shayway
Joined 1 year ago
Joined 1 year ago
Where I live actually has the opposite; there are ~6 within a mile, and they're usually completely full. People are always dumping huge collections into them, to where I never even have the chance to give back myself.
I don't know what makes it different here. But it is possible for them to work without safeguards.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 (warning, lots of disturbing imagery)
A healthy user-empowered ecosystem naturally has some fragmentation; that's a sign it's working as it should to accommodate different tastes and visions. You can't use the same metrics for judging monolothic systems driven by a central authority as decentralized ones.
I share many of the author's opinions on communication vs entertainment, but the framing around an intentionally open and flexible system like ActivityPub leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
LLMs and AI art flip this around because potentially very little effort went into making things that potentially take lots of effort to experience and digest. That doesn't inherently mean they're not valuable, but it does mean there's no guarantee that at least one other person out there found it valuable. Even pre-AI it wasn't an iron-clad guarantee of course -- copy-writing, blogspam, and astroturfing existed long before LLMs. But everyone hates those because they prey on the same social contract that LLMs do, except in a smaller scale, and with a lower effort-in:effort-out ratio.
IMO though, while AI enables malicious / selfish / otherwise anti-social behavior at an unprecedented scale, it also enables some pretty cool stuff and new creative potential. Focusing on the tech rather than those using it to harm others is barking up the wrong tree. It's looking for a technical solution to a social problem.
The amount of waste of even middle class earners is staggering. American culture needs to catch up with the fact that infinite growth, on both a personal and a societal level, is just not sustainable.
Please, at least put a disclaimer on top so I can ask an AI to summarize the article and complete the cycle of entropy.