Like some Australian teens are now successfully (!) using to sign up to social media.

Lets face it, you cannot keep kids out of any mainstream social activity humans do. As soon as they are interested, they will find a way in. Trying to prevent them will only cause harm and have zero benefits.

While this is a very fuzzy statement and requires qualification, it probably close to what is happening. Whether it will actually work out that way remains to be seen. As soon as that task requires some mental flexibility or high reliability, LLM-type AI is already out, even if people may not realize that.

I do agree, there are other effects at work. LLMs are far too incapable to have caused these effects all by themselves. They are clearly being used as pretext in many cases.

That is not quite true. Quite a bit of the world does run at least in part on compassion. The uncivilized part certainly does not.

I do agree on that one. I have, so far, found two instances where Internet-trained LLMs are useful: Search when you only can describe the issue or describe a concept and looking for cooking recipes by description. Both instances of "better search". For the effort invested, those results are utterly pathetic.

If it were AGI, it clearly had enough information. Since it is not AGI and cannot think at all, it did not have enough information and it would have needed the actual solution as input.

Indeed. But, you know, I am beginning to think that most people (outside of the about 10-15% independent thinkers and the additional 5% or so that can be convinced using rational arguments) are actually incapable of rational thinking or actively chose not to do it. People that do not understand the difference between an implication and a correlation. People think that people that do some thing makes them responsible for something entirely different with no causation chain present, but they have this fuzzy association. MAGAs that are keyword-operated and cannot do anything beyond reacting to simple keyword-triggers. And all the people that can only do yes/no and do not understand that most things are in degrees and shades of grey.

For these people, who can essentially only do unreliable statistical correlation instead of actual reasoning, an LLM may indeed look like it has insight, because they do not understand what insight actually is. And that LLM has a far larger "knowledge"-base.

Well, we can argue whether useful idiots share the blame or not. It is a complex question with no easy answer.

I fully agree that the "I got mine and fuck you" people are complicit and malicious.

Indeed. But there are tons of natural idiots that may be even dumber than "AI" of the LLM-variant and they are in awe because they do not understand what is going on. And many of them are aggressive.

Well, Musk is a half-educated idiot that got lucky and now thinks, like so many idiots with some luck, that his skills are superior.

I don't think there's any lack of fundamental problems. We're still primarily using a protocol that wasn't designed to be resistant to bad behavior, with address starvation, with assignments carried out by conflicted organizations, with name services likewise, with apparent disinterest from government organizations happy to write speeding tickets in anything like enforcement of existing laws about conduct on telecommunications networks, which themselves occasionally make a lunge towards censorship and all of which are somehow complicit in unconstitutional citizen spying programs. All of these problems are also international. When you want to discuss problems with the internet, the first problem is where do you start, and the last is where do you stop?

But on the flip side, at some point even the phone company is allowed to cut you off, and not only for reasons of nonpayment. It may have to involve legal action, but if you are problematic enough, you can be denied non-emergency phone services. Or, you know, imprisoned. Then you wind up with really terrible access to telecommunications. How much are we expecting to change society in the course of this conversation?

Slashdot, Reddit, and other atypical social media sites have their own benefits and pitfalls unique to their particular community and moderation designs. Aspects of Slashdot's specific mod system are beneficial and user-friendly, including the descriptive moderation and ability to assign scores based on it. I give bonuses for flamebait, troll, and offtopic on the assumption that much of that moderation is intentionally abusive, but I also don't want to wade in the muck of every single comment in busy discussions.

Sometimes I click around and eventually do read every comment, especially in discussions with few comments, but I'm not about to make that my default because I sure don't want to. But I still wish that metamoderation had any perceptible effects, or that you could comment in discussions where you've moderated — just not in the same thread — as the people most qualified to comment are also the people most qualified to moderate.

Now do Israel oppressing Palestinians.

Apparently you did, because equally apparently you don't understand as much as you think you do. You also seem to think you're the only descendant of Jews around here.

Just not AI slop. Bad-quality things can often be replaced by cheaper to make other bad quality things. And nothing of value is lost.

Very temporary in a strategic sense. Obviously.

They may surprise you, but these are not insights the LLM had. These are insights other people had and the LLM essentially only found them by insightless statistical pattern matching.