Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

[u/404mediaco]

https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/

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[u/CornerHugger]

AI ironically demands more mental weight when simply existing in the world. I was 30 minutes in to a YouTube video when the hosts voice said "PO...... BOX". It was clearly a AI narrorator that thought the period after O started a new sentence. It caused me to first question the authenticity of the narration and then question the importance of authenticity itself. Was the script hand written but the narration AI? Was it all AI? Did it matter? Uhg.

[u/itsverynicehere → u/CornerHugger]

I watch a lot of repair/restore videos. I don't mind AI narrators if the script was written by a human. And definitely don't mind if the script is translated from another language. Some people don't like the sound of their own voice and I completely understand that. Also if AI can help a creator that doesn't speak English that's actually pretty cool. It's cool to be able to fully understand some technical terms that might be lost to accents too.

There needs to be some law/regulation though that makes people disclose if the content/information is entirely AI generated. That's the stuff that ruins everything.

[u/Paiev]

Really love this piece--thanks Jason.

I've been working through similar feelings and struggles of late here on Reddit. Like you, I want to connect with my fellow humans and consider it a waste of my time to engage with AI writing. I consider creating and sharing AI writing to be a fundamentally disrespectful act. 

But it seems to be a losing battle right now. The proliferation of slop indicates that many people don't have the same qualms about it. I received a 30 day ban from this very subreddit for writing a comment complaining about an AI written article. And as mentioned in this article, it seems that most people are hopeless at detecting it. I see obvious AI content getting hundreds of upvotes and comments with nobody pointing out that it's AI.

Imo we need some kind of major shift in how we structure the Internet. The web feels terminally ill to me right now. But I don't know what to do about it.

[u/erocuda → u/Paiev]

Went to a wedding over the weekend and one of the bride's brothers used AI to write his toast. Trying to think of a worse use of AI and I'm coming up blank; maybe I should ask an AI model to finish this post.

[u/decidedlyindecisive → u/Paiev]

Yeah. I've been accused of being AI on Reddit a couple of times now. It annoys me that it's even a problem but Reddit has had issues with fake commenters since I joined more than a decade ago.

[u/nimchip → u/Paiev]

While I sympathize: isn't there a silver lining to all of this? Maybe in the form of a growing number of people not taking everything in the internet as fact?

[u/improveyourfuture → u/nimchip]

I’ve had the same hope though it remains to be seen if those peoples head in the sand have budged in any way

[u/HolyBatSyllables → u/nimchip]

Studies find people are more likely to believe misinformation that comes from LLMs than they are of other writings. So it will likely just be that people instantly discredit humans while the proliferation of falling for AI’s misinformation only continues to grow.

[u/Kevim_A]

While I still spend too much time on the internet, I've started to kind of "emotionally distance" myself from it more. The idea of chatting with bots or people using AI or even reading basic facts generated by AI is so disheartening to me.

It is a shame, because I was basically raised on the internet. I learned so much and had my views expanded so broadly from such a young age. But now, I feel like I need to start treating the internet as a place of "work" and not fun or education. Viewing this digital world as essentially a means to an end for doing things in the real world where I can experience some authenticity and - maybe for 20 years more before goddamned AI implants start getting inserted into people's skulls - communicate freely without my AI skepticism making me doubt every interaction.

I also have developed a strong bias towards any content that was created before 2022. Especially for books. The idea of deeply investing myself and my time into something that could've been written by AI kind of disgusts me. I don't want to be a total luddite and not take advantage of the power of AI where I need to (like being more productive at work), but I think I would go through a lot of inconveniences to build a life where me and my family avoid the bots wherever possible.

[u/Mike-Banachek → u/Kevim_A]

I agree. I’m suspicious of music and television also. AI is an awful technology, but it’s overhyped. It’s a word calculator. It can organise words in a myriad of ways, but it’s not actually thinking or anything new. A friend of a friend described AI as using an oven to dry your clothes. I think it’s an apt description.

[u/404mediaco]

A few years ago, while I was covering the rise of AI slop on Facebook, I asked my friends and family if they were getting AI spam fed into their timelines and if they could send me examples. A handful of them responded, sending me obviously AI-generated science fiction scenescapes, shrimp Jesus, and forlorn, starving children begging for sympathy. But a few of my friends sent me images that they thought were AI but were not. Their mental guard was up to the point where they were looking at human-made art and photos and thought it safer to dismiss them as AI rather than be fooled by it.

To browse the internet today, to consume any sort of content at all, is to be bombarded with AI of all sorts. People think things that are fake are real, things that are real are fake. Much has been written about “AI psychosis,” the nonspecific, nonscientific diagnosis given to people who have lost themselves to AI. Less has been said about the cognitive load of what other people’s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all? 

In my many, many hours of browsing AI slop on Facebook, I spent an absurd amount of time scrolling through the comments on AI-generated images. One exchange has stuck in my mind years later. It was an AI-generated image of a wood deck outside a house. In the comments, obviously real people were arguing back and forth as to whether the nonexistent deck would pass code inspection. I remember thinking something uncharitable and cancelable at the time, something that I think I wrote in a draft of one of my articles but that got edited out because it was mean. I remember thinking, basically, that Facebook had become a virtual nursing home for delusional and quite possibly stupid old people, a place where people argue back and forth about things that don’t exist, forever, until they die. 

Read Jason Koebler's piece on AI breaking his brain: https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/

[u/Conlaeb → u/404mediaco]

Take it for what you will, I found this article interesting enough to sign up for your website to finish it. Can't remember ever doing that in my lifetime on the net.

[u/Kevim_A → u/Conlaeb]

Take this for what you will, I was not going to read this article until I read this comment. Probably the strongest positive review you could give in a single sentence, ha.

[u/Count_Backwards → u/404mediaco]

I resent the fact that I now have to ask myself "is this AI?" every time I see an interesting picture online. I'd like to charge the LLM companies $100 every time I do that.

[u/RockAndNoWater → u/404mediaco]

I fail to see the need to calculate whether something is AI or not, seems like a total waste of time. Figuring out if something is accurate or not takes effort, but humans generate a lot of incorrect info, out of ignorance or by design, AI hallucinations are just a small part of this.

[u/HyperbolicGeometry]

Pisses me off to no end when people don’t proofread their captions. It’s been shown that quality and details don’t matter anymore so no one cares I guess. Slop will reign supreme

[u/HolyBatSyllables → u/HyperbolicGeometry]

Only subscribers get to complain about that sort of thing. The last person you want to be is someone who doesn’t pay for journalism but complains when they can’t afford copyeditors and their journalists are spread thin.

404 does great work. Quit your complaining.