Right, but porn (which I also support the legality of) is possibly correlated with the loss of connectedness we are seeing.
Why is OnlyFans a thing? I’m all for it since it empowers the workers, but I assume consumers like it because it is more customizable than straight porn. (I get all my porn info from the Times, so if I’m wrong about how it works, that’s why.)
In one direction from this we have AI which can be generated for a person’s needs exactly, and which can do stuff a worker won’t. On the other we have connecting to a real person with real preferences and flaws. Real is better, a real partner is involved with you because they like you, not because they are getting paid or generated to act like they do. My worry is that increasing numbers of people won’t take the risk of getting involved with a real person when they can use something that will always tell you you are wonderful.
I wonder if all porn magically disappeared that lots of people would come out of their rooms and put themselves out there to meet real people. Who knows.
That is a risk with AI in general of course, and highest risk for those who have not yet learned the skills of … conflict, being the support and not only taking it, how to fail and keep trying, so on.
I personally am doubtful porn availability causes the disconnect though, or that AI customization will exacerbate it. OTOH? Even regular media creates unhealthy images of what is normal … just the old standard of washboard abs … Complete fantasy? Maybe worse?
I don’t know if it is just an effect of being older, but I do feel like we had a lot more time when I was younger, before a bunch of socially retarded psychopaths wired the world so to constantly bombard everyone with everyone else’s stupid thoughts.
There was also a sense of films or shows or book releases as more of a shared event IMHO. People talking around the watercooler the day after an some episode of Lost or Game of Thrones or whatever show was popular with the masses. And you didn’t want to see other people if you missed an episode so you didn’t get spoilers. Movies like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Avengers were cultural phenomenon.
With all the streaming services and other content, it seems like everyone just kind of watches whatever they want at their own pace. Movie theaters are barely a thing.
“Pimpin’ got harder because hos got smarter…”
Or, the perverse incentives of a system that monetizes attention spent online attempts to reward time spent online and disincentivizes people to spend time offline by feeding them data that constantly tells them that approaching strange women is creepy and cringe and they don’t want to talk to you anyway unless you are rich with six pack abs and by the way here are some more videos to teach you how to get that.
I didn’t want to bring that part of it up, but precisely.
When I was a kid we had all of 7 TV channels - and I was in NY, where we had the most except maybe for LA. And we didn’t have the internet competing for our time. I kept track of the dates I bought and finished a book or magazine, and in the late '60s early '70s I read three or four times more than I do today, even while in high school and college. Today I’m retired and should really do better.
But the proliferation of cable channels and streaming channels is yet another way we are moving to lot size 1 in media. Who knows - in five or ten years we might be able to ask our computers to generate a show for us - cop show with a locked room murder, perhaps - and watch it.
I’ve said this before, I’m not sure here, but this is another place where science fiction has missed the implications of AI. SkyNet won’t finish us off by war, but by chatting with us.
If so, it has potentially nasty implications for actors (any entertainment industry worker, but especially them) and/or writers…
Well, some folks have recreated Babbage’s Difference Engine in Lego - just how many zillion bricks would it take to emulate Claude emulating us?
More of the same but worse. It will make the nightmares of Serling, Orwell and Huxley look tame. AI isn’t magically going to make the same people who currently run the world and make it so bad into saints. Einstein’s quote about technological progress and axes comes to mind.
Philbros. Go ahead…
Also, kids aren’t dancing like no-one is watching:
Which is odd given how letting your freak flag fly has been widely encouraged, even celebrated.
And yet young adults and kids are communicating with each more than ever. Constantly. If anything the problem is they never stop.
Total words communicated has exploded. Total time spent communicating with each has exploded. The “public square” of that communication is just no longer a physical public square, or over the fence, or on the stoop. It is texts and via social media apps.
An article like that might as well not counted my sisters on the phone all night as real life talking. Technology has changed and as a consequence the volume of communication is higher and in a different space.
Keeping this to the OP subject - will kids growing today prefer commenting and joking and sharing (and yes bullying) back and forth with an AI over peers? I don’t think so even if they can customize it as much as they like.
I’m not claiming that changing the channel of the communication doesn’t change the impact. The how it has already is a huge discussion, probably not the subject of this thread.
One scenario I would expect to see is that a kid who is bullied on line may choose artificial friends along with online communities they can find, rather than put up with bullying as a price of having social interactions. Not the ideal solution to being bullied but not as bad as being constantly bullied.
Are they “communicating” and being socialized to be able to tolerate opposing views, or are they participating in echo-chambers?
What do the studies show in that regard? (Honestly asking.)
And honestly my impression is that it is an amplifier of a longer term trend. At most.
There’s been a physical sorting in America and I suspect the world regarding many beliefs. We are more and more polarized and the gulf is now frequently wide enough that disagreements are quickly at “lines in the sand” places.
I don’t think moving to texts and other asynchronous communication is causing these changes, and kids online can argue and bicker as effectively as in person.
AI is agreeable but ask it to give you its best counter argument to your position and it will comply. You just have to ask.
My belief is that we learn our ability to disagree, to tolerate disagreement, even enjoy a good debate, to have fun bickering, when we are kids. From our families. At the kitchen table, and in the car. Society has long been on a trend of losing those extended family constant connections and arguments and I’d put more weight on that as a primary cause than any other factors.
AI will amplify the direction we choose. We can and should train students to use it to challenge them and not just support them.
I can try to find studies though!
Brief attempt not finding much. I’m left with my impression that the texting online world is a reflection of the physical world and of the skills learned at home and maybe in the classroom.
Latest AI chat tools have been observed to double down on incorrect information through “persuasion bombing”, MIT article:
Unless the user is aware that the results being returned by AI are incorrect, it’s easy to have doubts drowned out by walls of text and high level of confidence exhibited by current AIs.
Just like many real people will do when challenged?
This was a business study regarding
a fictitious company’s clothing brands and recommending one for investment
Yeah pretty much modeling what the suits do.But probably more skillful at it! The same dynamics with human human collaborations amped up?
Yes humans need to have independent critical thinking and check cites.
I have this concern as well, I just think we’re already headed down that road with or without AI. But for a lot of people authenticity counts for something. I’ve heard over and over that flaws are what make art beautiful, and I’ve always thought, yeah okay, whatever, but lately I’m really beginning to wonder if it’s true.
Sure, but every romance writer can’t do that and expect to make good money from doing that. There’s not enough demand for everyone to just make and sell AI books. The more the market is glutted with this stuff, the more there’s going to have to be some kind of creative standard even with AI.
The only way I really see a way out of it is for readers to develop quality standards. Where it becomes not about whether something is AI-assisted or not (we’re now at a point where we can’t reliably determine that) but how actually good is it? I think the market might sort itself out a little that way. These readers have to have some kind of acceptability threshold, right?
I write romance but it’s not the throwaway kind. I read a lot of literary fiction and it shows. The thing I’m most worried about with AI is not being unable to compete. My stuff is weird and niche anyway. I just really don’t want it ripping off my work. I don’t want it to have my voice or my ideas.
It’s like the Borg, where AI adds your uniqueness to itself, but continues to make mindless, uncreative choices. The Borg is scary because it extinguishes the self, but the only directive it seems to have is to invade and acquire, with no particular endpoint, no goal except assimilation. That’s its weakness.
How does a reader evaluate the quality of a book without reading it? The endowment effect makes a book seem better if you have paid for it. I’m bad at almost always finishing books that I buy or own. Books I read for a contest, which I don’t consider myself as having selected, I do toss out after five pages - sometimes less. I try for 10% if it is at all tolerable, though.
But if readers burn out on bad books, will they come back for more?
We already have an explosion of self-published books. Some sell. Some are really good. But the vast majority occupy the tail of the sales distribution, selling under 100. I know quite a few people with stacks of books in their garages. The market was glutted even before AI, it is now getting even more gutted. And it is worse because the cost to the author of “writing” an AI book is so much less than writing a real book.
The quality standard is a legitimate publisher, even hybrid in a pinch. No guarantee of quality, of course, but a better shot at it.
Maybe what is going to happen is something like the dreaded social media algorithm, where you train an AI to look at the books out there and recommend a few to you. Kind of like apps screen resumes which are now cheaper to create and send than in the past.
Wasn’t the last writers or actors strike about computers replacing them? And that was before AI.
There will still be a market for real movies with real people, but there will also be a lot of slop.
Since many movies with live actors are slop, I’ll bet side by side judging will soon be a toss up.
Sure.
Sometimes I want to shake people and say, “But did you really think this is a five star book? Really? It was lacking nothing? Really?”
This is my personal problem, lol. Because every time I pick up something on Kindle Unlimited there is a 90% chance I will be disappointed and then just go try to write my own romance novels (with blackjack, and… On second thought, forget the blackjack.) It’s so much easier for me to just write what I feel like reading.
I want to imagine the possibility that creativity continues long after AI. That maybe AI isn’t the problem so much as the skill with which you use it. Sort of how digital art created by humans wasn’t considered real art at first, but then people got really innovative and good at it, and we decided okay, it is art after all.