I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page.
There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.
On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.
I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.
My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!
I'm saying you don't even need a substitute. Genuinely looking back, I was more anxious when I would browse reddit in my free time.
I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.
"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.
Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.
I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.
RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely.
Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
weep? I'd finally be free. I wish this site would disappear too. Whoever designed these algorithms got me good, at a young age, and I don't think these sites have been a net positive overall or on me personally
We are already free. If we keep returning to a few subreddits, it's because we can't find an equivalent community elsewhere. If they kill the old interface, we'll eventually use the new one if there are no other alternatives, no need to lie to ourselves.
Iam nearly 15 years on reddit now and I would miss it if i cant use old. or a good client. Iam sure sooner or later it will happen and ill most probably leave.
Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.
Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.
Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are
1. Car crashes
2. Street/bum fights
3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)
4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")
5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)
Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level
I've found a page on Facebook that regularly posts single white mothers with black babies on supposed dating profiles with very demanding requirements for men. The comments are loaded with people saying that they deserve their current situation, enforcing racial stereotypes, etc. It's not hard to see that these are AI generated, as there are maybe 5-8 posts a day like this, and the images are pretty clearly AI generated. Regardless, they get the engagement, and they sell the shirts. Easy way to automate a business, I guess, but at what cost?!
I don't have a link, but I have seen exactly what he's talking about, which probably means that it is an established business model and multiple actors are doing it.
A similar thing I have randomly come across multiple times on YouTube are videos consisting of a still AI image of a white person mistreating a black person (e.g. a white police officer screaming with rage at a black man eating in a diner) and an AI voiceover text telling a GPT-generated story hashtagged #heartwarming, e.g. "The white police officer was violent against the black man... What he didn't know was this was a highly decorated veteran!"
Some of these are clearly getting picked up by the algorithm and drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The factories behind these are probably halfway around the world but realized the race relations of a large economy can be exploited for profit or geopolitics.
Several of the Reddit "AmITheAsshole"-style subs have a significant number of posts which are either AI or sloppy creative writing.
Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI has accelerated this process, at least for people who don't notice when they're getting played (or who don't want to notice).
I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and think it's real.
> I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content!
I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?
This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.
Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.
Cultural antibodies take a long time to develop. In twenty years you will see more common resistance to what's being produced today, but less to whatever new innovation is released then.
See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.
I will admit, I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I am having a harder time these days identifying AI-generated content (aside from the obvious ones).
I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.
And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.
Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).
I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people don’t really use Facebook very much and are much more active on TikTok and instagram, both of which I would describe as semi-hostile to AI, or at least the kind of lazy slop AI you’re talking about.
Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all.
BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
> ...I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.
Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.
E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.
Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.
As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.
Unfortunately, "X is just a tool and is super useful when used properly, all things are both bad in excess and good in moderation, what you gonna do?" is exactly the type of conclusion that a chat bot is likely to reach. Doesn't really say anything, appears to express sophistication and wisdom by being more "nuanced" than an actual position, demands nothing of your audience, not likely to get downvotes on social media, etc.
I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215
> You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.
It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.
Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.
When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.
(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)
Yes, IMO this is going to start becoming visible sooner rather than later. College students that defer to ChatGPT to form arguments for them are going to graduate, sit for an in-person job interview and discover they haven't had to think fast, with their own brain, in years. It won't be pretty.
But who is going to crack first? Will job applicants somehow remove their borg implants and learn to think on their own? Or will businesses give in and admit that nobody can think for themselves anymore, allowing applicants to use ChatGPT during their interviews (knowing that they're probably going to need to use it on the job, too).
there seems to be a parallel with the industrial revolution - being fit and having muscles used to be the norm when everyone worked the fields all day. but now that grocery stores and sedentary jobs have made exercise optional. so choosing to pursue fitness signals to others that one is disciplined, takes pride in their appearance, etc.
i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.
>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.
And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.
People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.
Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.
Curious if we could test/compare (popluation-level) memory skills before/after writing was introduced to the population.
I want to say "I remember things better when I write them down", and because I think I'm a smart person I think my memory is good.
I don't know how well I'd remember things if I'd spent a large portion of my life building memorization skills. Maybe I could be 100x better at memory if I exercised it more?
Anything that contributes to you not needing to actually "think" and instead just "react" is going to be bad for you because it is simply engaging your reward system. The only way LLMs can be a net good is if they free you from drudgery and allow you to work harder on the things that actually matter. (Think dishwashers and laundry machines). If you are using them as an "easy button" so you can finish your work (poorly) to have more time to scroll your timeline then yes, you are turning your brain into mush.
I'm purposefully not engaging with whether LLMs are actually even good at what they do, which is another discussion.
I think this is true of just about any technology. It will make lazy people lazier and help productive people get more done in less time. It's all about where the motivation is for each individual.
The wishful cynic in me sometimes thinks this might actually lead to a partial reversal of ageism in the workforce. It's almost starting to look like the kids graduating from school with chatgpt are actually handicapped (painting in extremely broad strokes; there will always be prodigies) and those who graduated or worked before 2022 will actually become more desirable to hire.
I'm sure this take is at best oversimplified. Probably mostly wrong. But it's certainly something I will think about while hiring from now on
Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.
A recent Stanford grad just told me "it's all just bots talking to bots", referring to students who use ChatGPT to do all their homework, and teachers who use ChatGPT to grade the work that was submitted by ChatGPT. And because of the pandemic, somehow people think it's now reasonable to do standardized testing in private with internet access. It's an anecdote, but she was really dissatisfied with her experience there. And that's one of the most prestigious schools in the country.
Do you have a different experience in academia recently?
It's funny how multiple commenters here are reacting to this article by saying that older media is also bad when the article itself is about specific observations about how relying on AI and overengaging in social media can lead to detrimental outcomes.
Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.
Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.
Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!!
Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?
On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.
> We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality.
The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are common (politics), and thread discussions like on HN where real life versions are fleetingly rare. I dont think its entirely fair to conflate the two. eg:
> Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions?
I discuss on HN as much to find and genuinely debate alternative opinions, and IME thats a pretty common pattern. i have learned so much reading other comments, formulating thoughtful responses to others, and have others break down / extend / critique my own shared opinions. Its what makes HN enjoyable and also the primary way its different than other social media sites.
I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1.
> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.
Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion.
I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.
> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.
> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads
And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.
Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.
You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.
> You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN.
I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.
My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.
this website exists as an advertisement for a brand. the people here are hustling harder than anywhere! it's worse than LinkedIn! that's why this website is a constant dick measuring contest -- it's a news site run by a venture capitalist firm about startups!
Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?
the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..
HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc.
HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone.
HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.
There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking.
The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.
On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.
So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.
Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.
I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.
I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past
> I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past
This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.
That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are.
I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.
The ideas seem fairly clear to me. They're working on projects that are much more complex than what they were able to approach before, and they're able to dive into topics that were previously out of reach because of AI assistance. The grammar may not be perfect, but the point is understandable.
If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from.
...good question. This (standard) excuse is designed to make you feel bad for potentially insulting someone trying their hardest, but it doesn't make any sense.
Funny I've been trying to quit reddit and I'm just like "what do I do with my time" I usually have two windows: reddit on the left and YT on the right. I work 7 days a week and haven't made anything for myself code/hardware wise in a while.
I think of this concept living second hand through other people's lives (social media) it's not living your own
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
20 years ago I remember all the scary articles/studies about the web ruining education.
e.g
Net cheaters (from link below)
The ease of gathering information on the Internet has a darker side. The simplicity of finding out things on the Web also makes it easy for students to cheat. Cutting and pasting text from a Web site and into a paper is effortless. So is wholesale copying or purchasing finished essays or reports. About a fifth of online youth (18%) say they know of someone who has used the Internet to cheat on a paper or test. While 9% of those who have been online for a year or less know someone who has cheated, 19% of those who have been online for 2 to 3 years and 28% of those who have been online for more than three years know people who have used the Net to cheat
Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.
If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.
That still seems to be a problem.
It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued).
At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.
It was used in exactly the same way. You think the world you live in is based on the honest truth of how things went? Entire families and peoples have been written out of history, for convenience. They are kept out of history for "stability".
Reading should help one think, but it is not to replace thinking...
I mean to some degree it is true in that you have the luxury of forgetting stuff if you know where you can get that information in future. I think many can agree that having access to written and printed word even has been a big positive.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.
I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.
I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.
But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.
I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
Lumping AI together with social media is confusing for me. One is a tool for the user, the other is not.
If social media is a tool for anything, it is for the company to generate ad revenue. Sure there is value someone can extract (keeping in touch family). But I can also extract value from junk mail (using it as scrap paper for notes and lists.)
AI is still a tool. I think? I have not seen any direct way that monetizes it through ads, yet. I expect AI with a revenue model will look way worse.
AI is turning people dumb. I see it all the time with code slop. It's the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish". Maybe a tool-using approach to AI is "should me how to do this", rather than "do this for me". "Show me an example of some code" is more useful to me than unleashing it on my project.
Also, social media is obviously a sort of digital narcotic. Probably should be scheduled.
“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.
The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.
Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.
Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.
typical technological determinism. comparing AI to the motorcoach assumes something we cannot know yet, namely that the impact of AI on the next century will be comparable to the invention of the automobile. there's also a long list of negative externalities caused by automobiles. who cares? anyone hurt by climate change, or who lives in a grid organized around cars rather than people. anyone who has ever been killed in a car accident.
Yes, although in this case the premise is just entirely wrong. A "traditional Google search" doesn't work anymore as Google just ignores half of what you put in anyway, and even vigorous quoting and Google-fu still generally just returns SEO garbage. Whereas e.g. Kagi is another world (proving that "knowing how to search" is not actually the problem anyway).
"AI" absolutely contributes to brain rot. Google "AI" is just a status quo propagandist that makes things up, misunderstands questions and berates the "user" if the "user" dares to contradict. It is worse than any legacy media. It also weaves in how awesome "AI" is and how the "user" should treat "AI" with respect, preferably like a human.
You should definitely keep minors away from this dangerous brainwashing.
Even better "AI"s lead to outsourcing of thought, search capabilities, speed reading and critical reflection.
Contribute? That's basically its only purpose now, rot your brain with a dopamine drip and show you a bajillion ads. Now with AI slopgen being baked right into most of them it's been set into overdrive.
Deleted all my social media accounts except Youtube (but I use Unhook to remove everything except my subscriptions and the search). Haven't felt better. I use Telegram and Whatsapp and SMS to keep in touch with friends and family, nothing connected to any social app. I avoid all of the social-media-lite features in those apps like the plague.
Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation. Ditto for garbage like People magazine. If you watch some old TV ads from the 80s, it’s scary at how bad they are. The variety of content from modern, connected platforms definitely can be harmful but it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation than a dozen TV stations and yellow journalism.
> it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation
less ?
We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...
If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.
What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?
As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.
Past media may have prepped us with some brain rot that's now causing people to prostrate themselves to the tech giants in exchange for not having to work as hard. But that doesn't mean that an acceleration of social media, slop, and loss of transparency on the information we take in isn't going to be extremely worse.
Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior.
Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.
The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.
[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.
Exactly. The article should just say “Mass consumption of media causes brain rot” because since 1900 that’s all it’s doing.
Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.
Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…
Why hasn't a social media platform with mandatory verification to prove users are unique humans taken off yet? Still too hard to break the existing network effects?
That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.
AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.
(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)
Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.
Who cares about planetary scale? Back when your networking reach was largely limited by the size of your area code, local BBSes had user verification and were incredibly popular.
Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
Anonymity is more important, and verification systems can always be gamed. To add, given what you see well known people post under their real name, including Trump posting a video of himself shitting all over Americans, I don't understand what benefit you're expecting to get.
> Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar.
You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
>Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar.
"played a role" != "instigated". everything "played a role" there.
their fucking government did it.
>You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. For social media, I think you can point to directly social media with regard to the Arab Spring as well as the Rohingya genocide, and many, many mass shooting events. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head.
Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily_ responsible, but I think there's little doubt it played a role.
I'm in a local facebook group for my town where people post hiking pics, bird pics, local business updates, contractor recommendations etc. I am annoyed to see "brain rot" videos starting to take over the page.
There is one dude promoting his succulent repotting/resale business and he's posted like 5-8 ai generated surfer dude monkey surfing and partying with his potted succulents just in the last week. I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining, "hey buddy take your ai-spam elsewhere" but all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!" I just ended up blocking this dude but I am sad for humanity lol.
On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.
I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.
My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!
I refuse to use reddit with it's modern UI. Once old.reddit.com dies I'm hanging up my spurs
I left when they killed 3rd party app access.
Honestly even the curated subs I was a part of were pretty toxic or echo-chambery now that I've had time to look back
The biggest problem is that Lemmy is no substitute for Reddit. Majority of it is run by tankies and people professing extreme left views.
I'm saying you don't even need a substitute. Genuinely looking back, I was more anxious when I would browse reddit in my free time.
I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.
Except hn. Never disengage from hn.
"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.
A better way to think of it is that the western “left” isn’t part of the global left. Using tankie unironically is a classic example.
Where would you go to? Hacker new?
Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.
If I accidentally did it Adsense would ban me.
Do it anyway! Then you have a case against them.
I think it's possible to remove ads with reddit revanced
I never use the app, only login to old. and when old is taken away, I will take my marbles and go home.
I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.
RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
Old reddit is unfortunately just a rounding error. I weep for the day they decide to kill it.
I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely.
Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
weep? I'd finally be free. I wish this site would disappear too. Whoever designed these algorithms got me good, at a young age, and I don't think these sites have been a net positive overall or on me personally
We are already free. If we keep returning to a few subreddits, it's because we can't find an equivalent community elsewhere. If they kill the old interface, we'll eventually use the new one if there are no other alternatives, no need to lie to ourselves.
Iam nearly 15 years on reddit now and I would miss it if i cant use old. or a good client. Iam sure sooner or later it will happen and ill most probably leave.
Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.
Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
> since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies
maybe you find a suitable board on 4chan
Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.
Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
I don't usually see them either!
There are Firefox extensions that monkeypatch the old UI with usability enhancements and force a redirect for all reddit links.
I'm leaving Reddit because of all this!
I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are
1. Car crashes
2. Street/bum fights
3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)
4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")
5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)
Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level
OK maybe try to escape the algorithm? This is different with Reddit, though. You'd have to figure out which settings you need to change.
It's wild how many fan subreddits end up turning into hate boards for the sub's alleged purpose.
I've found a page on Facebook that regularly posts single white mothers with black babies on supposed dating profiles with very demanding requirements for men. The comments are loaded with people saying that they deserve their current situation, enforcing racial stereotypes, etc. It's not hard to see that these are AI generated, as there are maybe 5-8 posts a day like this, and the images are pretty clearly AI generated. Regardless, they get the engagement, and they sell the shirts. Easy way to automate a business, I guess, but at what cost?!
Could you give me some searching clues to hunt down this or a similar profile?
I don't have a link, but I have seen exactly what he's talking about, which probably means that it is an established business model and multiple actors are doing it.
A similar thing I have randomly come across multiple times on YouTube are videos consisting of a still AI image of a white person mistreating a black person (e.g. a white police officer screaming with rage at a black man eating in a diner) and an AI voiceover text telling a GPT-generated story hashtagged #heartwarming, e.g. "The white police officer was violent against the black man... What he didn't know was this was a highly decorated veteran!"
Some of these are clearly getting picked up by the algorithm and drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The factories behind these are probably halfway around the world but realized the race relations of a large economy can be exploited for profit or geopolitics.
Several of the Reddit "AmITheAsshole"-style subs have a significant number of posts which are either AI or sloppy creative writing.
Mass-produced outrage bait isn't new, and it's available in a thousand flavors. But AI has accelerated this process, at least for people who don't notice when they're getting played (or who don't want to notice).
Here are a few examples of ones where right-wing influencers are making AI-shop videos of people complaining about losing SNAP benefits:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1ojydgq...
https://www.reddit.com/r/themayormccheese/comments/1ojtbwz/a...
Note how that second one all uses the same script, "I have 7 babies from 7 different baby daddies!"
I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and think it's real.
> I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content!
I instinctively want to blame AI, but on some level, I think the problem runs deeper: it's that we are for some reason compelled to consume content where it just doesn't matter if it's real or not. It has no bearing on your life. You just want to spend your time scrolling through heartwarming stories about complete strangers, or through rage-bait that reinforces your political beliefs. Ethically, I see a difference between telling you true stories and lies. But if we're being honest with ourselves... what changes if the kitten rescued from a storm sewer is actually just gen AI?
This isn't even a Facebook thing. 24-hour news networks and many newspapers perfected this craft before. Endless streams of celebrity gossip and stories about stranded / rescued pets, written for no reason other than to satisfy this weird craving among the readers.
Each step along the way lowers the bar for feeding you the content and allows it to be tailored better, but I don't know what the fix here is. Short of banning the internet and forcing people to go outside more.
Cultural antibodies take a long time to develop. In twenty years you will see more common resistance to what's being produced today, but less to whatever new innovation is released then.
See, for example, the slowly declining efficacy of banner ads, as each cohort of computer user learned to ignore them but they still retained efficacy on newer vintages of users.
I will admit, I consider myself pretty tech savvy and I am having a harder time these days identifying AI-generated content (aside from the obvious ones).
I find myself squinting hard at interior design pictures on Pinterest to see if they’re real, I can never be sure with an instagram video, and even blogs and comments are getting harder to tell.
And I think the fact that I am having a harder time distinguishing reality from AI worries me greatly that I would be susceptible to misinformation if I venture outside of trusted sources.
I have the exact same response!
> all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!"
Probably bots?
Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).
The internet will be more and more ai stuff.
At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.
I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people don’t really use Facebook very much and are much more active on TikTok and instagram, both of which I would describe as semi-hostile to AI, or at least the kind of lazy slop AI you’re talking about.
> in a local facebook group for my town ... [someone posts AI promos]
> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining
people are less confrontational the more local it is
Moderators really need to start cracking down on this stuff. If nothing else just posts per week limits or something.
Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all.
BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
> ...I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.
This implies that the default suggestion isn't a data analyzed soup of what people of a given age / location / demographic / search text are most likely to respond to. Even if it is your first time to log on to a platform it is very much algorithm driven.
Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.
E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661253
I think it's not at all self-contradicting.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/a...
thx
I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.
Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.
As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.
Unfortunately, "X is just a tool and is super useful when used properly, all things are both bad in excess and good in moderation, what you gonna do?" is exactly the type of conclusion that a chat bot is likely to reach. Doesn't really say anything, appears to express sophistication and wisdom by being more "nuanced" than an actual position, demands nothing of your audience, not likely to get downvotes on social media, etc.
Proper use of anything that has a big downside is in direct opposition to making money, sadly.
This is true if you're only looking at the short term. In the long term, quality does matter.
I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845772 "meta predicted 10% of revenue came from scams"
> You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.
It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.
Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.
When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.
(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)
Yes, IMO this is going to start becoming visible sooner rather than later. College students that defer to ChatGPT to form arguments for them are going to graduate, sit for an in-person job interview and discover they haven't had to think fast, with their own brain, in years. It won't be pretty.
But who is going to crack first? Will job applicants somehow remove their borg implants and learn to think on their own? Or will businesses give in and admit that nobody can think for themselves anymore, allowing applicants to use ChatGPT during their interviews (knowing that they're probably going to need to use it on the job, too).
Or businesses just use ChatGPT to replace the entry level employee.
I can't wait for the first company to do this. I hope someone comes around to do a good post mortem from the rubble.
there seems to be a parallel with the industrial revolution - being fit and having muscles used to be the norm when everyone worked the fields all day. but now that grocery stores and sedentary jobs have made exercise optional. so choosing to pursue fitness signals to others that one is disciplined, takes pride in their appearance, etc.
i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.
>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.
And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.
People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.
I believe you are thinking of the Vertiwalk lift:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYqHWDt5wRk
Ancient Egyptians on writing:
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.
> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.
Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.
Curious if we could test/compare (popluation-level) memory skills before/after writing was introduced to the population.
I want to say "I remember things better when I write them down", and because I think I'm a smart person I think my memory is good.
I don't know how well I'd remember things if I'd spent a large portion of my life building memorization skills. Maybe I could be 100x better at memory if I exercised it more?
Anything that contributes to you not needing to actually "think" and instead just "react" is going to be bad for you because it is simply engaging your reward system. The only way LLMs can be a net good is if they free you from drudgery and allow you to work harder on the things that actually matter. (Think dishwashers and laundry machines). If you are using them as an "easy button" so you can finish your work (poorly) to have more time to scroll your timeline then yes, you are turning your brain into mush.
I'm purposefully not engaging with whether LLMs are actually even good at what they do, which is another discussion.
I think this is true of just about any technology. It will make lazy people lazier and help productive people get more done in less time. It's all about where the motivation is for each individual.
The wishful cynic in me sometimes thinks this might actually lead to a partial reversal of ageism in the workforce. It's almost starting to look like the kids graduating from school with chatgpt are actually handicapped (painting in extremely broad strokes; there will always be prodigies) and those who graduated or worked before 2022 will actually become more desirable to hire.
I'm sure this take is at best oversimplified. Probably mostly wrong. But it's certainly something I will think about while hiring from now on
Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.
A recent Stanford grad just told me "it's all just bots talking to bots", referring to students who use ChatGPT to do all their homework, and teachers who use ChatGPT to grade the work that was submitted by ChatGPT. And because of the pandemic, somehow people think it's now reasonable to do standardized testing in private with internet access. It's an anecdote, but she was really dissatisfied with her experience there. And that's one of the most prestigious schools in the country.
Do you have a different experience in academia recently?
It's funny how multiple commenters here are reacting to this article by saying that older media is also bad when the article itself is about specific observations about how relying on AI and overengaging in social media can lead to detrimental outcomes.
Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.
Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.
Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!!
Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?
On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.
> We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality.
The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are common (politics), and thread discussions like on HN where real life versions are fleetingly rare. I dont think its entirely fair to conflate the two. eg:
> Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions?
I discuss on HN as much to find and genuinely debate alternative opinions, and IME thats a pretty common pattern. i have learned so much reading other comments, formulating thoughtful responses to others, and have others break down / extend / critique my own shared opinions. Its what makes HN enjoyable and also the primary way its different than other social media sites.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848504
206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title.
Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?
I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1.
> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.
In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.
Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion.
I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.
> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.
My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.
> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads
And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.
Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.
You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.
> You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN.
I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.
My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.
this website exists as an advertisement for a brand. the people here are hustling harder than anywhere! it's worse than LinkedIn! that's why this website is a constant dick measuring contest -- it's a news site run by a venture capitalist firm about startups!
Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?
the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..
HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc.
HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".
I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone.
HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.
Uhh, the yc job board is essentially a different site entirely than this forum.
I don't really understand how they used "brainrot". I thought brain rot was this generations surrealism, a type of art?
By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.
There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking.
The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.
On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.
So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.
> So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way.
Using language in an anti-thinking way seems like a somewhat interestingly thought through mission though. If that's even the case.
The fact that you try to think about it that much though is arguably what makes it almost funny.
Art doesn't have to make you think or convey any ideas. L'art pour l'art. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or wherever.
Here's an example of how reliance on traditional media leads to detrimental outcomes: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.
I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.
> “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
Such a low bar.
I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past
You could add writing to that list of topics...
Could you focus on contributing something meaningful to the discussion instead of adding snarky insults?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past
This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.
It's pretty clearly not a native English speaker
That's fine; I wasn't referring to the academic quality the grammar. It's the ideas themselves that are muddled and unclear. Proficiency in given language and the ability to express oneself clearly are not as related as we typically think they are.
I know plenty of folks with poor English who are nonetheless very clear and concise when it comes to expressing their thoughts in English. I also know many native English speakers who, despite being proficient in the language, cannot express a lot their ideas clearly or concisely.
The ideas seem fairly clear to me. They're working on projects that are much more complex than what they were able to approach before, and they're able to dive into topics that were previously out of reach because of AI assistance. The grammar may not be perfect, but the point is understandable.
If you want to give feedback, the Hacker News guidelines encourage responding to the strongest interpretation of someone's argument. Instead of criticizing the way something is written, you could rewrite it in a clearer form to demonstrate what you mean. That way it's constructive, and they have something to learn from.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What language has a space preceding commas?
...good question. This (standard) excuse is designed to make you feel bad for potentially insulting someone trying their hardest, but it doesn't make any sense.
Funny I've been trying to quit reddit and I'm just like "what do I do with my time" I usually have two windows: reddit on the left and YT on the right. I work 7 days a week and haven't made anything for myself code/hardware wise in a while.
I think of this concept living second hand through other people's lives (social media) it's not living your own
I found this in the article to be pretty funny
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
20 years ago I remember all the scary articles/studies about the web ruining education.
e.g
Net cheaters (from link below)
The ease of gathering information on the Internet has a darker side. The simplicity of finding out things on the Web also makes it easy for students to cheat. Cutting and pasting text from a Web site and into a paper is effortless. So is wholesale copying or purchasing finished essays or reports. About a fifth of online youth (18%) say they know of someone who has used the Internet to cheat on a paper or test. While 9% of those who have been online for a year or less know someone who has cheated, 19% of those who have been online for 2 to 3 years and 28% of those who have been online for more than three years know people who have used the Net to cheat
from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2001/09/01/main-report-...
Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.
If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.
That still seems to be a problem. It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued). At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.
Can’t you say the same about the printing press?
It was used in exactly the same way. You think the world you live in is based on the honest truth of how things went? Entire families and peoples have been written out of history, for convenience. They are kept out of history for "stability".
Reading should help one think, but it is not to replace thinking...
I mean to some degree it is true in that you have the luxury of forgetting stuff if you know where you can get that information in future. I think many can agree that having access to written and printed word even has been a big positive.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
You/me in your/my current state are/is the single most important thing in the world.
Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.
I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.
I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.
But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.
I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
Lumping AI together with social media is confusing for me. One is a tool for the user, the other is not.
If social media is a tool for anything, it is for the company to generate ad revenue. Sure there is value someone can extract (keeping in touch family). But I can also extract value from junk mail (using it as scrap paper for notes and lists.)
AI is still a tool. I think? I have not seen any direct way that monetizes it through ads, yet. I expect AI with a revenue model will look way worse.
AI is turning people dumb. I see it all the time with code slop. It's the old "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish". Maybe a tool-using approach to AI is "should me how to do this", rather than "do this for me". "Show me an example of some code" is more useful to me than unleashing it on my project.
Also, social media is obviously a sort of digital narcotic. Probably should be scheduled.
> “I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
Well, this guy obviously didn't get the memo that Google search isn't what it was 10 years ago and is total junk.
It's not just AI brain rot. Brain rot is everywhere. Social media, linear TV, politics.
“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.
The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.
> a better way of doing something
Your argument fails right here because you're supposing something that isn't true. LLMs are better than search engines for some things, but you're speaking as if they're a replacement for what came before. They're absolutely not. Reading books — going to the original source rather than relying on a stochastic facsimile — is never going to go away, even if some of us are too lazy to ever do so. Their loss.
Put another way: leaving aside non-practical aspects of the experience, the car does a better job of getting you from A to B than a horse does. An LLM does not 'do a better job' than a book. Maybe in some cases it's more useful, but it's simply not a replacement. Perhaps a combination is best: use the LLM to interpolate and find your way around the literature, and then go and hunt down the real source material. The same cannot be said of the car/horse comparison.
typical technological determinism. comparing AI to the motorcoach assumes something we cannot know yet, namely that the impact of AI on the next century will be comparable to the invention of the automobile. there's also a long list of negative externalities caused by automobiles. who cares? anyone hurt by climate change, or who lives in a grid organized around cars rather than people. anyone who has ever been killed in a car accident.
Yes, although in this case the premise is just entirely wrong. A "traditional Google search" doesn't work anymore as Google just ignores half of what you put in anyway, and even vigorous quoting and Google-fu still generally just returns SEO garbage. Whereas e.g. Kagi is another world (proving that "knowing how to search" is not actually the problem anyway).
Well, don't use that kind of social media, I suppose.
I'm anti-social media and AI, but I would like to submit:
Schfifty Five https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978
For posterity: https://archive.ph/jsJgf
"AI" absolutely contributes to brain rot. Google "AI" is just a status quo propagandist that makes things up, misunderstands questions and berates the "user" if the "user" dares to contradict. It is worse than any legacy media. It also weaves in how awesome "AI" is and how the "user" should treat "AI" with respect, preferably like a human.
You should definitely keep minors away from this dangerous brainwashing.
Even better "AI"s lead to outsourcing of thought, search capabilities, speed reading and critical reflection.
I think it's much healthier to spend time playing video games, watching netflix/youtube, than on social media.
Contribute? That's basically its only purpose now, rot your brain with a dopamine drip and show you a bajillion ads. Now with AI slopgen being baked right into most of them it's been set into overdrive.
Deleted all my social media accounts except Youtube (but I use Unhook to remove everything except my subscriptions and the search). Haven't felt better. I use Telegram and Whatsapp and SMS to keep in touch with friends and family, nothing connected to any social app. I avoid all of the social-media-lite features in those apps like the plague.
Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation. Ditto for garbage like People magazine. If you watch some old TV ads from the 80s, it’s scary at how bad they are. The variety of content from modern, connected platforms definitely can be harmful but it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation than a dozen TV stations and yellow journalism.
> it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation
less ?
We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...
If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.
What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?
Been seeing this argument more and more. Is there a name for it?
“Bad thing X has been happening forever.
AI _guarantees_ X will exponentially get worse, but it lets me do (arguably) good thing Y so it’s okay.”
As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.
Reading this, I have no idea which of the thousands of new media silos you inhabit. But they all tell different mutually exclusive narratives.
So statistically, even if one is purely honest and accurate, most likely you aren’t in that one particular silo.
Trouble is, the "silos" in both new and traditional media aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. See https://old.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/13akipf/a_... for example.
Past media may have prepped us with some brain rot that's now causing people to prostrate themselves to the tech giants in exchange for not having to work as hard. But that doesn't mean that an acceleration of social media, slop, and loss of transparency on the information we take in isn't going to be extremely worse.
Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior. Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.
The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.
[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.
Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation.
Don't discount the effect of lead in paint, pipes, gasoline, etc. It's not a surprise that Republicans try to roll back regulations that remove lead.
Exactly. The article should just say “Mass consumption of media causes brain rot” because since 1900 that’s all it’s doing.
Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.
Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…
Get outside, do something.
Why hasn't a social media platform with mandatory verification to prove users are unique humans taken off yet? Still too hard to break the existing network effects?
That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.
AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.
(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)
How would such verification work at planetary scale?
Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.
how would a phone number proof uniqueness though? I can buy multiple SIM cards even with showing ID
Who cares about planetary scale? Back when your networking reach was largely limited by the size of your area code, local BBSes had user verification and were incredibly popular.
Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
Anonymity is more important, and verification systems can always be gamed. To add, given what you see well known people post under their real name, including Trump posting a video of himself shitting all over Americans, I don't understand what benefit you're expecting to get.
"things that compete with legacy media are le bad", article #20735.
Well yes, they are. It's just that a lot of legacy media is also bad. They can both be correct.
how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate? the shitrag here did at least one.
> how many wars did LLMs and the social media instigate?
At least one already. I suspect your comment won't age well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
> Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar.
You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
>Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters that social media had played a "determining role" in Myanmar.
"played a role" != "instigated". everything "played a role" there.
their fucking government did it.
>You could probably count the war in Gaza to some extent.
are you for real?
> "played a role" != "instigated"
You took out a pretty important word.
> are you for real?
Yes? Both sides of the conflict used social media heavily to justify their actions and generate support for continuing the conflict.
LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years. For social media, I think you can point to directly social media with regard to the Arab Spring as well as the Rohingya genocide, and many, many mass shooting events. I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head.
Much like legacy media, social media is certainly not _wholly_ or necessarily even _primarily_ responsible, but I think there's little doubt it played a role.
>LLMs are quite new, so you might honestly want to save your comment and return to it in a few years.
okay, call me when an LLM begins to append "furthermore, I think that X must be destroyed" to its outputs.