it seems like the tipping point is coming soon...

Submitted by captain_gumpy t3_10kydj1 in singularity

With all these different forms of AI taking the internet by storm, I feel that very soon it will be indistinguishable whether or not something was AI generated. With midjourney being able to create photo real images (with some artifacts), deepfake technology, and chatgpt writing convincingly human text, it seems like the trend is that it will eventually overtake the amount of actual human creation out there.

Of course this can only affect the digital realm, but there is no doubt that what's on the internet has ripple effects on the real world. People are already worried about "disinformation" and "fake news" from real people who are either lying or are just misinformed. What happens when people start citing articles that were written not by a human, but by an AI? It may be my pessimism, but I cannot see a future where the reliability of the information we find on the internet is not questioned at every step, which makes it all the more difficult to form opinions and know what's happening out in the world.

54

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

thephilth t1_j5tx0q6 wrote

It might effectively break the internet. People may become disillusioned with being online, particularly in terms of social media etc., particularly when a lot of associated digital professions disappear. It may push people back into a non digital world. To be autonomous again. To connect locally again, with neighbours, friends. Become interested in local governance. It might... but probably not. It will change how we navigate online though. We've gone from terminals to personal computers to smart phones. I can see a progression where wearable tech, maybe even augmented reality, becomes as common place as the smartphone. Where you no longer visit sites but communicate directly with your AI companion, who could have multiple personalities and areas of expertise depending the context, be it digital/real. Think Jarvis/Friday etc. Who knows.

29

Smellz_Of_Elderberry t1_j5uceeb wrote

I think this take is correct. Showed my father how easy it is to deep fake and create fake video, he said "I will never trust anything I see online again". Lots of folks are already leaving social media and online connectedness behind, I kinda think it's a good thing...

People shouldn't trust what they see online. That's been the case for a long while... This is hopefully going to start solidifying our real world relationships again, something which has kinda been ruined due to social media.

I imagine that going forward tech will continue to advance rapidly.. But that we will see people push away from certain aspects of it, like being always online, always connected, and having a ton of social media sites.. Instead I think people are going to realize that everything online is easily fakable and live more here. With less of a focus on trying to appear the most popular on their social feed.. To me, it's the rebirth of people being genuine.

I'll probably pull back as well. Not in a luddite kind of way, but simply remove tech from the things I don't really need it for. I enjoy cooking on an open flame for example, I don't need a fancy electric oven. But I'll still watch movies at the end of the day. Likely movies which are dreamed up by our DVD player.

14

BaldyBeardyMan t1_j5ulgtf wrote

That's a really healthy take on the issue, so thank you for posting it. I needed to read something like this .

3

ChefAntony t1_j661ow3 wrote

Thank you so much man this is what I needed. I sincerely hope this is how the public starts to view things. A world where a majority of the once-human driven things is driven by AI scares me a lot.

1

Smellz_Of_Elderberry t1_j66egx0 wrote

I sometimes get scared to. But I'm also hopeful, I think it will improve our lives, it just might make them harder in ways as well.

I would love it if my job were automated haha. It's hard, and I don't particularly enjoy it. I'd rather do other things. In many ways i want to live a life with less tech.. but I think the way to that is through more of it.. at least for those who choose that life.

Here's to a good future.

2

Martholomeow t1_j5wdw51 wrote

the internet is already broken. most of the search results i get seem like they were written by bots, and many of them were written by low paid writers who just write posts based on what people are searching for. Half the stuff i find is not only wrong but in many cases nonsensical and self contradictory.

I actually know someone who works for one of these places. She writes articles on things she knows nothing about by just rewriting articles that are already out there, thus regurgitating and spreading the nonsense.

She showed me a tech article she had written and it was completely wrong, yet the seo made it rise to the top of the results, alongside a bunch of other articles on the same topic that also got it completely wrong.

It’s becoming pointless to search

3

enkae7317 t1_j60038m wrote

You mean half the searches are essentially just ads that are highly prevalent by SEO. I agree the search engine is broken.

The other day I was looking up how to do some power query stuff on excel. What I would normally do is go to google search and type it in and then wade through links of bullshit/ads for about 10 minutes before I finally MAYBE find somebody else that has had the same problem in the past. Then if I'm lucky--it'll have somebody that responded with the right answer.

Instead, I went to ChatGPT and simply typed in my issue and ChatGPT was able to, not one, but give me THREE solutions to my problem. Within seconds.

1

Martholomeow t1_j600zdf wrote

yes i’ve started to use chatGPT for these kinds of things too

2

tatleoat t1_j5tgyjk wrote

It can't be much further, we're finally beginning to clear some really important benchmarks, like the fact we now have AI that can transcribe human speech with the same level of accuracy as humans (~95%). I mean things like that open up every door

11

Cryptizard t1_j5tlyk0 wrote

We have been beyond that point for a while. You should only trust reputable news sources, any picture or video can be faked or generated by AI.

As far as overwhelming regular human content, though, there are still CAPTCHAs to prevent that. I haven't seen any indication that AI models are breaking CAPTCHAs any time soon. Since they are purposefully designed to exploit the weaknesses in AI, they will be one of the last to fall before we get AGI.

8

captain_gumpy OP t1_j5tuwr1 wrote

I recently saw this video, and I do understand the importance of captchas in preventing bots from flooding social media.

https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM

However, there isn't much stopping a normal person from just completing the captcha and then copy and paste an AI generated response, image, etc.

Additionally, news sources may already be trying to use AI to generate their articles.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceweinstein/2023/01/05/which-section-of-this-article-was-written-by-an-ai-chatbot/?sh=69b855241aa7

I remember seeing that someone also used an AI to generate an entire fake New York Times article, but I can't find a link.

I'm extremely concerned for the children that are growing up navigating this world. It's hard enough being an adult in it right now.

7

BassoeG t1_j5u2ps0 wrote

>I feel that very soon it will be indistinguishable whether or not something was AI generated.

I disagree, fortunately this state of affairs won't last for long before AI keeps improving and surpasses rather than merely matching human capabilities, leaving AI-generated content as extremely immediately recognizable. It'll be better than the human-generated content. That's the defining trait to look for.

7

_dekappatated t1_j5wex67 wrote

This sucks for super talented artists. They won't get the recognition that they once did. Everyone will automatically assume it's AI

6

birdpix t1_j5uoy8e wrote

Just played with ad taglines on chatgpt. Blown away. Saved a week of creating!

5

COLESonFIRE840 t1_j5v2txl wrote

OK, so i was also just thinking this the other day as i was watching my YT shorts. A bunch of videos came up in my feed of pilots having crash landings or near misses, i kept saying "damn how is this not on the news". but some videos seemed a bit... not right, and that's because they were videos of people flying flight simulator and posting them as if they were real. But the only reason i caught on was because of the ATC comms were bad. other than that the graphics were too real, the physics were real, even the small ground traffic was moving around. come to find out its FS22. But it got me thinking, if i can get fooled by a YT short, what else can we get fooled by? is the TV we watch even real? Is biden even alive or did he die of old age? we dont actually know. 20 years ago we could say, "well duh hes alive i just saw him on the TV" but now.. you really dont know if its a deepfake or CGI or anything.

We already have AI rappers and vocal artists, deepfakes are already too good. VR is getting too good.

I think you are definitely right, we are at a crux, and we really don't know what's on the other side.

4

dasnihil t1_j5tub1a wrote

Besides the industrial implications of changes to come, I see some psychological changes in general public.

- We will be soon desensitized with art as we know it today (pretty looking photos, beautiful landscapes, renaissance work), because when things become too cheap to produce without requiring any expertise, it automatically diminishes in value and society will come up with new trend

- Psychologically the people who grew up to be aspiring artists of various forms (writing, painting, music, film, photography etc) will shy away from such forms of art and new generations to come will have new forms of art coming from the scarcity created by automation

- Eventually we'll get self-awareness engineered using digital networks and we'll go back to the old ways of art, mixed with new philosophies that are to emerge when we give birth to our own sentient systems, immortality will have it's own baggage of problems

3

RabidHexley t1_j5usxxx wrote

> We will be soon desensitized with art as we know it today (pretty looking photos, beautiful landscapes, renaissance work), because when things become too cheap to produce without requiring any expertise, it automatically diminishes in value and society will come up with new trend

I already kind of feel like this is the case. Not on an individual level, I can still be impressed and enjoy work, and I don't think that will really change.

But what were previously virtuosic displays of skill in many domains aren't remotely as novel as they used to be. Simply due to the mass proliferation of skill and material access, the number of people who posses the technical skill of those previously considered masters is fairly huge.

If you're an aspiring artist or creative in any domain, you already have to assume there are thousands and thousands of people who are as good or better than you will likely ever be. AI changes the economic paradigm to be sure, but I'm not sure how much AI will change the emotional paradigm of why people pursue creation.

5

crunchycode t1_j5x39d2 wrote

I find it quite ironic. Computers were conceived as a way to help humans determine objective truth more quickly and easily by modeling the world. But now this ability to simulate - Turing's Imitation Game - is being turned on its head, making it even harder for people to know what is real and what is not real.

I suspect that Turing knew or intuited that it would lead here, but perhaps not many of the other early computing pioneers, who might be shocked to see what massive computation is leading to.

3

Hello_Hurricane t1_j5v4ja0 wrote

I think we still have some time. I have yet to see an AI generated image that's 100% indistinguishable from the real thing.

1

ChronoPsyche t1_j5v8o90 wrote

>but I cannot see a future where the reliability of the information we find on the internet is not questioned at every step,

This is already the reality now and has been for a while. If you haven't realized that then you've assuredly been mislead about a lot what you thought was reliable information. Not due to AI necessarily but due to massive disinformation campaigns and just general bullshit that spreads so easily in online echo chambers. AI will just make those all the more effective.

You shouldn't take anything at face value, always question what the source of the information is and whether that source is credible. This is why I get so frustrated by all the random blogs that are posted on this sub with news-like headlines, as if they are from credible news sources. They aren't, they are written by random people whose credibility is completely unknown and spammed on AI subs for click ad revenue. 90% of the time they contain unsubstantiated rumors and hyper-sensationalized, misleading, and/or outright false information. Like the blog article that made the 1 trillion parameter claim. Those of us with a skeptical eye knew it was bs immediately.

And by the way, even if it comes from a credible news agency, then you still have to consider potential bias. Bias is a lot easier to deal with though than straight up fake information.

So basically, yes you need to be vigilant, but not just from AI, but from all sources of information. Doesn't take a large language model to write an article and mislead.

1

DungeonsAndDradis t1_j5viivl wrote

I hate to break it to you, but it's already here. Bots have been used to write articles for years, and bots run rampant on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

And they're good. Most bots are indistinguishable from a standard user.

And they're only going to get better and cheaper.

It's very easy to control the narrative when you've got an army of bots posting articles, posting comments, etc.

1

Martholomeow t1_j5wcqjy wrote

Vernor Vinge didn’t call it the net of a million lies for nothing

1

FpRhGf t1_j5y35r3 wrote

You forgot voice cloning. Nowadays you can just train a convincing model of someone else's voice on your computer, as long as you have enough audio datasets that don't have noise.

1