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0 pointsadd-sub-mul-div3y ago0 comments

We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

A few sources will control the information we get in a much more direct and extreme way than now, that conscious skepticism will no longer be able to defend. Whatever handwaved promises we get now will be gone ten years from now.

If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational search results distracting us, we'd never tolerate that in principle.

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pphysch3y ago

> We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

There's nothing fundamentally new about this. The average person is blissfully unaware of the conversations being had between powerful individuals, PR experts, producers, and so on about how said person should be manipulated.

amatecha3y ago

I pretty much have this ever-present aura of "citation needed" floating around in my head when I listen to people speak. Any kind of news/press thing, politician speaking (lol), or just anyone trying to claim/assert anything -- I can feel nothing but "citation needed" until they provide some kind of supporting evidence. I feel like people expend a shocking amount of energy proclaiming things they literally do not know with even the slightest degree of certainty - they saw it on some guy's sensational YouTube video and repeat it uncritically. The fatigue is real.

pphysch3y ago

Even a citation is insufficient nowadays. They will cite a "reputable" source like NYT, which in turn cites "an anonymous intelligence official", and so on. Unverifiable.

Misinformation and manufactured narratives are omnipresent and all we can do is consume as diverse a media diet as possible and develop a good nose for bullsh*t.

dougmwne3y ago

Oh please. As if the reputation of any news outlet even matters anymore. They all fired their real journalists and fact checkers long ago. Everything you read is full of inaccuracies, agenda pushing and misinformation. If you think it doesn’t, you’ve been had.

spindle3y ago

That's true of (commercial) news outlets. It doesn't apply to "everything you read". There are many ways to check facts that don't rely on news outlets, at least for people who have time and resources.

dougmwne3y ago

But relevant to the topic at hand, do any of those sources regularly make it onto the search engine results page? Is the quality of Forbes, Cnet, Reddit, Wikipedia and Quora clearly better than these AI generated responses in some way?

I know there are expert vetted information sources, but you generally have to pay for the quality and they do not get linked to from Bing and Google.

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0 pointsadd-sub-mul-div3y ago0 comments

We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

If there wasn't such a gee-whiz coolness factor about conversational search results distracting us, we'd never tolerate that in principle.

0 comments

pphysch3y ago

> We're slow-motion singing on to a future with a fundamental shift to receiving information in a completely opaque manner.

amatecha3y ago

pphysch3y ago

Even a citation is insufficient nowadays. They will cite a "reputable" source like NYT, which in turn cites "an anonymous intelligence official", and so on. Unverifiable.

Misinformation and manufactured narratives are omnipresent and all we can do is consume as diverse a media diet as possible and develop a good nose for bullsh*t.

dougmwne3y ago

spindle3y ago

dougmwne3y ago

I know there are expert vetted information sources, but you generally have to pay for the quality and they do not get linked to from Bing and Google.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse