Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Metadata
Highlights
- Here we are on the web
And we’re naively writing a bunch of sincere and authentic accounts of our lives and thoughts and experiences. Trying to find other intelligent people who share our beliefs and interests
But feels like we’re surrounded by content that doesn’t feel authentic and human. Lots of this content is authored by bots, marketing automation, and growth hackers pumping out generic clickbait with ulterior motives. (View Highlight)
- It’s difficult to find people who are being sincere, seeking coherence, and building collective knowledge in public.
While I understand that not everyone wants to engage in these activities on the web all the time, some people just want to dance on TikTok, and that’s fine!
However, I’m interested in enabling productive discourse and community building on at least some parts of the web. I imagine that others here feel the same way.
Rather than being a primarily threatening and inhuman place where nothing is taken in good faith. (View Highlight)
- There’s a new library called
AgentGPT
that’s making it easier to build these kind of agents. It’s not as sophisticated as the sim character version, but follows the same idea of autonomous agents with memory, reflection, and tools available. It’s now relatively easy to spin up similar agents that can interact with the web. (View Highlight)
- We can tell this is already happening because spammers and scammers are lazy as fuck.
This recent Verge article: “’
As an Al language model
’: the phrase that shows how Al is polluting the web” pointed out that the phrase “as an AI language model” is showing up in all kinds of places: Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, Tweets, and LinkedIn posts. (View Highlight)
- This is captured well in this quote from Tim Ingold, a well-known and brilliant anthropologist: “Every way of life represents a communal experiment in living. The world itself is never settled in its structure and composition. It is continually coming into being.”
Generating a mass of content from a very particular way of viewing the world funnels us down into a monoculture. Which feels like shutting down a ton of possibilities and diversity for all the ways human culture might unfold in the future.
Not to mention all the existing cultures and languages we might lose in this process. (View Highlight)
title: “Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI”
author: “Maggie Appleton”
url: ”https://maggieappleton.com/forest-talk”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Metadata
Highlights
- Here we are on the web
And we’re naively writing a bunch of sincere and authentic accounts of our lives and thoughts and experiences. Trying to find other intelligent people who share our beliefs and interests
But feels like we’re surrounded by content that doesn’t feel authentic and human. Lots of this content is authored by bots, marketing automation, and growth hackers pumping out generic clickbait with ulterior motives. (View Highlight)
- It’s difficult to find people who are being sincere, seeking coherence, and building collective knowledge in public.
While I understand that not everyone wants to engage in these activities on the web all the time, some people just want to dance on TikTok, and that’s fine!
However, I’m interested in enabling productive discourse and community building on at least some parts of the web. I imagine that others here feel the same way.
Rather than being a primarily threatening and inhuman place where nothing is taken in good faith. (View Highlight)
- There’s a new library called
AgentGPT
that’s making it easier to build these kind of agents. It’s not as sophisticated as the sim character version, but follows the same idea of autonomous agents with memory, reflection, and tools available. It’s now relatively easy to spin up similar agents that can interact with the web. (View Highlight)
- We can tell this is already happening because spammers and scammers are lazy as fuck.
This recent Verge article: “’
As an Al language model
’: the phrase that shows how Al is polluting the web” pointed out that the phrase “as an AI language model” is showing up in all kinds of places: Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, Tweets, and LinkedIn posts. (View Highlight)
- This is captured well in this quote from Tim Ingold, a well-known and brilliant anthropologist: “Every way of life represents a communal experiment in living. The world itself is never settled in its structure and composition. It is continually coming into being.”
Generating a mass of content from a very particular way of viewing the world funnels us down into a monoculture. Which feels like shutting down a ton of possibilities and diversity for all the ways human culture might unfold in the future.
Not to mention all the existing cultures and languages we might lose in this process. (View Highlight)