• Tony Bark
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    132 years ago

    Just as bad, if not worse, than the blockchain craze that came before it.

    • Heresy_generator
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      2 years ago

      This is worse. Blockchains didn’t do anything except extract money from suckers, which is bad but has a very limited impact. There were no valid applications, nothing they could do cheaper or better, so they just existed in their own separate world of scammers and grifters. AI is appropriating people’s work to shit up the internet we all use with nonsense and will continue to be used because it has valid applications: creating bad art or vapid text without having to pay anyone.

      • I Cast Fist
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        32 years ago

        Blockchains didn’t do anything except extract money from suckers

        And consume more energy than Egypt. And drive GPU prices through the roof for a couple of years.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    So be it. Humanity got along just fine without the internet for milleneia. Its clear at this point that the public internet isn’t going to be used to improve our human existence. If there is anything to bemoan, its that the practical usefulness of the internet will only continue to get more and more narrow.

    • @[email protected]
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      102 years ago

      Right but how much of our daily existence is tied to the internet? Like all of our banking systems, our commerce, communications, infrastructure.

      • Tigbitties
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        42 years ago

        I think that functionality will contunue just fine. It’s surfing that dying. They’re trying to put up billboards up wherever are eyes are looking and we can’t even see what we’re looking for anymore. AI is just a “smarter” billboard. Eventually we’re just going to stop looking.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      We got a along without antibiotics for millennia, too, but I wouldn’t want to lose access to them.

  • @[email protected]
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    282 years ago

    It’s not “ai”…it’s just a few billionaire assholes.

    & it’s not just the internet. It’s the entire “reality”.

  • Tigbitties
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    42 years ago

    Google made the recipy for the shitty internet cake and put it in the oven. AI is the icing.

  • kitonthenet
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    12 years ago

    This stuff is only economical at scale, it makes no sense to set up an AI spambot farm on startrek.website because you’ll just get banned and you’ll have to do all the ban evasion stuff you have to do on, say, Facebook but for a site with a hundredth of the daily active users

    • HobbitFoot
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      12 years ago

      For now.

      Right now, there can be value in using a bot net to create 10000 AI driven bots that look like humans but have a coordinated agenda on Reddit. As that value drops, I expect that smaller and smaller forums will get inundated with these bot networks.

  • @[email protected]
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    162 years ago

    What’s interesting is this is also kind of a circle of tech moment too. At least for me, search has been sort of killed (or google search anyway), but it’s just back to the Internet of 1997 again, where we have “sort of useful” “search engines”, some walled gardens like AOL was, and maybe webrings or the original sort of Yahoo! curated link / subject sites / lists.

  • @[email protected]
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    302 years ago

    The internet is a place where people can connect from across the world, bringing them closer together and allowing the free exchange of information. It’s unfortunate that it is being more and more locked down and controlled by business and government interests looking to isolate, control, and monetize people. AI isn’t the only tool being used to ruin the internet, but it’s damn effective.

    • harold
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      2 years ago

      “free exchange” is being capitalized by the rich.
      there are countries going through brain drain, this is the internet/world going through a brain drain global recession/dark age

  • @[email protected]
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    892 years ago

    Hot take

    The internet was already ruined. It’s no longer the same place it was in 2016 or 2010 or 2000. It’s become a corporate hellhole where you can’t get away from tracking, monitoring and other shady practices no matter what you do. Almost nothing is free and open and everything is designed to milk as much money out of the product.

    AI is just accelerating this. Makes me think of the “old net” in Cyberpunk2077. Infested with rouge AI that have turned it into a battleground.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      2000 or 2010 maybe (too young to know) but I’m not sure I see any difference between now and 2016. The only major new thing I can think of is tiktok but it didn’t ruin the internet.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      It’s just the normal capitalist cycle.

      1. New thing invented
      2. Golden age of thing
      3. Corporations figure out how to engineer thing for maximum profit
      4. Thing sucks
    • @[email protected]
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      332 years ago

      Lukewarm counter-take: That non-commercial internet is still out there.

      As long as there’s nerds, there’s going to be nerds building stuff for the fun of it. Building your Lemmys, your Fediverses, your Geminis etc…

      There is definitely more legislation now, dissuading some percentage of nerds, but we also have a lot more nerds…

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        Even places like lemmy or mastodon aren’t safe anymore. Everything that is public can be, and is, data mined by some corporation. There will be bot accounts or paid people pushing their agenda. And several other things.

        It’s not a technical problem. We can have places that are better than the average, but the corporations will still put their tentacles in.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        Even the non-commercial spaces are commercial. I’ve seen a bunch of thing disguised ads on here already. The fediverse is no different than the rest of the net. The big corps are still monitoring everything.

        Every “nerd” I meet now wants out asap. The only ones who don’t seem to be pushing blockchain or AI. The tech sphere I loved is well and truly gone. The people are so profit driven nothing else can matter.

  • harold
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    2 years ago

    capitalism and the rich** ftfy just like they’re destroying the earth and space

    • @[email protected]
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      352 years ago

      Everything that is exposed to consumer information will be this way soon. It’s an eventuality at this point, not a maybe.

      • I Cast Fist
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        42 years ago

        They also gave an opt-in to allow all your data to be used to train AI models. You auto opt-in if you use any of their AI assisted services

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        They changed their TOS to allow themselves to license everyone’s videos for A.I. training (or anything else). One of the execs tried to say they weren’t doing that but unless they change their TOS, they can and no doubt will.

        For some people, that’s a personal privacy issue but for people who have Zoom calls about, for instance, health records, it makes Zoom illegal. And even if it’s not illegal, companies use video calls for discussing proprietary information they don’t want to be potentially licensed to competitors.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Holy shit how did I not hear about this but the back to the office thing was everywhere? Fuck that, no. No that is not ok. Fuck. FUCK why is everything going to this shit?

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          Does software exists that encrypts video and audio data on one end, and requires a key to decrypt on the other end? Anyone looking at the feed without keys would be seeing garbage.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            Yes, E2EE video call software exists, but then you’d be using something other than Zoom.

            Theoretically you could have everyone in a call use a plugin that “added” E2EE to Zoom, but I’m not certain such a plugin exists - and even if it did, ensuring everyone you communicate with Zoom uses it would be enough of a barrier that it’d be simpler to just use something other than Zoom that has E2EE baked in.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            I’m not sure about the technicals, but there are some services that are HIPAA compliant, which I assume means something similar to the end-to-end encryption you’re describing. WebeX is the one I know one of my local hospital systems uses.

          • I Cast Fist
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            32 years ago

            Zoom and MS Teams both seem to have E2E encryption for 1-on-1 calls. They own the code, tho, so whether they really cannot decrypt the stuff is a matter of trust.

          • @[email protected]
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            72 years ago

            Zoom already does 256bit AES end-to-end encryption. From what I understand it isn’t the live calls but the files and recorded calls you save on their servers after are what they would use for AI training.

            Zoom already updated their TOS a few hours ago to supposedly address the issue. https://gizmodo.com/zoom-ai-privacy-policy-train-on-your-data-1850712655

            Update, August 7, 5:06 p.m.: After this story was published, Zoom issued an update to its Terms of Service. The article has been updated to reflect the change.

          • pjol
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            2 years ago

            If those you wish to have a video call with already have each others phone numbers then Signal is a option. It supports up to 40 participants. Available on Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac and Linux.

            Signal has other great chat/messaging features too.
            Also a unofficial community on Kbin

            • pjol
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              2 years ago

              Oh,forgot to mention there is support for sharing screen and separate window on desktop. Unsure about mobile clients.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            Yes. End to end encryption between two parties is pretty trivial to implement. Video and audio is no exception.

        • Bri Guy
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          192 years ago

          Wow, wtf…it seems like every big tech company is going through “enshittification”. Is there an open-source alternative for Zoom that is hopefully more privacy-focused?

        • Billiam
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          102 years ago

          Apparently they did:

          As of Monday afternoon, [section 10.4] has a new paragraph in bold below it: "Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”

          How exactly they obtain customer “consent” isn’t disclosed.

          • @[email protected]
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            132 years ago

            I’m not so worried about Zoom adding fancy autocomplete (“training our models”) as I am with them licensing it out. This is what section 10.4 says before the caveat:

            You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content, including AI and ML training and testing.

            I don’t think that extra caveat even addresses licensing meeting content to third parties for training A.I.

            • Billiam
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              2 years ago

              A bit later in the article also addresses this:

              That consent, [Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita] Hashim closed, still won’t allow third parties to train an AI off your calls: “And even if you chose to share your data, it will not be used for training of any third-party models.”

              However, glancing through the ToS I don’t see where Zoom prohibits third-party AI training, only prohibiting training their own models. On the other hand, data for training LLMs is apparently the modern gold-rush and it’s feasible that Zoom wouldn’t want that data to be accessed by any potential competitors.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    I feel like with “cheap” AI we’re entering a dark age of tech.

    Eventually everything will, the tools and the tech will get more mature and sort itself out but for a couple of months/years we will be confronted with bad AI news , bad AI games, bad AI art, etc

    I’m pretty confident a day will come were AI will be seen as a tool and that pure AI generated content will be seen the equivalent of a bad JavaScript game or a cheap knock clone.