AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I would be concerned about language collapse (i.e. models incrementally forget vocabulary + fail to adapt to new terms leading to language becoming incrementally worse) before I would worry about knowledge collapse

Why so?

The exact same mechanism is on display here. Ask an LLM for information, and it’s more likely to condense an answer, not display additional relevant information, and slowly but surely produce less and less outputs including that given information.

Sources then begin to be generated by the AI model that adds less and less of that information over time, LLMs cite those new sources that don’t include that information, etc, etc, and now that information is just not present in a majority of sources, and is never stated in any LLM responses.

If anything, this is more likely than models forgetting certain vocabulary, because while the underlying tokens for a lot of that vocabulary still exist in the model, the subsequent combinations for a given piece of information are substantially less likely, and the models’ finite size can only store a subset of that actual information in statistical averages. (i.e. you can store the alphabet and a dictionary of every word in the English language, and many simple phrases, in a tiny fraction of what the sum of Wikipedia is, and Wikipedia itself will contain a subset of all information on the internet, and so on, but you can still theoretically write any English content you’ll find on Wikipedia or the internet using that alphabet and dictionary)

What’s wrong with wanting a UI you’re used to?

Everyone wants other people to switch to Linux until they do literally anything a purist wouldn’t do with their own personal setup 😅

God I hate how literally every single AI-generated comic (or at least the ones made by OpenAI’s models given how damn universal its style is) have the EXACT same facial expressions. Every surprised or scared character has the exact same sort-of-horrified-but-no-light-behind-the-eyes look, any moment of true excitement, being proud, happy, etc has the same smiling-while-vaguely-staring-into-the-distance look to it, etc.

Over a third of adults say that if they had a $400 expense (i.e. sudden medical bill), they’d either simply go broke, or have to go into debt and put it on their credit card while carrying the balance month-to-month because they had no other means of paying it.

Nearly half of Gen Z has resorted to using buy now pay later services to buy groceries, and more than one in ten people you meet are in poverty.

49% of households with credit cards consider carrying a balance because they can’t pay it off in full “normal” to them. And remember, essentially all of these statistics have to do with people that have essentially no savings, and no real income left after expenses at that point. They’re not even truly enjoying themselves after spending so much of their time on labor, they’re just making enough to live at bare minimum and that’s it.

Most Americans are absolutely struggling.

Yeah. Honestly, I don’t really have a problem if a developer is just able to… not spend a bunch of money on a ton of furniture that’ll get shuttled between different properties, not accidentally bang up a wall, etc, and just make a good looking listing image that accurately represents the space.

All the better if it can maybe lead at least some of the more mom & pop landlords to not charge more because they’re looking to recoup staging costs.

Hell, I’d love it if I could look at a listing, and maybe get like 5 or 6 different options for how the space could look in very different styles, rather than the same, bland, generic palette of furniture and colors just because that’s the only truly cost-effective option.

But of course, we can’t have AI do anything good, that’d be ridiculous. It has to move the windows around and make the space look twice as big for no reason!

That’s fair. Still, I do think it’s a tad unreasonable to expect of people, when it can significantly impact their popularity and thus their income, when the actual effect of them leaving is usually that… essentially nothing happens to the company they’re leaving from.

Unfortunately, Facebook and its users likely won’t care much if someone leaves the platform, as long as they can keep scrolling. It’s gotta be on a very large scale, with a lot of people giving up portions of their audience before more people start genuinely moving to alternatives.

They chose to advertise themselves on the “Grandma’s Racist Rants And Old White Guys With Sunglasses Who Hate Poor People” platform.

While true, they also advertised themselves on a platform most Americans use.

Say what you want about someone’s ability to not use a social media platform in the first place, but if you’re a band that depends on… people, it’s hard to just decide not to put yourself out there on a platform where so many people are.

The network effect is real. It’s where people’s friends, family, celebrities, bands, etc all are. Leaving means leaving people who are important to you.

A lot of people find it easier to leave platforms like Twitter now, because the platform is such a shell of its former self that it doesn’t even provide what many people originally came there for, but if you’re on Instagram, Facebook, etc, it still often provides people with easy communication to/from family and friends, and organizations like bands with access to an audience, promotion, visibility, etc.

Leaving the platform means leaving fans, and giving up visibility. I wish everyone could just quit Meta’s platforms and crush the company, but there’s a very simple collective action problem at play here that makes it very difficult, don’t discount that.