alt Hacker NewsAI Is Destroying the Trust Between Writers and Readers
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GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
Pre-2023 writing is the low-background steel of culture.
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
When reading takes more effort than writing, trust is inevitably a victim.
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
Things are ogre in the fanfiction and webserial scene. Everything written after 2024 REEKS of AI, and most of them, over 90% are obvious AI. It's very easy to spot if you're advanced reader, AI style has a lot of tells and idiosyncratic phrases (and please don't disclose them). There are meta tells as well: unrealistic output volume for a human writer, having a patreon for fanfiction, etc.
Are you kidding me? For a general audience:
The absolutely fraudulent blog post to nonfiction "bestseller" pipeline already crushed nonfiction writing over the last decade or more.
Good fiction has always been niche. The rules are the same, read the best.
Well, this was all foretold in 2019 when OpenAI held back GPT-2, an unusable model by today's standards, for fear of making misinformation and fraud too easy. I remember when the internet, once the preserve for businesses and universities, came to the home, and I said, wow, kids are going to watch a lot more porn. As with any life-changing technology, you take the good with the bad.
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers. Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture. The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it. Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population. Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
Internet already lost faith with paywall site like this.
And how could I trust if their article is not written by AIs at this point?
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
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> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.