being used as training material. Banning the use of them as training material will have no impact on whether they get "toxic waste" pumped into it.

My objection is to those who are saying that to save the commons we need to prevent grazing, ie, that to save the quality of public discourse we need to prevent AIs from training on it. Those two things are unrelated. Stopping AIs from training on it will not do anything to preserve the quality of public discourse.

[–] Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No mate, you're just being pedantic

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And you're still keen to argue two days after the thread's moved off of everyone's feed.

[–] Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah man I login a couple of times a day to check notifications