altcunningham
Hooker with a heart of gold
Yuuuuup.
Yeah, but I don't think AI is going to have an impact on these things in the sense that it's going to do the things Fox News was already doing. As you said, the Republican-controlled media robbed us of our present. But they've been working for the last decade to rob us of our future. I don't think AI is going to have an appreciable effect on what was already going to happen.I definitely don't think it's going to alter things for the folks already deep into information silos except that it'll entrench them further, isolate them more. I think it's more that it being deployed wide has a groundwater poisoning effect on children and younger adults who are still malleable enough to learn things. Fox news (and an increasingly captured government) robbed us of a present, AI could rob us of many potential futures. I see every day how badly COVID fucked with a generation of kids who were still in grade school at the time, and AI is coming along at the perfect moment to make problems that could be overcome into lifelong deficits.
I don't think so, though. Look around you. That AI in this form can even exist is BECAUSE critical thinking has essentially been stomped out of the general population -already-. AI is a result, not a cause.It's going to contribute to even more critical thinking suppression.
Yup.We're cooked but we were already in the oven and well seasoned before this.
Yep. AI is, as the corporate dickheads like to say, "a force multiplier." Our lack of ability to smell bullshit when it's on our plate before we start eating is the main problem. It's causing catastrophic harm but we'd be in so much less trouble if we had a populace that hadn't had critical thinking skills degraded and atrophied since the Reagan administration.Yup.
I don't want to UNDERstate how bad AI is. I think my position on AI is well understood around here. I just think it's worthless as a tool of lies if we don't have a population primed to believe every single lie. Before AI, it was just 'my cousin's best friends' dad said...' and that was just 'fact' for that person for the rest of their life. As a person that has argued about history, mythology, and religion for my entire Internet-existence, let me tell you that AI was definitely not the beginning of even 'experts' believing things that were totally wrong because the one source they used sucked and they refused to look beyond it.
Every idiot has always found a way to find The Truth Machine to avoid having to actually think or do any work. The Internet definitely made that more accessible, just as AI has made the stupidity ON the Internet even more accessible. But the foundational problem is still how fucking stupid, lazy, and disinterested in reality most people are.
And here we are, back at my original point.and yet so fucking stupid.