Opinion | The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse
www.nytimes.com
Why the development of artificial intelligence might result in greater pollution of our digital public spaces.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

  • Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    169·
    1 year ago

    This analogy falls apart when you note that “overgrazing” these resources does absolutely nothing to harm them.

    Only if you consider AI-supercharged misinformation to not be harmful.

    Only if you consider the entropy of human interaction on the internet to not be harmful.

    Only if you consider being unable to know who is real to not be harmful.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      102·
      1 year ago

      None of those things directly harm the resources being “grazed”, and none of them are inevitable consequences of AI. If you think they are then you’re actually arguing against AI in general and not the specific way in which they’ve been trained.

      • Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        55·
        1 year ago

        You think the internet being flooded with articles, comments etc. all being written by AI whose only goals are selling shit, disseminating misinformation, and manipulating elections and opinions - with no way to know what is human and what is AI - is going to be a great environment to continue to train your AI?

        You might be interested to read about Model Autophagy Disorder.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          53·
          1 year ago

          That is not a problem caused by “overgrazing” those open resources. It’s a separate problem with AI training that needs to be addressed anyway. You’re just throwing out random AI-related challenges regardless of whether they’re relevant to what’s being discussed.

          Simply put, quality control is always important.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
              12·
              1 year ago

              And you’re completely missing the point.

              Whether or not toxic waste is pumped into the field is completely independent of whether anyone is “grazing” on it. AIs are going to be trained and AIs are going to be generating content, regardless of whether those “commons” are being used as training material. If you wish to keep those “commons” high-quality you’re going to have to come up with some way of doing that regardless of whether they’re being used as training material. Banning the use of them as training material will have no impact on whether they get “toxic waste” pumped into it.

              My objection is to those who are saying that to save the commons we need to prevent grazing, ie, that to save the quality of public discourse we need to prevent AIs from training on it. Those two things are unrelated. Stopping AIs from training on it will not do anything to preserve the quality of public discourse.