On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.

I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.

I've found a page on Facebook that regularly posts single white mothers with black babies on supposed dating profiles with very demanding requirements for men. The comments are loaded with people saying that they deserve their current situation, enforcing racial stereotypes, etc. It's not hard to see that these are AI generated, as there are maybe 5-8 posts a day like this, and the images are pretty clearly AI generated. Regardless, they get the engagement, and they sell the shirts. Easy way to automate a business, I guess, but at what cost?!

I'm pretty surprised by how fooled normal people are by all this AI-sludge, and/or how accepting they are of all this low-effort content. My reaction to this stuff is the same as yours: please don't clog the internet up with all this fake content! But everyone else in my life thinks it's great, and sometimes don't believe me when I point out it's obviously AI generated. I think people are already totally fooled and think it's real.

> all the comments were "cute!" "adorable" and "love this!"

Probably bots?

Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).

Those comments are probably AI as well

Funny to complain about content marketing that happens outside of HN, when content marketing is so popular here.

E.g. in this recent 800+ point submission[1] a company presents their product as the ultimate alternative to PaaS, their use case seems shallow and presents their product in positive light only.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661253

I think it’s a generational thing. Younger people don’t really use Facebook very much and are much more active on TikTok and instagram, both of which I would describe as semi-hostile to AI, or at least the kind of lazy slop AI you’re talking about.

The internet will be more and more ai stuff.

At the end of the day, people don't care if it's real or not as long as it's either entertaining or tells them what they want to hear.

Have you seen sci-fi movies? It's all fake! And people are happy with this. Same here, it becomes annoying only after some time. Most didn't get to this point yet. By the time they get quality will be better, so like new again. After that even adults will have hard time telling apart reality from generated. Like little kids believe dreams are true.

> in a local facebook group for my town ... [someone posts AI promos]

> I opened the comments expecting to see other people complaining

people are less confrontational the more local it is

Moderators really need to start cracking down on this stuff. If nothing else just posts per week limits or something.

Just a few hours ago, I was trying to find the profile of an excellent swimmer I met at dinner yesterday. I knew his first name and the club he swims in, so I searched his name together with the club and "swimming" on Instagram without using the keyword club. Almost all the results were attractive girls posing in swimsuits, but none were actual amateur swimmers. The guy I was looking for didn't appear at all.

BTW, mi Instagram account is just a placeholder and I can't imagine an algorithm suggesting that content. It seems like a default suggestion.

thx

> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.

I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.

As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.

I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845772 "meta predicted 10% of revenue came from scams"

> You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.

It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.

Yes, IMO this is going to start becoming visible sooner rather than later. College students that defer to ChatGPT to form arguments for them are going to graduate, sit for an in-person job interview and discover they haven't had to think fast, with their own brain, in years. It won't be pretty.

Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.

When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.

(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)

there seems to be a parallel with the industrial revolution - being fit and having muscles used to be the norm when everyone worked the fields all day. but now that grocery stores and sedentary jobs have made exercise optional. so choosing to pursue fitness signals to others that one is disciplined, takes pride in their appearance, etc.

i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.

>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither

I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.

And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.

People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.

Ancient Egyptians on writing:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.

I think this is true of just about any technology. It will make lazy people lazier and help productive people get more done in less time. It's all about where the motivation is for each individual.

Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.

I don't really understand how they used "brainrot". I thought brain rot was this generations surrealism, a type of art?

By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.

Here's an example of how reliance on traditional media leads to detrimental outcomes: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.

I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.

Such bs! Every new tech causes the disgrace of society! Music, films, dancing, comic books, the internet. Everything is always evil except the bible of course.

You could add writing to that list of topics...

> I’m doing most complicated projects I ever work , I would not even try to implement them without AI. My brain is exploding of complexity every time , I passively learn lots of topics I only had a vague understanding in the past

This sentence is very poorly written and ironically is undermining the very case you're trying to make.

That still seems to be a problem. It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued). At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.

You/me in your/my current state are/is the single most important thing in the world.

Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.

I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.

“I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”

This has a real “I’m afraid no one will know how to ride a horse when the motorcoach comes out” sense to it.

The answer is, who cares? Why would a better way of doing something “frighten” someone. Not to say it won't come with its own set of issues, but technology constantly evolving/improving should be expected by now, but humanity remains terrified at even the slightest upheaval of the status quo.

> it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation

less ?

We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...

If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.

What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?

As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.

Been seeing this argument more and more. Is there a name for it?

“Bad thing X has been happening forever.

AI _guarantees_ X will exponentially get worse, but it lets me do (arguably) good thing Y so it’s okay.”

Reading this, I have no idea which of the thousands of new media silos you inhabit. But they all tell different mutually exclusive narratives.

So statistically, even if one is purely honest and accurate, most likely you aren’t in that one particular silo.

Past media may have prepped us with some brain rot that's now causing people to prostrate themselves to the tech giants in exchange for not having to work as hard. But that doesn't mean that an acceleration of social media, slop, and loss of transparency on the information we take in isn't going to be extremely worse.

Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior. Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.

The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.

[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.

Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation.

Don't discount the effect of lead in paint, pipes, gasoline, etc. It's not a surprise that Republicans try to roll back regulations that remove lead.

Exactly. The article should just say “Mass consumption of media causes brain rot” because since 1900 that’s all it’s doing.

Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.

Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…

Get outside, do something.

Well yes, they are. It's just that a lot of legacy media is also bad. They can both be correct.

That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.

AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.

(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)

How would such verification work at planetary scale?

Anonymity is more important, and verification systems can always be gamed. To add, given what you see well known people post under their real name, including Trump posting a video of himself shitting all over Americans, I don't understand what benefit you're expecting to get.