Showroom7561 @ Showroom7561 @lemmy.ca

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I've been pretty reserved on my opinion about AI ruining the internet until a few days ago.

We're now seeing videos with spoken dialogue that looks incredibly convincing. No more "uncanny valley" to act as a mental safeguard.

We can only whitelist websites and services for so long before greed consumes them all.

I mean, shit, you might already have friends or family using AI generated replies in their text messages and email... not even our real connections are "real".

And we’ve had fake news forever.

Yes, limited in their scope.

The fake news of yesterday still needed real people to spread disinformation. Fake news of tomorrow will have convincing videos, photos, "verified sources", interviews, article upon article expanding on the disinformation, and millions of bots to promote the content through social media and search.

"Fake" will be real enough to have catastrophic effects on actual people.

It's like going from spitting wads of tissue out the end of a straw to dropping hydrogen bombs. We aren't prepared for what's to come in the landscape of fake news.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your answer.

To expand on a few points:

Lets start with the attempt to define “usefulness” as the degree to which connection to humans happens. Human connection on the internet has always been illusory. Yet we still find utility in it.

While "usefulness" and human connection can be linked, you can also separate them.

For instance, if the majority of websites become content farms, with information that (likely) isn't accurate because an LLM hallucinated it. Can you find it useful compared to when an expert wrote the content?

This could even apply to how-to content, where now you might have someone with actual experience showing you how to fix something or work something. But with AI content farms, you might get a mishmash of information, that may not be right, and you'd never be able to ask for clarity from a real person.

What about a travel site that fakes photos, generates convincing videos of your destination, and features stories from other travellers (AI bots) without you knowing the difference? This might have been hard to pull off five years ago, but you can generate 1000 such websites in a few days. When does the usefulness of using such a site become diminished?

As for human connection. I disagree that it has always been illusory. When you chatted with strangers online 10 years ago, you knew for a fact that they were a real person. Sure, they could have been deceptive or have an "online personality", but they were real.

A step up from that would be people using a fake identity, but there was still a person on the other end.

But in the near future, every stranger you connect with online might end up being a bot. You'd never know. At what point would you consider not spending time or energy interacting on a platform?

This planet has been a soulless hellscape longer than any of us have been alive, and LLMs are more likely to improve the situation than make it worse.

I've been around long enough to say that's not true in the slightest. Being online and consuming content online was very, very different 10+ years ago as it will be in the next 10 years.

The internet of old was mostly a force for good. The internet of tomorrow will be weaponized, monetized, and made to be unrecognizable from what we've had.

I watch Youtube

Then you've noticed a lot of fake videos, too.

Fake product reviews (fake script, fake voice, fake video footage). Videos with AI hosts (that you wouldn't even realize is AI). Low effort video production that's been handed off to an app to do all the work. Scripted content based on AI generated text (Youtube now offers creators AI generated ideas and scripts, btw).

You can sift through some of it now, but what will you do when you can't tell the difference? Will you invest time watching fake content?

I have channels that I watch. Real people (who I've met), and others who are verifiably real. But those creators will be few and far between in the near future.

Depends what you read. Blogs are still a thing and on many there is not the slightest hint of AI and in some there is even not even a single ad to be seen. It’s still people talking about what they truly care. Not people trying to farm likes or views by spreading some low-effort shit content, be it videos, pictures or text.

To illustrate my point: Say, five years from now, you come across a "blog". It's got photos of a friendly person, she shares images and video of her and her family, and talks about homesteading.

What if that entire "person" was just AI generated, and the "blog" was just fake AI stories? How would you even know? Would you want to spend time even reading blogs, knowing that it may not even be written by an actual person?

We will be at that point very soon. You will never know who's real and who's fake (online), because their entire life can be faked.

The corporate/marketing-owned Web is filled to the brim with utter crap but that’s not new, and it has been so well before AI became a thing.

While true, and I agree, at least it was people being evil/greedy. And the speed at which they could be evil/greedy was capped.

With AI, you could generate a lifetime of greedy/evil corporate/marketing-owned web in a matter of hours, and just flood every corner of the internet with it.

It's a very different threat.

But the human-made web is still a thing. It’s just not promoted as much as it once was and certainly it’s not promoted where nowadays crowds gather to get spoon-fed content.

Per my point above, you'll never know what's human-made in the very near future. At some point, bots with human identities will flood websites, then what?

Yes, of course. I'm not talking about that.

Even here, Lemmy. How long before the replies you get are from bots, and you're posting for bot users? Will there even be a point to continue wasting time on that?

When you see news being reported, at some point, you'll have no idea what's real or fake. And it will be so ubiquitous that you'll need to spend a considerable amount of time to even attempt to verify whether it's true or trustworthy. At what point will you simply stop paying attention to it?

Maybe (?) thiat’s controversial but “human connection” is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider whay I’m currently online.

What I mean by that is when you looked back at content from 5+ years ago, you know that a real person wrote, drew, recorded, thought of, put effort into it.

We had interconnectedness, and as human beings, we really should do what it takes to not lose that.

There will be no more looking at photography, artwork, music, or movies as a marvel of human effort, skill, and talent. To me, that's a huge loss.

When you read a blog years ago, you were reading another person's experience, and that had value.

Information from a resource was researched and had input from an expert human being, and/or a team of them. That had value.

So losing the humanity of the internet sucks but I can find way to work around it.

Online? If so, how long do you think you can sustain it? If the majority of the internet or digital content you see becomes AI generated, with no way of knowing, what then? Will you invest time to use a future Lemmy where your interactions are probably all with bots?

Ramaphosa was right to ask "I'd like to know where that is", when the "evidence" was shown to him live.

Other world leaders should be prepared to challenge Trump right to his face when he fabricates lies like this in those pathetic ambush attempts.

My wife is the Kobo user, so I don't know what tools are available.

But seeing how there's already a self-hosted sync service available, I'm sure it's not impossible for Pocket (or something like it) to be developed in the open-source community.

Why are we allowing him in? He's an enemy of this country, a rapist, and a convicted felon.

We don't want that trash here, even if the summit is in Alberta.

You mean, perfect for self-hosting? 😀

Since abandoning American retailers, I've certainly given Canadian Tire way more money than I used to. I'm not surprised that others have, too.

They really are an alternative to many of the things you might find at Walmart or Amazon.

And they sell a surprising amount of Made in Canada products, which is even more important to me.

I also don’t understand why people insist on Street parking when they have a garage.

I'm in Ontario, and can't begin to tell you how many people will keep their driveway and garage empty so they can park on the street. It's like their own personal problems manifest in some bizarre parking territory claim.

I guarantee you most garages are not empty, even if not used for vehicles people store stuff in them.

Their storage problem shouldn't be everyone's problem, though.

When I look, I see garages + driveways, and the driveways are empty. Also, how many cars would each of those homes have? The residents are all apparently elderly and/or disabled, so it would be unbelievable to me that they would have 3 - 5 cars per home.

Regardless, public roads are NOT the place for them to be parking on a permanent basis.

And filling the driveway with a car in the garage is dumb because then you have to shuffle vehicles if you need to use the one in the garage.

Again, this is a self-created problem. The personal inconvenience of one shouldn't be the inconvenience of all. If front-entry parking is needed, the homeowners should be allowed to convert their lawn into a driveway (via by-law).

Those “traffic calming” measures suck donkey balls. Unneccesary concrete islands and out juttings that prevent people parking, and the city expect the homeowners to mow/shovel those spaces

Funny, because this would have come up during the city's extensive public consultation rounds, and alternatives would have been provided for feedback.

Also, why don’t the cyclists use the alley ways? There is little car traffic there.

Those alleys are designed for residents to be able to access their parking area, and not as a road for transportation. While I'm sure you could take a detour through those alleys on a bike, it would be inappropriate to assign them as "bike lanes". Also, it would create conflict for people who actually want to visit the front of homes, forcing them to use the road anyway. Not ideal for anyone.

because those rentals wouldn’t include a parking space, typically.

All the more reason to flesh out the cycling and public transportation network.

The point is, taxpayers should not be paying for these residents to have on-street (public) parking, while they leave their (private) garages and driveways empty.

For residents that absolutely "must have" parking at the back and front of their property, by-law provisions should allow them to be able to create a second driveway on their front lawn.

Just the sight of those streets with cars lining both sides of the curb just screams entitlement.

I wish this report made mention of the fact that all the residents on the affected roads have their own garages and special access road to those garages behind their homes.

They are against bike lanes because they are selfish individuals who want to park on public property instead of on their own property.

They'd rather have this:

Instead of using this:

There should be zero need to have on-street parking on both sides of a residential street, when garages and driveways remain empty! If they end up cancelling these bike lanes, the city should be charging for parking at a rate of $100 per day per resident.

Traffic calming measures, also being opposed by the residents

This makes no sense. At all. No matter how big of an asshole you might be.

To me, if I had to get a new monitor, it would 100% have to be 120 Hz at 4K OLED with HDR.

My TV and smartphone are both HDR with high refresh rates and it really puts my laptop and desktop monitors to shame.

That's one part of a many part problem.

Housing (including rent) isn't solely the responsibility of the federal government, but I'm glad to see that they are getting more involved.

Provinces and municipal/regional governments play a much greater role, so we need to pressure all levels of government to step up their efforts.

Carney must be the first PM that I can remember, who actually fleshes out answers, rather than avoiding them. Impressive, to say the least, as it shows a clear understanding of the subjects he's being asked about.

While the CD checks are absolutely annoying, nothing, and I mean nothing, was more inconvenient than having to go to a certain page and a certain line and a certain word in the manual to unlock a program you paid for. Fucking infuriating.