If We’re Not Careful, the AI Revolution Could Become the ‘Great Homogenization’

Great Homogenization is a good term for it. A classic example is to look at houses built before construction materials were popularly standardized in the 2nd half of 20th century. Every house had something different or unique. The laborer carving the handrail was in the mood for something different this time and it is beautiful. Now... it&#x27;s all IKEA copy-pasta.<p>It would be the same principle, but moved into code, documentation, audio, and other areas

I think this couldn&#x27;t be any more incorrect.<p>I think the first thing people get confused about here is the fact that AI is trained on predicting the next word. What they don&#x27;t realize is that predicting the next word for all of English is a really really hard task. It&#x27;s not something you can accomplish simply by repeating common phrases. These generators have to actually learn to do things to do their job well.<p>In fact we know what this looks like, Markov chains have existed for ages and we know those sort of output they give as statistical models of language. They are trash in comparison to what we have today.<p>Imagine saying something like this about a human, &quot;they&#x27;re not actually intelligent they&#x27;re just machines bred to reproduce&quot;. Don&#x27;t confuse an error function with the thing that was created as a result of training on that error function.<p>Instead, I believe that we are going to see the last vestiges of the era of homogenization ending. Television was homogenization. Radio was homogenized. Our current entertainment, short of platforms like YouTube and Spotify, are also homogenized.<p>AI takes the power from creators to create, and gives it to the individuals of the world. This is going to result in one of the most dramatic personalizations of media that we have ever seen.<p>And yes, whatever people ask for is going to have to be within the bounds of AI, but humans are not going to sit idly and let the AI determine what they get, they&#x27;re going to continually try to improve and customize it to fit their needs. Humanity never sits still, and this tool won&#x27;t make us do so either.<p>We&#x27;re already seeing an explosion of individuality empowered by things like youtube and Spotify, and AI is only going to make that even more individualized.<p>These are not mass produced media machines, what they create is not just copy paste. When you ask an AI machine for an output you get something that is unique from everyone else, and what you ask it is going to be unique from everyone else.<p>People are soon to have self-expression unlike any we have had before, and we should be more excited for this than we were for the internet as a result.

This is a lot of text, a lot of ads, and a lot of memes to say not much. Although I really appreciate the Bitcoin Times calling AI people idealists.

I think globalization has already homogenized things to a great degree...

This is nothing more than an ad for this person&#x27;s other works and Bitcoin Magazine

For a piece that warns of homogenization, it&#x27;s rather unoriginal, even down to the historical inaccuracies. (The early internet was not a “place where anyone can say anything“, it relied on the NFSNET backbone, whose policies banned many forms of speech. And of course the “anyone” part is somewhat suspect, too.)

&gt; The law of large numbers strikes again<p>This is not even remotely what the law of large numbers mean.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Law_of_large_numbers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Law_of_large_numbers</a>

&gt; Moving forward, every app we interact with will have a conversational interface, …<p>I don’t think we have a good idea yet of how to wire up LLMs with software APIs in a safe way. This includes the LLM properly understanding the semantics and context of the software it interfaces with, in relation to the user’s intents.<p>&gt; …and we will no longer be limited by the bandwidth of how fast our fingers can tap on keys or screens.<p>A physical keyboard actually tends to have higher bandwidth than speech. Well, maybe not for the mentioned “midwits”, in the author’s opinion.

Wow. This is really a low-value entry. I learned nothing. I don&#x27;t think the premisces are correct, and I think the author never traveled abroad (at least outside of 3-5 star hostels&#x2F;Airbnb), which is a bit rich when you try to talk about homogenization. I don&#x27;t know where he lives but I doubt he even trail&#x2F;hike across his own country.<p>I think I read about conspiracy singularity theories with more meat than that (at least conspiracy theories have great Wikipedia links to little-know facts)

Yes. The real threat may not be the extinction of humanity, but of creativity.<p>AI is just harvesting the existing output of humanity. Once it burns through that it will just become stale, or produce vapid nonsense that we all ignore. So us humans will lose our creative edge.<p>Knowledge will resemble fashion, where divorced of any practicality all we will care about is novelty and wow factor.<p>Now if AI comes up with a hint of something both new and important, who will be bothered to interpret and appreciate it?

Agriculture homogenized our diets and the landscape, colonialism and globalization are homogenizing language by increasing language death, mass media and the internet homogenize people’s thoughts and opinions (IMO). But with art, once a particular style gains too much traction and becomes dominant, there’s an urge to disrupt it and do something deliberately different, and maybe we’ll see that with the writing style ushered in by generative AI.

I did not enjoy this - you need to get all the way to the end to see that he is ok with silos as long as his get to survive. The article is a bunch of breadcrumbs to get you to the point where he springs his models on the reader.<p>Which is would have been one thing he if was honest but the frame is bogus. If he wanted real diversity at the popular level he would not have cherry picked so very hard so assign blame.<p>His frame is that ‘wokeness’ is the real problem with AI, since results from AI language interfaces will be governed by whatever that is. But all sorts of systems can present the problems he wants us to understand. You can’t tell me that Thiel&#x2F;Zuck&#x2F;Q&#x2F;4chan or any other entity on any spectrum could not pose a problem of similar shape, depending on ownership or algorithm mastery.<p>Having a bitcoin guy tell us the free market is gone and info homogenization will come because commie cat ladies, with no mention of megamergers and market capture through non competitive means, seems like he is burying his own values just to print some dunks he thought was clever.<p>It is rare for me to more insulted by other terms in a text when the author uses the word ‘ideate’ non-ironically but it happened here.<p>I am eager to see good debates about language mediated interfaces and debates whether LLMs will expand or contract knowledge, but not starting from his set of assumptions.

Another day, another article opening by shitting on everyone concerned with the dangers of AI without engaging with their arguments, only to dive into a largely unrelated topic. Is that the new way to get upvoted?

This quote alone tells you much about the author:<p>&quot;computers can be used to document ideas that change the world, or they can be used to operate central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) that enslave you into crazy, communist cat ladies working at the European Central Bank&quot;<p>I stopped reading after that. I know NASDAQ is pro neo-liberal free market but I can&#x27;t take that seriously.

AI isn&#x27;t the cause. It&#x27;s trends that go around the world. `Globalization` _is_ the `Great Homogenization`

Luckily it&#x27;s not as useful as people think it is. We will see an AI bubble much to the similarity of the .com crash

Yea, the AI gives out all the stuff in the middle of the standard-normal distribution. For everything.

Article has interesting points but waters it down to almost no value with communist takeover conspiracies, the idea that Bitcoin can replace money with 7tps consuming the energy of a country, and a pointless tirade on &quot;useless woke politics&quot;, which is, among another things, people resisting marginalization and oppression of trans people and women in the United States, which is very much actively happening at the moment and requires no hypothetical long term thinking.<p>The government isn&#x27;t forcing machine learning models to turn into Disney characters right now, it&#x27;s trying to punish Disney for the CEO&#x27;s opinion that he&#x27;s opposed to laws in Florida making it unlawful for teachers to discuss gay issues, and it&#x27;s pretty extraordinary to be able to write something like this and use Disney as a reference and not even be aware of that, but I&#x27;m happy that the author doesn&#x27;t feel concerned about what&#x27;s going right now, perhaps because it doesn&#x27;t personally affect him.<p>I invite the author to increase the diversity of viewpoints on his training model to avoid having narrow, ideological opinions heavily influenced by algorithms that are not very compatible with reality.

Anyone have any articles with good potential outcomes? Has one been written yet?

Like how everyone is using the same social media? Drinking the same shit at starbucks. Living in the same cities with the same stores? Wearing the same clothes. Talking in the same language. Watching the same shows&#x2F;movies. We&#x27;ve been trending towards a homogenized global monoculture for a while now.

Oh it will be. Already everyone can program, be a voice artist, draw paintings, write poems, and what not. The actual skills will be lost, because cheap and quick beats depth and intent. Basically every time.