Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it’s also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
I think that’s already uncomfortably close to reality.
A fully AI company was already tried as an experiment. There is also a company that appointed an AI CEO but I suspect this one is a publicity stunt. The experiment was a “failure” by the way, with AI agents only completing less than 20% of the tasks in the fake company and with some hilarious mishaps. But 20% of a company tasks being done in full autonomy by (not specifically trained) AI is scary.
Right now, various socials are full of AI generated fake engagement, images and videos. Meta is offering AI-powered ads. The obvious question I see asked every time, also here on Lemmy, is: if most of Facebook becomes a zombie world where comments and fake engagement is all LLMs, who would buy those Meta ads? That question was actually what inspired this wildly successful (-27 votes and counting!) showerthought of mine: this fake engagement only makes sense if Meta thinks we’ll give AI more and more agency to choose the products we buy and (eventually) buy them on our behalf. So it’s going to be AI convincing other AIs to buy. Our money becomes sentient, so to speak,
Crazy talk, right? Well…
Thanks! I’ll try longer showers.
I like the comparison. We used to think of the Economy like this hard-to-control, vital but occasionally dangerous natural force, like Gravity. The showerthought was that with the advent of machine models, money has started becoming sentient and making decisions without us.
Fair enough… I meant more in the sense of investment/pension funds. Or the fact that the actual value of the bills in our pockets is driven up or (more frequently) down and probably so does the interest rate of your mortgage or the price of your fuel. And maybe not for you, but the algorithms on social media do have influence on what company you choose for your insurance.
“people” buying ads? In 2035? What a delightfully vintage concept!
Fun fact: Nadella has been replaced with an AI agent a couple of months ago and nobody has noticed yet. “Copilot, while I’m away, generate bs on AI adoption and fire a bunch of employees, ok?”
prompt engineering does require skills. It’s just that, rightly or not, they are now seen by companies as foundational skills for a lot of jobs and worth investing in training for most employees (rather than hiring a team of prompt specialists).
Like if you work in certain roles you need to have good knowledge of spreadsheet software, you don’t go to your company’s “Excel guru”.
As an alien I would now spend all my time targeting wannabe influencers. Wait until they are alone, get naked and let them take high-quality pictures and videos of my green ass while I dance and play yankee doodle on my harmonica
“it drove right through my kitchen wall. And I hadn’t even ordered one!”
Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
worth giving it a try…do NOT, I repeat do NOT spray RFK Jr with DDT every time you see him. I am a liberal and this would really make me cry. Don’t do it!
I like it a lot but I need two physical SIM slots so it doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. But great idea and love the price drop
Thanks, I understand better now.
On a related note, I wish I had known of the “just because I said it and I did it, doesn’t mean I succeeded” line of defense when I was a kid
Meta argued that “the FTC’s case rests almost entirely on emails (many more than a decade old) allegedly expressing competitive concerns” but suggested that this is only “intent” evidence, “without any evidence of anticompetitive effects.”
Not sure I understand the argument. if I write that I’m going to buy another company instead of competing with them, then I go ahead and I do buy that exact company, are they arguing that the two things are not necessarily related?
That’s true but at least one of these things needs to happen:
the forklift costs billions and consumes tons of energy, but it can lift a whole mountain, which no group of humans can do
the forklift helps a team of 10 do the work of 50 and, while still relatively expensive, it costs less than the 40 people it’s replacing
the forklift becomes an inexpensive commodity and it augments human capabilities and creates new possibilities for society as a whole
This is roughly what happened with mainframes to personal computers to mobile devices. LLMs are stuck between 1 and 2, they are not good enough forklifts to lift a mountain and not cheap enough to replace 40 people and save money. There are some hints that they could at one point move to 3 but the large players that could make it happen are starting to be scared by the amount of investment to get there.
On a related note, lot of people are being fooled by this hype machine mixing GenAI with good “old” machine learning and you now read about all these “AI wins” like “student discovers new galaxies with AI” or “scientist discover new medicines with AI” that make it sound like these people just asked ChatGPT “how would you go about discovering a new galaxy?” or “could you make up a new drug for me pretty please?”.
yes, but with at least $100M of additional VC funding
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.