- May 2023
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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When you read someone else’s writing online, it’s an invitation to connect with them. You can reply to their work, direct message them, meet for coffee or a drink, and ideally become friends or intellectual sparring partners. I’ve had this happen with so many people. Highly recommend.There is always someone on the other side of the work who you can have a full human relationship with.Some of us might argue this is the whole point of writing on the web.
The web is conversation (my blog def is), texts are a means to enter into a conversation, connection. For algogens the texts are the purpose (and human time spend evaluating its utility and finding it generated an externalised cost, assymmetric as an LLM can generate more than one can ever evaluate for authenticity). Behind a generated text there's no author to connect to. Not in terms of annotation (cause no author intention) and not in terms of actual connection to the human behind the text.
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Everything we say is situated in a social context.
Conversation / social interaction / contactivity is the human condition.
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But there are a few key differences between content generated by models versus content made by humans.First is its connection to reality. Second, the social context they live within. And finally their potential for human relationships.
yes, all generated content is devoid of an author context e.g. It's flat and 2D in that sense, and usually fully self contained no references to actual experiences, experiments or things outside the scope of the immediate text. As I describe https://hypothes.is/a/kpthXCuQEe2TcGOizzoJrQ
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I think we’re about to enter a stage of sharing the web with lots of non-human agents that are very different to our current bots – they have a lot more data on how behave like realistic humans and are rapidly going to get more and more capable.Soon we won’t be able to tell the difference between generative agents and real humans on the web.Sharing the web with agents isn’t inherently bad and could have good use cases such as automated moderators and search assistants, but it’s going to get complicated.
Having the internet swarmed by generative agents is unlike current bots and scripts. It will be harder to see diff between humans and machines online. This may be problematic for those of us who treat the web as a space for human interaction.
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Secondly, I’m what we call “very online”. I live on Twitter and write a lot online. I hang out with people who do the same, and we write blog posts and essays to each other while researching. As if we're 18th-century men of letters. This has led to lots of friends and collaborators and wonderful jobs.Being a sincere human on the web has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me, and I want others to have that same experience.
True for me (and E) too. For me it largely was because the internet became a thing right around when I entered uni in the late 80s, and it always was about connecting. Blogging esp early in the years 2002-2009 led to a large part of my personal and professional peers network.
'18th c. men of letters' I've sometimes thought about it like that actually, and treat meet-ups etc like the Salons of old vgl. [[Salons organiseren 20201216205547]]
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https://web.archive.org/web/20230503150426/https://maggieappleton.com/forest-talk
Maggie Appleton on the impact of generative AI on internet, with a focus on it being a place for humans and human connection. Take out some of the concepts as shorthand, some of the examples mentioned are new to me --> add to lists, sketch out argumentation line and arguments. The talk represents an updated version of earlier essay https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest which I probably want to go through next for additional details.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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https://web.archive.org/web/20230503151906/https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest The essay from which the talk I also saved came. The talk is a good approach to the storyline, expect more details / arguments to be found in here.
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