[muvlon]

The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything.

And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things that have gotten better due to AI (certain kinds of accessibility tech) and a huge pile of things that just suck now. The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

[pixl97]

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them.

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.

[ethbr1]

> bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them

You'd think we would have learned this lesson in failing to implement email charges that net'd to $0 for balanced send/receive patterns. And thereby heralded in a couple decades of spam, only eventually solved by centralization (Google).

Driving the cost of anything valuable to zero inevitably produces an infinite torrent of volume.

[mogsor]

AI doesn't encompass any "human behaviours", the humans controlling it do. Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, it does it because people tell it to and it has (or had) no instructions to the contrary

[n8cpdx]

You’re way off base. It can also create sexually explicit pictures of men.

[abustamam]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but women are disproportionately affected by this than men.

[notanastronaut]

>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

[mogsor]

It's true, making these things easier and faster and more accessible really doesn't matter