AI can cheaply fake almost every signal we traditionally used to judge quality. I now see this pattern everywhere, in open source, in education, in research, all breaking at the same time. I find signaling theory useful for diagnosing what is happening and why it is so disorienting, and signaling theory and adjacent literature can provide the vocabulary to discuss possible solutions.
I don’t entirely agree with the doom and gloom of that article. Humans are particularly good at adapting to changes. And humans are particularly good at detecting patterns and anti-patterns. Patterns are signals, and while adaption will take a while and will be painful, I think we’ll work it out. For example, detecting AI slop reliably and intuitively is a skill that more and more people learn. Once the pattern is learnt, it’s a new useful signal. Other new signals emerge for quality detection. In a world of crap software, the few that work well will stand out. Anything that can be “created” by anyone with a few prompts loses its value. What’s valuable will be what stands out from the slop.
Learning to identify AI made content is currently possible in some cases, and as things are, we’re fast approaching the situation when it won’t be possible in most cases. I don’t think we can adapt this in that way.
If what you are saying was true, propaganda wouldn’t work.
That’s the part about the painful process I mentioned. The dumb masses were always dumb and they will be the last to adapt. We’re in the Programming community and therefore might be a little earlier, as tech people are often early adopters of new ideas. I mean, the fact that you are using Lemmy is a sign that you want to try something more progressive, while most of the general public are happy with X, Instagram and Reddit.
I’m fairly Ai positive myself, I just want to point out that Ai is better at detecting patterns than humans are.
For example, detecting AI slop reliably and intuitively is a skill that more and more people learn.
This is true, I also have this skill right now, but I have no confidence it will still be useful 2 years from now.
Anything that can be “created” by anyone with a few prompts loses its value.
What is value exactly, commercial value? Just because it took 3 prompts to create a great tool or the 11th season of Friends does not mean those don’t have personal value or can give you a huge productivity boost or entertainment.
One of the things the author provided as a moderate answer is actually scarier than anything else he described. Delegation
Delegation plays right into the hands of people who made AI, because that’s what they want: for you to stop thinking about whether something is good or valid or not and trust other sources. Their sources, to be precise. It goes by a term I’ve seen thrown around that I like: cognitive surrender. You stop critically thinking about the problems and hope somebody else solved them.
Some things must delegate to some degree. As an example: Before, if we didn’t know how to code through something, we threw the question or problem at StackExchange or user forums and hoped a person more talented and experienced than us could answer. Beats bashing your head into a wall all day. And usually somebody eventually came through. Because some humans love helping and it doesn’t hurt if they want to show off either. They’ll even explain how and why it works. You got unblocked from your problem and then carried on doing everything else. The problem and solution are available for all to see. StackExchange doesn’t own the resulting contributions or gatekeep them, it just hosts them. This is healthy delegation.
Now you ask the equivalent of a magic 8ball to just do all of the work for you. That includes the knowledge to do so, and the quality control thereof. But the 8ball doesn’t actually understand your usecase. It’s not interested in helping you. It has no desires. It doesn’t really know what good projects look like. It doesn’t know if it even completed what you asked for unless you tell it that it did. When it’s “done,” you have a product of questionable quality and no idea how or why it made certain decisions. It can be prompted to explain itself, but it doesn’t really know. And it’ll give different people different answers. Your prompts and its decisionmaking and answers are private. Nobody except the AI owner knows what happened and why. Actually even AI corporations don’t have the complete why.
Now, propose that some team of people, let’s say Microsoft, starts to become the arbiter. They detect whether a project is completed and good enough. They give the project ratings based on metrics you can’t see or audit. Are they working in your best interests? Have they ever had your interests in mind? Who gets to audit whether or not their checks and balances are fair and correct? You don’t. You gave up that responsibility and now nobody except the entity that made the AI is even authoritative enough to answer.
The result is you don’t own the problem or the solution. You ask and you’re forced to be happy with what you get back. This is not delegation. Because you don’t have the responsibility anymore. This is surrender.
If we delegate, it has to be to everyone, not walled fortresses of corporate design. That’s what open source was designed to give. That’s what we have to claw back. Designating specific groups as arbiters of truth and quality creates an infinitely corruptible system. We’ve seen it before. People put in that place of power will abuse it. So the power must be distributed and shared by everyone instead.
Full disclosure, I have only skimmed the source article because I just woke up and am not quite with it, but your comment brought to mind two real-world situations that I’m currently trying to navigate.
In my regular working life, I recently hired an assistant. The person we hired seemed like a great fit. They had all the requisite knowledge and skills represented in their resume and work history, with examples of actual work product to show for their efforts. Sadly, I’ve come to realize that all of their work and the terminology they threw around in their interview was from AI. When asked to use tools and systems that they cannot just dump into an AI system - you know, things that require actual intelligence and effort to wield - they flounder, plod along, and honestly, have a lower quality of work than most amateurs I interact with.
It’s not just that they don’t seem to know the material, it’s that they don’t seem to be capable of learning it, either.In my extracurricular working life (my freelance work, side hustle, or what-have-you), I work with an educational institution to create educational materials for students. Very template-driven, and with some strict editorial and stylistic confines. Key amongst them is accessibility.
Before I get my hands on the files, they go through a robust editorial process where they are placed in an organizational template that mirrors the layout file. Lately I’ve been receiving files that look like the template, but are just all the ‘Normal’ style in Word, with overrides applied. Which is to say that someone has been using AI to style the document, and the AI has not been applying headings, or other elements that define document structure - a key component of accessibility. We’re having lengthy discussions about this - both practical, and philosophical. On the philosophical side, we’re struggling with the decoherence of information. And I think that also factors into cognitive surrender - a term I very much like.(Thank you coming to my TED talk.)
There is no AI, what we have is precisely cognitive conformity as a service that replaces conventional information search. We all should be fucking scared.
I agree you don’t know if the AI is working in your your best interest. But at the same time you don’t know if the person answering your StackOverflow question, is acting in your best interest either. They could just be racking up SO points to unlock more mod powers.
If you’re saying that AI centralizes power, then I agree with you.
That said, unlike answers from an LLM, SO answers are available for public review and scrutiny (for better or worse) which can filter out unhelpful answers.
Yeah not to say StackExchange was a perfect answer either. It was the best we had. I frequently grated against their community guidelines for posting things, especially when somebody would mark a question as duplicate but then linked to something completely fucking unrelated. Developers can be curmudgeonly shits sometimes.
But it was far more trustworthy than what we have now. Cuz you can bet even if they were being smug shits, the people writing answers on SE were trying to be more correct than everybody else and prove it.
You can’t just live in plato’s cave and hope that the shadows on the wall are well-written code. But there will be a lot of people who try.
One of the best takes I have read in a while. It eloquently describes my main concern and worry. The destruction of curated knowledge by drowning out the signal with noise.
It worked for media to gain political power. First thing they went for is “balanced” news, and then they torpedoed the science/education sections by adding “junk” programming.
Not entirely onboard with how negative the perspective is but agree with the increase of noise making it harder to find real signals. This might sound simplistic but I just see it as the progression of technology and it’s just something you deal with like getting old. There are plenty of waves in technology that created new problems and it always leads to new solutions.
Great article! I’m floored.
I think all of the outcomes will happen in different domains and use cases. It all depends on the cost to verify trust and quality. Plenty can do with slop, but certain donations absolutely cannot.
Reminds me of the book Fall or Dodge in Hell where they use PERDAs and editors to verify authorship and build trust networks to combat fake signaling from AI. I think that book (while bleak) is a bit too hopeful. An excellent read though, well worth the time.
When production costs more due to allowing time and training for quality labor, and profit is reigned in for affordability, everyone wins.
Right. When no one loses, “winning” becomes meaningless.
Capitalism makes everything a zero sum game, because market must grow, in order to survive.
I understand that Mani Mani was thrust upon us and never stopped rejecting it beyond as being a tool to measure. Everyone has defined it is as everything else and I reject it. Not because of right and wrong but because I don’t work like that.
I think even Helium can escape TFT. Never tried it but I don’t really need to. Basic logic. That’s what they’ll get for playing me like I’m stupid by being stupid.
Zero sum indeed. Sayonara. LMFAO.
