If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
> what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature?
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
The good faith is "We here at youtube adamantly REFUSE to spend any actual manpower on things that require it, and you know what, so should you! Join us. Thrive. Beep Boop."
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
Brand management people, who normally handled this, cost money. Self-service brand management with LLMs costs less money. Building this in as first-party product commoditizes this, costing the vlogger even less, while YouTube gets to keep them in-house and focused on the platform, instead of external services that may be cross-platform.
Yes, so if we assume that cost saving is the only metric that is meaningful and that there should be no legislation or norms saying otherwise, then indeed it follows as a consequence.
Cost saving is basically what drives the market, and thus shapes our entire reality. It's not some side goal of some people, that you could suppress or eliminate - it's the thing itself.
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
It is not inevitable, almost nothing is... This just bothers me because so many people in tech talk about things as being "inevitable" when it's just a lazy resignation to the current zeitgeist.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
> But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
I see this attitude over and over again, particularly where it comes to regulating things like AI and bans on social media. Tech would rather do nothing if "it's complicated", or had any downside to anyone while ignoring the rampant downsides impacting everyone right now. Sometimes it comes across as thoughtful policy making, but more and more I see it as a crutch for intellectual laziness and in some cases dishonesty.
In these cases for it to be inevitable there doesn't need to be agreement. Someone does it and if enough clueless people use it, now we're stuck with it. Why we can't have nice things.
Not just Youtube. Most of the time unintentionally but, any personified information broker is manipulative in its nature. Watching vlogs or streamers, listening podcasts, reading post of social media accounts one follows. There is face between you and the information and that face becomes familiar to you. Face that builds trust.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
> Most of the time unintentionally but, any personified information broker is manipulative in its nature.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
--
[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
> even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
I don't think listening to a podcast is really substantially different to tuning into Walter Cronkite. Both are deliberately recognisable human faces (or voices) for the presentation of the media to you.
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
No, but the survival of the "entrepreneurs" who convince people they need those rocks, very much is.
In the OF/pet rock/pidgeon trio, the pidgeon is actually the odd one out; the other two are all about making money by exploiting people's need for socializing.
Alas, "e-celebs" are a step worse than "e-prostitutes". Both exploit parasocial relationships to trap customers, but in the end, OF performers provide customers actual value in exchange for money, while vloggers and influencers also try to sell you all kinds of random shit - their actual business is advertising.
(It's similar to analog world prostitutes vs. telemarketers; the former engage in voluntary exchange of value for money, the latter just try to scam you. That the society scorns the former while accepting the latter is some perverse inversion of morality, if you think about it. One could argue that the value prostitutes provide is poison - but then so is what telemarketers sell, too, and prostitutes don't cold-call you to trick you into buying.)
It's not an exclusive relationship. It is a highly transactional ephemeral one.
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
It's a logical evolution of how emotional labor is used in the business world. We pay service and hospitality workers not only to literally do what their job description says but also to be nice to people, keep them engaged and create parasocial (or at least one-sided) relationships that make customers come back and spend more money. Live streamers have long deployed similar strategies with the only difference being they profit off of it themselves rather than being paid through an employer (although many employee moderators, editors and even people to manage their social media accounts so they at best only have to engage with a filtered subset of messages directly if at all).
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
> That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
Screens with ads intermixed is only optimized towards attention farming long term.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
I'm an "early" user of the Internet (early to mid 90s, I missed out on BBS's and Usenix but had an internet-connected PC in my home before most people I went to school with did).
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
This is a bunch of hand-wringing. If the AI reply is what I would have said anyways; awesome! Finding thumbnails is hard, but if AI comes up with a good one? Fantastic!
None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
I think you miss the part where they fake it being real.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Politicians should not only be required to sign the laws they back by hand but to fully recite them without error - anything less means the law isn't important enough to make the books.
> Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
> Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
I actually been in this exact scenario before. I and another friend were avidly into Hearthstone, and another third person was playing with an Hearthstone Cheat bot in an University study room. We asked to watch for a while.
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
It's hard for me to understand how Tinder is not dead yet. One big pile of pop-up ads (even when you pay you get upsell popups) and some Chinese scammer bots.
I'd argue that what Match Group did with OKC was bordering on criminal. Everything on it worked and it worked for small, often marginalized groups. It was turned into a worse version of tender.
It's highly dependent on location. I use it while traveling, and yes in a few countries it's useless, but I've met 300-400 people over the last 7 years. It's added more value to my life than any other single app (even though I've never paid a dime for it).
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
An average of 1 person per week over a period of 7 years? Impressive. Is it fair to assume you're using a relatively shallow definition of "value" here, or was there something else you had in mind?
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Why would you quit hearthstone over the presence of bots?
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
If you are just playing against bots, the challenge is arbitrary. What would top 10% actually mean? 5000 ELO? Albeit, the ranks are slightly arbitrary already as the matchmaking algorithm significantly influences your competitive experience. But you know when you get higher rank, you have proven you are better than increasing amounts of real players. If every person was actually playing a single player variant of the game (matched against bots), the reward for climbing the ranked ladder is significantly diminished.
Well unlike with modern multiplayer games where the matchmaking algorithm decides who you play with, on the Internet you can still choose what websites to visit.
Honestly, if more people wondered about who'll read what they write online, and whether it matters that those folks read it, the Internet would probably be a better place.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
Hallmark cards tend to leave a lot of blank space to write. It’s absolutely genuine when you grab a pen and start writing. Bonus points if the Hallmark message is relevant to the person receiving it and maybe something you can riff on in the handwritten part. Funny cards are also great!
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
To me, yes. Key point being, "if I review and approve of the message" - if you actually do this, then yes.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
I recently went to an social interest group meeting. It begins with a presentation, which is generally confirmed in advance by the organizer based on a text abstract of the planned presentation submitted by a future presenter. This time, the presentation turned out to be staggeringly bad, mostly consisting of filler words and interjections, and presenter was struggling to express even the basic idea. I could not fathom how that could happen, considering the idea was presumably expressed in the abstract. I had to write one before, and felt annoying and difficult to write down what I felt was all ready to be said in my head, but as a result I knew what I wanted to say and how I could say it when in front of a dozen of people.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it, would not have taken place.
To reiterate, I don’t know whether it happened or not, but even if no LLM was involved in this instance (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the IRL vibe extremely casual) it would be beyond silly to assume that it would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason[0], and when some signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. When the Web and tech in general had removed a whole lot of constraints on communication, we still could rely on those signals, but that is apparently coming to an end.
Writing a birthday card is another endangered signal. The impression from the movies, how these gestures become very cheap if they come from some rich CEO who certainly has a personal assistant for this sort of stuff, now applies to everyone (including people who would never touch an LLM with a ten foot pole). Once we all know that a birthday card can be reduced to “I have read and approved this message”, as social beings we won’t stop needing the psychological impact of such positive gestures—we only stop receiving it.
I am not sure I see all of the above as positive (even if in the latter case I am slightly optimistic that some viable substitute for those signals could be found within personal relationships).
[0] Even that reason is dubious, like discrimination by a social criteria, well then that’s not going to go anywhere. Tech is not going to solve that human problem, besides perhaps a very fleeting handful of months when some techies gain edge while everyone is still catching on. New barriers will be erected, the core problem left unaddressed.
Is it? Is it also wrong that they so far weren't labeled as [copy-pasted], and/or [outsourced to influencer management agency], and/or [not by ${influencer name}]? YouTube influencers and vloggers are brands, not people; they go big enough, they start outsourcing this stuff, which to my mind is just like "AI slop", except produced by protein parrot instead of silicon one.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
A lot of it is labeled as "you are talking to me personally".
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
> Is it also wrong that they so far weren't labeled as [copy-pasted], and/or [outsourced to influencer management agency], and/or [not by ${influencer name}]?
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
It reduces the cost of the scam siginificantly which makes it available to many more scammers. It's the same with other spam content on the internet - it was possible before but AI makes the problem so much worse.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
Well for one only someone with severe mental issues would ever consider paying for porn considering how much of it is available. The corollary to that is that anyone making money from the porn industry is taking advantage of people incapable of making rational purchasing decisions.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
I think it should be banned too. And maybe they do think that, but I'm just saying, anyone whose livelihood is based on the appreciation of other people should remember not to alienate those people too much
I mean, I guess if your sole goal with consuming content online is to kill free time and pound dopamine out of your brain without putting in any effort, then yeah, fair enough. I'm sure Mr. Beast appreciates your viewership.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
> If the AI reply is what I would have said anyways; awesome! Finding thumbnails is hard, but if AI comes up with a good one?
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
Worth noting that - mostly - punters weren't having real interactions with the models anyway. As the article points out, they'd previously reported (and I think HN had linked to the story) that a large number of models had been outsourcing their DM interactions to a rotating cadre of gig-workers already. And as the gig workers wouldn't be able to keep track of the full chat history between each punter and "the model", the conversations could sometimes feel off, or have long-term inconsistencies.
I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.
I assume in this case, you are saying "the model" to mean the human Only Fans account holder and not an ML model in which the fake models are trained on? Something funny about clarifying that too.
As I contemplate using AI tools to generate images to start an OnlyFans, I see the irony where first they outsourced to Chatters, then replaced the chatters with AI and next we will replace their hotness with AI models. I'm sure this is already happening.
Yeah, there are already “influencers” which are AI improved clones of existing influencers (without the original model’s consent). So in addition to looking perfect, curating their perfect existence, pleasing sponsors, keeping the attention of the masses, scaling up their ability to respond in a timely way to fans, content creators now need to police their IP from being stolen by other “creators” (and not just the fans).
Chatters-for-hire were always questionable. Some are cheap labor in cheap English-speaking countries. But I’ve also seen that vendors that offer chatter services have difficulty with quality control (of the chats), causing the OnlyFans channel to drop the chatters and apologize for the breach of trust to paying fans.
That said, I imagine there is a LOT of value in identifying high quality leads/chats to be prioritized and ignoring/ blocking the lowest quality (eg. Insurers and time wasters).
> So in addition to looking perfect, curating their perfect existence, pleasing sponsors, keeping the attention of the masses, scaling up their ability to respond in a timely way to fans, content creators now need to police their IP from being stolen by other “creators” (and not just the fans).
How sad.
"Influencers" living on borrowed time is one of the few good things about the machine learning dystopia.
I feel like we've all spent way too much time in front of the screen in an AI echo chamber if we have to clarify this. Humans performing for the camera have been known as models long before an AI model has ever been dreamed up. Now that the word is being used with both meanings in the same article, the smart "nerds" are the ones having problems deciphering the use?
Humans selling their bodies for profit have historically been known as prostitutes. "Model" is already term intended to mislead about what the job is. Also not a term the average person would use.
Good point, it’s already practically impossible to distinguish between ChatGPT o1 output and say the median substack essay. At least for someone who only has a few minutes to spare for second guessing.
CD players did not spell the end of live music. I have never really understood people who pay money to OnlyFans models but I do think its not just to see some boobs on a screen? its to experience a (para)social relationship with another person.
Most of the experience of a live performance (especially for pop artists) is in being there, with a crowd, and the soundscape of a giant auditorium or stadium, so the lip-syncing doesn't matter much either way.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist but I think the novelty of this will wear off too quickly for it to become the future. People will have to realize the emptiness of it. I need to believe that.
It won't. Conservatively over 60% of young men are single. The real number if you remove men that have had maybe one relationship or encounter in a multi-year span is 80% or more. The lie you will hear is that men are choosing OnlyFans over a relationship. There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
None of that supports the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term. We have unmet transportation needs, but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
> but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
Notably, this also removes one of the remaining major economic options for otherwise unemployable women. Going to be a rough time economically when even pornstar/escort isn’t a viable option, eh?
Even if that were true, I really think the solution ought to be something else than "let's stop AI so that really poor women can be forced back into selling their bodies for sex".
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down? Prompting your own porn will be so much better than current human porn that the people who are actually married will choose to be single instead?
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
> I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down?
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
The service won't care what you do, as long as you keep paying the subscription for your porn-bot, otherwise it will get deleted - or so it will tell when you try to start the subscription cancellation process - begging to not let it die.
I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this. Hookups will die, and perhaps Americans will need to find new paradigms for meeting people, but marriage offers a bunch of things that even the best porn doesn't.
> I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
At the rate technology is improving and the rate that women are becoming less and less accessible to average men, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years, 80-90% of American men go an entire lifetime without a non-AI relationship.
Polygyny - a smaller number of "high status, high attraction" males having app-mediated interactions with larger numbers of females.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
> What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
Gender ratio on Tinder is heavily skewed toward male than women, except Europe.[1]
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
The study has been taken down for a long time now but OkCupid found that 80 percent of women went for 20 percent of men whereas men had a relatively normal distribution of women they went for.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
If men outnumbered the women, the numbers are going to be more stark, no? Also, online dating doesn't really match real life dating. You miss so much information.
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
The people won't have a choice there either. Even if you can spot 90% of the fake content the remaining 10% will still drown out anything even remotely genuine.
That isn't what I said, if you can't read a sentence that's not my problem. And don't "simply not the case" without providing any source. What a terrible remark.
> There is no choice. They can't get a relationship.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
> The average young man wants mutual compassion and respect from their social circles and loyalty and being loved from their girlfriend.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
It's definitely mens' fault when women disregard them for not being 6 feet before they know anything else about them.
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
Get your eyes out of a screen and get out. This is where real relationships starts. Dating apps somewhat work to get dates, but not very often to start a relationship. Individual dates aren't relationships.
I didn't like this number either, but it's more mainstream than you think. For example, from last year: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo.... This is an opinion article citing a contemporary Pew Research study that appears to support the 60% number, although it's stated as "63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single" (emphasis mine).
I don't think you needed to imply that someone was an incel.
Out of those under 30, I bet there is a huge differebmnce between those between 20-24 and 25-29. It is no secret that women tend to seek people who are slightly older. A few decades earlier, a 20-22y old guys would just date 16-18y old girls and that wouln't be frowned upon nor put them at risk of going to jail.
Naively, you'd think that if demographics break down 50/50 between the sexes, then 60% of men being single means 60% of women are single too. But that's not the case; the article says men in their 20s are single at twice the rate of women in their 20s.
I agree that part of that ~30% difference could be women dating older men. But it could also be women dating each other: this[0] Gallup poll from 2023 found that 27% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Gen Z as noted here doesn't perfectly overlap with people in their 20s, but it seems like this could be another (better?) explanation.
If you’re asking how they can’t get a relationship, you may wish to look up the original definition and meaning of “incel” before it became derogatory slang for a certain type of misogynist.
I'm not going to waste my time educating you on this because I can tell from the way you jumped immediately to the incel label that you're just going to deny deflect and diffuse.
Well you should see what happened when replika nerfed their bots, people were extremely upset, as if somebody killed a loved one. You are underestimating the tendency of humans to build connections, and if virtual connections make it easy then why put all the effort to build human ones?
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
It wont wear off because people, customers, aren't consuming this because of the 'novelty'. They are being fooled. They don't realize it is a 'novelty'.
I actually got approached for a job for a "virtual girlfriend" site. Paid amazingly well too, and the user numbers were mind blowing to me, but it felt scummier than working for a gambling site to me.
IIRC (from mobile), it was a different article from Wired that corroborated this, with a surprising disagreement (from what you mentioned) being that the gig-workers would keep notes that are attached and shared. The notes are per-... random? I suppose they'd be called? The gig-worker's customer is the streamer (or agency) that pays them, so I don't have a better name for the hoarde of people they're meant to be chatting with
Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.
I guess there is some truth to the adage that a male body can't push blood both to the brain and to the penis at the same time - it's either one, or the other. I mean, if you step back and take a cold look at the content produced by popular OF performers, it's pretty apparent those are business operations. There are other people involved. Someone does the camera work. Location work. Promotion. And yes, fan management too.
Same applies to YouTube personas, too. Brands, not people. Talking to fans is a job that can be outsourced. AI doesn't introduce anything new; AI features on the platform are competing with creators' brand management agencies, which themselves likely already use ChatGPT for this anyway, because why wouldn't they? ChatGPT does better job at this stuff and is cheaper than human labor - but again, the AI angle isn't important here - that human labor was just a generative model in a protein substrate anyway.
First, let me say that you often post here on HN, and you are one of my favourites. You really have an ability to view the issue from multiple angles and provide thoughtful replies.
After reading your post, I had a thought: Making this story about OnlyFans is the click bait element. Seriously, replay the story in your head where it says that top 1/2/3/4/5% of YouTubers or Instagrammers or TikTokkers are using LLMs to answer comments and DMs. Suddenly, the story is much less enticing. It probably would not even make HN front page. Most readers here would look at such an article, shrug their shoulders, and say: "Yeah, seems right. I would do the same.". However, as soon as you add sex work into the mix, it gets way more spicy and elicits more emotional responses.
The difference is that on OF the direct contact is part of the sales pitch (perhaps the only part that actually provides "value" since there is no shortage of free porn, including OF leaks) whereas on other platforms it is not (and you are not directly purchasing anything at all but watching ads instead). Onlyfans isn't clickbait here because it is genuinely more scummy than doing this in the other places you mentioned.
That said, I don't agree that using AI chatbots to deceive fans is OK anywhere else either. And no, I would definitely not ever do it myself.
It wasn't. It perhaps should've been, but instead, it was just "legitimate marketing practice".
This is another facet of a larger phenomenon, that I just commented on in another thread[0] - there's a lot of harmful activity that's considered legitimate, thus invisible to our legal and cultural immune systems, yet no less harmful than the slightly less legitimate scams.
Your linked post seems to be a polemic, not a legal analysis. Many advertisements are subject to successful (expensive) class-action lawsuits based on some fraud or truth-in-marketing claim. Also, this isn’t an advertisement, it’s a communication which takes place under an implied contract.
Really? Do people really think OF "performers" really enjoy interaction with random dudes fapping in front of their screen.
Shouldn't there be a level of candidness at which it cannot be considered deception? I mean we accept casinos/gambling and religions in our societies for example.
If the site is saying ‘chat with X for $5/min’, and you never have any interaction with X at all for your $5/min, that seems like a pretty clear cut case doesn’t it?
"Give god the first portion of your income. Don't spend it and come sunday say i'll just give god a little of what's left. Give god the first portion of your income!"
Okay, I've been in and around both sides of religions, and I do believe this is the first attempt at saying tithing is an act of fraud. I don't necessarily disagree. Just noting that it's the first time. I'd assume the down votes were expected with this one.
I have several friends who are "creators" who answer their own messages. I had an ex who warned me that she wouldn't mind if I watched porn but she wouldn't want me to use onlyfans because the platform encourages 1:1 communication.
I wouldn't expect, like, Mia Khalifa (I'm out of the game, who's current?) to answer her own messages but there does seem to be an expectation that smaller creators are actually behind the accounts.
The fact they answer themselves or with help from someone is one thing. The fact they are sincere in their messages in another one.
I know there are also some people who pretend they are falling in love with the prostitutes they pay to have sex but the terms are clear both in physical and online prostitution. It is all a business about pretending and consumers should expect that.
Even if it is 1:1 communication, it's not like the two of you were likely to meet. The thing that I've always seen as the one to get upset about is if the person is local thirst trap type of someone that is much less famous and more of a possibility of real life interactions.
People being easily duped is not an argument for something not being a scam. In fact, protecting easily duped people from scammers is the entire reason for having laws against scams.
The other day I was helping an elderly family member purchase something from the Internet. They were talking to a chat bot. One of the automated replies was a voice recording. There was not much "AI" in it, just a bunch of spam in Whatsapp all the time telling them to purchase all sorts of products. They were added to multiple "group chats" where only admins could send messages (i.e. a spam fest). But what worried me was that because the automated messages are never marked as such, I wasn't sure if they were perfectly aware that they were talking to a bot, since it seemed they were tried to have a conversation, saying hello and explaining things. Maybe that's just they think that's how bots work, and, loosely, the bot responds appropriately, by ignoring almost everything all the time and just spamming more.
I found it repulsive on a visceral level.
Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.
Yes, I'm experiencing this in the form of 'suggestion' buttons.
It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.
It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.
> It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong.
"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]
Feels like that ended with an ai escape when I was hoping that the punchline would be that all the apparently happy, well adjusted, coherent users were in fact ai trained in the preapocalypse and the insane sick, repetitive people were the real users living in the post apocalypse.
I got a friend that goes to live shows in Los Angeles and then interviews the bands after the shows for a decent amount of time and with decent quality. mostly punk rock bands. I've personally met Les Claypool and Trent Reznor and a bunch of smaller artists after shows. However i've never tried to email or otherwise contact any musicians or whatever, except one time in the late 90s there was hosted AOL chatrooms or something similar on yahoo or something where many fans would be in a room and get selected to ask a question that the person of the hour could see, and they'd reply. I also got to ask Reznor a question like that, 26 years ago or something.
I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.
Yeah, there are some not-nobody bands that do actually talk to fans after shows - as in face to face without special appointment, just hanging around at the exit merch store.
I would rather have those "celebrities" that don't want to directly interact with plebs be honest about it. Nothing wrong with setting boundaries for your job, a lot wrong with deceiving people even if it might seem benign at first.
I would so much rather the creator not participate in the comments than have a fake AI that doesn't know the creator's mind in the comments.
I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.
The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.
YouTube’s best interest is ad, and having more content to retain you, the consumer, on the platform as long as possible would be their main goal.
Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.
> what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature
So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.
And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.
Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.
But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.
This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.
And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")
AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.
This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.
(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?
These nihilist arguments often ignore physical, nonverbal interaction. You can interpret it as byte procession in the end but it is still missing from digital interaction.
They are selling an experience, that includes the style of content, conversation, personality or persona of the creator.
Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?
It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.
We weren't talking to a sexy young attractive lady on those phone sex lines either.
Some didn't care and still used them, many were scammed, but that is the nature of the industry. Sadly it has always been on the consumer of unregulated sexual services to be aware of how the industry of their era works.
Should we legalize, regulate and make it safer for both the buyers and also sex workers? Yes, but that is an another conversation altogether.
Assistants/employees are being democratized. That's a good thing, because it levels the playing field.
In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.
I mean they started calling people content creators and the people liked it and thought that was a compliment, that's all you need to know.
A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.
You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.
People already weren't quite a lot. For any channel that can afford it, other people write messages, not creators. This just automated that. These aren't real interactions.
IG has this feature as well - or at least was trialing it. I got an AI-generated response to a comment on a post -- I was not amused (or impressed), but at least it was clearly labelled as such. Still warranted an immediate unfollow. It's hard for me to see why anyone would want to receive AI-generated replies, like what's the point?
On OnlyFans you get so many messages there’s no hope of replying to all of them manually. So it’s either reply to basically no one, or use automated methods.
This is like plane overbooking. Airline companies could do the right thing and just sell exactly the seats left on the plane (in this case, the OF creators could put a limit to the people being able to DM them) but instead they choose the extra profit by selling more tickets than there are seats (OF creator allowing an ungodly amount of people to flood their DMs) and just take the blame the few times the statistics goes against their favor (someone figures out they have been talking with an AI/employee)
>trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?
The use case for Alphabet is to control more of the interactive bandwidth so they can steer the influence on behalf of the highest bidder / inject increasingly subtle conversational advertising.
You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.
I sort of get why this feels dishonest, but in the same way I’m not sure social media is something that users expect to be a reciprocal experience in 2024, save speaking to ones own immediate circles.
Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.
Things seem directly headed to the movie Her where your monthly subscription is mostly used to pay for hosting your personal interaction model in the cloud.
I guess so, to a point. Jimmy Kimmel wants you to feel like you're a part of a community because you watch his show and get all of his inside jokes, but he's not sending you fake text messages pretending to be your close personal friend. Seems different to me!
The parasocial television friend hustle was developed before that was possible, or else they'd probably all be doing it too. As it is, they stick with their establish form and don't innovate because their audience is people who haven't and probably won't ever adapt to the newer forms of the hustle. If parasocial hustling is food service, then television talk shows are Cracker Barrel.
If no one addresses the roots, why bother condemning the consequences? Eight billion people watch bigcorps screw them up in all poses and nobody bats an eye, cause it’s “legal”. We all get what a few democracies count as normal.
This comment is 100% AI generated, straight from an LLM (admittedly a small and specifically trained one). My first and likely only AI generated comment.
On a micro level there's no clear way to tell, nor is it really valuable.
Like most engineering there's a matter of "good enough" and you get surprisingly close to that by simply tracking down the most obvious accounts.
It couldn't be completely automated out regardless because intent is important as well. Using an LLM to try and translate yours or a foreign post has more honest intention than a soliciting bot or an otherwise disruptive user that is breaking rules.
Now with that context in mind:
> How could hacker news determine such things?
Good question, I'm curious as well. I'm not well versed in the state of tracking such behavior. But I'm sure any site of size has needed to prepare for this for a while.
It's a cat and mouse game, same as all other spam. There are AI detectors, but then the AI get better and the detectors aren't much better than 50:50 ... I don't know how we'll combat this in the future but I don't think detectors are the answer
Given what I read of Dang, I'd be surprised if any method HN uses isn't supplemented by heavy manual jidgment. I imagine any automated solutions will simply be used to flag for review more than do any sorts of auto-modding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8
If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.