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I doubt there will be widespread adoption in the next 3-5 years. People galactically overhyped chatbots as the effective advent of AGI, but it was more of an iterative step like any other. A useful one, to be sure, but not immediately transformative to all aspects of human existence that some have claimed.
Search results were already sort of an issue from SEO slop-factories gaming the system so aggressively. Chatbots will lower the price of that stuff a bit so we'll probably see a bit more, but I doubt it's going to be that much more of an issue compared to what could be done a few years ago by paying some ESL third-worlder rock bottom prices to produce the stuff. I doubt that AI-powered RSS feeds are going to be the wave of the future as well. Search results aren't great, but you can usually find what you're looking for if you enter the right query (for most things, that means appending "reddit" to the end).
The replies to a lot of tweets with over 10k likes are filled with LLM-generated "helpful" spam replies, and those spam replies, as far as I can tell, get hundreds of likes from actual users. A few years ago the replies to top posts were much better than today. Yes, LLMs can't do most things, but they can write low-context tweets, they can write SEO spam slop at 0 marginal cost, and that's all you need for it to be a big problem.
I think you're right that people will either just ignore it, and just read the tweets / watch the videos of the popular users they currently follow (say what you will about MrBeast, he's clearly intelligent and very good at optimizing for his targets) and ignore the LLM spam replies / comments like they already do though. Or they'll eat up the slop and love it.
Soon AI will likely be much smarter, but we'll have bigger issues than higher quality internet spam
In case you think this problem is more intractable than it is. If you just block/mute these accounts when you see them after maybe 5 rounds the flood slows to a trickle. It's really not a lot of accounts doing it.
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I think this is short sighted. We are at the infancy stages of what these things can do, and judging what will be true in 5-10 years based on brand new technology is a fool’s errand. In 1992, only the true dreamers imagined the internet as always on, available, and in everyone’s pockets. Outside of the optimistic futurists, you would not have predicted Űber, DoorDash, Grubhub, or the like. We had an early version of online shopping in the form of Service Merchandise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise) in which you could drive to the store and order things from a kiosk. People seeing things like that and the big clunky desktops connected to dialup modems would think someone talking about hailing a cab over the internet was a kook.
And I’ll mention that a lot of the anti-hype is often not only based on early versions on AI, but it seems quite often on wishful thinking and a high view of what it is they actually do. Journalism isn’t that difficult provided to have the facts at hand. The format and conventions of writing for the news are not difficult. In fact, I don’t think most business writing is super difficult to learn. AI could probably write something that would be indistinguishable from a human written article or business paper. I’d give fiction writing 10-15 years tops if we’re talking about median genre fiction. Art bot ai can already produce stuff that’s easy enough to edit into something you could use as graphic art. The new Sora could probably create a commercial in ten years. But a lot of people just don’t want to believe that their entire profession could be automated so they comfort themselves that AI chatbot can’t do their job and therefore it’s safe.
It's rather goofy that you lead with a sentence saying how it's essentially impossible to predict the future of tech, then you... do exactly that, but in the other direction. Obviously there's very wide error bars here on both sides, but I don't think accurately predicting an impending tech revolution is any easier than predicting a tech fizzle as you seem to implicitly think.
There have also been a bunch of failures like VR, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Crypto (as more than just a medium for fraud and bigger-fool speculation). Even self-driving cars seem decades away from mass adoption. The number of tech startup failures dwarfs the amount of success stories by at least an order of magnitude. As such, I believe our Bayesian priors should be calibrated towards pessimism in general, only veering towards cautious optimism for the most promising possibilities.
Promises of "it's only just begun, surely the next version will be even better which will lead to mass adoption" were used for all those listed failures, but improvements either didn't manifest, or were so marginal as to be irrelevant.
A lot of the pro-hype arguments here are based less on historical technological developments, and more on wishful thinking that it would somehow hurt their outgroup. "Your days are numbered, journalist!" is a pretty good example.
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I dunno, the LLM can churn out slop faster, at a higher quality, and it's only going to get better and faster and cheaper as time goes by. Especially once the people shoveling slop have had time to come up with their own models optimized for what they want to do, ones that don't necessarily talk in the same stilted way as the current high-profile commercial products that can't afford to accidentally say anything offensive.
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