8mo ago

The apocalypse that wasn’t: AI was everywhere in 2024’s elections, but deepfakes and misinformation were only part of the picture

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Larger part of the picture — people are stupid and believe everything they hear on tv and see on the internet. Even larger picture — this is by design as politicians continue to gut public education to make sure the populace stays malleable and doesn’t have critical thinking skills.
The real election danger wasn’t AI, after all. The real danger were the reckless, emotionally motivated, uneducated people.
- I think the real danger is the people manipulating those people.
  
  There will always be a con man or grifter out there somewhere. The uneducated and gullible population I think is the bigger issue. People need to have their defenses up against deception, which requires critical thinking.
- Low information voters?
Heh, part of the reason is that OpenAI stagnated and that most AI products are still dumb.
And people, especially bad actors, use them stupidly too. Like are they running a cot finetune with constrained grammer tuned just for their... Blah blah blah, nope. They're just using cheap OpenAI API, maybe with a jailbreak prompt, if not just prompting the webpage, out of sheer laziness and ignorance.
- It's like the discussion of building bear proof garbage containers - the problem for designers is that there is a significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
  Is it that AI is just dumb and not that good? ... or are we all just so collectively stupid that it doesn't take much to affect how we think and see the world.
  AI might not to be so far advanced as we would like to see ... and at the same time, I think we are realizing that collectively, we are overestimating the amount of AI that is needed to affect our absolutely stupid civilization.
  
  Yuuuuup. People talk about how stupid AI can be… but like, have you ever met a human?

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