Larger part of the picture — people are stupid and believe everything they hear on tv and see on the internet. Even larger picture — this is by design as politicians continue to gut public education to make sure the populace stays malleable and doesn’t have critical thinking skills.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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The real election danger wasn’t AI, after all. The real danger were the reckless, emotionally motivated, uneducated people.
I think the real danger is the people manipulating those people.
There will always be a con man or grifter out there somewhere. The uneducated and gullible population I think is the bigger issue. People need to have their defenses up against deception, which requires critical thinking.
Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by "owners" I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn't actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like "trickle down"?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking "experts" - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).
Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that's not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.
In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.
All this to say that blaming humans for being human rather than everybody that took and takes advantage of that, is at best naive and at worst being a bit of an useful idiot (for still falling for the swindle of excusing the very politicians who put us were we are now).
Low information voters?
Heh, part of the reason is that OpenAI stagnated and that most AI products are still dumb.
And people, especially bad actors, use them stupidly too. Like are they running a cot finetune with constrained grammer tuned just for their... Blah blah blah, nope. They're just using cheap OpenAI API, maybe with a jailbreak prompt, if not just prompting the webpage, out of sheer laziness and ignorance.
It's like the discussion of building bear proof garbage containers - the problem for designers is that there is a significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
Is it that AI is just dumb and not that good? ... or are we all just so collectively stupid that it doesn't take much to affect how we think and see the world.
AI might not to be so far advanced as we would like to see ... and at the same time, I think we are realizing that collectively, we are overestimating the amount of AI that is needed to affect our absolutely stupid civilization.
Yuuuuup. People talk about how stupid AI can be… but like, have you ever met a human?