Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
Liked the article but the end was kind of a letdown for me. If capitalism-driven AI is ruining the web even further why would demanding that AI is better today already and not in the future help with any of the problems this article has described?
For me the solution is obvioisly rejecting corpo-spam social-networks and going back to the selfmade small-internet, the fediverse etc. Sure that’s not a solution for humanity as a whole but neither is demanding better AI now.
Are have I completely misunderstood something?
Personally I read it as a general “demand better”, “don’t accept crap wrapped in gold” as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I’m inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is “don’t let the hype win”; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say “not good enough” and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to ‘fulfil’ our needs. It’s not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past “AI is bad” to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that’s still important.
Ok, yeah, but I still think that totally misses the point. At least for me even fully functional AI will still be a desaster and would be used for the most heinous stuff, eroding democracy worldwide even more and it obviously changes nothing of the social-media-silo capitalist hellscape most people live in comfortably (or less comfortably if it gives you eating disorders, depression and stuff).
I can’t disagree with you on that, you’re absolutely right - I suppose my read just gives the author the benefit of the doubt that it’s not ‘better AI’ that we deserve, but a better internet (i.e. with no AI whatsoever).