AI Destroys Institutions(papers.ssrn.com) |
AI Destroys Institutions(papers.ssrn.com) |
Working as intended. WONTFIX.
The authors then break down the mechanisms by which AI achieves these outcomes (that seem quite reductive and dated compared to the frontier, for example they take it as granted that AI cannot be creative, that it can only work prospectively and can't react to new situations and events etc.), as well as exemplifying those mechanism already at work in a few areas like journalism and academia.
Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones.
But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!
No sir, there was nothing there to begin with - if you read recent history, you'll see that it's full of stupidity, and a few rabble rousers leaving entire nations by the nose.
With the mollification off the smartphone, we've merely taken off the edge of this killing machine.
I had a wake up call on this yesterday. After a recent HN thread about Zed editor, I decided to give it another try, so I loaded it up, disabled AI, and tried writing some code from scratch. No AI completion, no intellisence. Two things came to mind. First, my editor seems so much more peaceful without being told what to do. Second, it was a bit scary how lost I felt. It was obvious that my own ability to communicate through code had declined a bit since I began using AI coding assistants. It turns out that as expected, coding assistants really are competitive cognitive artifacts. After that experience, I've decided that I am going to do at least part of my coding with all completions turned off. Unfortunately at work you are paid to produce quickly, so I think my AI free editor will have to be reserved for personal projects.
Further related to your statement about thought, the hallucinations persist, and even last night I got a response about 80's pop culture that was over 50% bullshit. Just imagine what intentional persuasion through LLM models will do to society. Independent thought has never been more important.
Regulations do more harm than learning process from mistakes.
It's like for some reason we thought that like some good percentage of us aren't just tribal worker drones who fundamentally just want fats, sugars, salts, dopamine and seratonin. People actively vote against things like UBI, higher corporate taxes, making utilities public. People actively choose to believe misinformation because it suits their own personal tribal narratives.
SSRN is where most draft law review/journal articles are published, which may be the source of confusion.
For most other fields, it is a source of draft/published science papers, but for law, it's pretty much any kind of article that is going to show up in a law review/journal.
From what you're saying it seems that for an insider this is clear. I guess that makes more sense then
when one of the juniors makes a mistake, i can talk to them about it and help them understand where they went wrong, if they continue to make mistakes we can change their position to something more suited for them. we can always let them go if they have too much hubris to learn.
who do we hold to account when a model makes a mistake? we’re already beginning to see, after major fuckups, companies blackhole nullrouting accountability into “not our fault, don’t look at us, ai was wrong”
the other thing is, if you have done a good job selecting your team, you’ll have people who understand their limits, who understand when to ask for help, who understand when they don’t know something. a major problem with current models is that it will always just guess or stretch toward random rather than halt.
so yes, people will make mistakes, but at least you can count on being able to mitigate for those after.
First we stop anthromorphising the program as capable of making a "mistake". We recognise it merely as machine providing incorrect output, so we see the only mistake was made by the human who chose to rely upon it.
The courts so far agree. Judges are punishing the gulled lawyers rather than their faux-intelligent tools.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust...
In the 1960s, trust in institutions was around 70%.
In 2025 it's about 17%.
This is not something like we had 70% until 2023 and then AI dropped our trust suddenly. If anything, AI doesnt even register on the graph.
So correlation here is practically non-existent. Gallup and Pew have the similar trends for journalists and universities.
You dont get to blame AI for this.
Interesting bump and question. How did clinton improve reputation and then bush destroy it? Or is that a false hump?
I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.
Recently, it so happened that I spent an hour reverse engineering and documenting a piece of a system. A co-worker asked a LLM to do the same. It generated some really nice documentation.
The difference is, I (as a team member) now have the understanding. Generating the documentation does not increase the understanding of the team.
I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but so far the parts of the argument I can pull out are about how Institutions actually work, as in a collection of humans. AI, as it currently stands, interacts with humans themselves in ways that hollow out the kind of behavior we want from institutions.
“ Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control”
An analogy that I find increasingly useful is that of someone using a forklift to lift weights at gym. There is an observable tendency when using LLMs, to cede agency entirely to the machine.
I can't see how, given that potential is 99% shorcuts.
> They (AI systems) delegitimization knowledge, inhibit cognitive development, short-circuit long term thinking processes, and isolate humans by displacing or degrading long term human connection.
This is a pretty good summary of the worry I’ve seen expressed about extensive use to build large pieces of software. Large pieces of software aren’t just the code that describes them. They exist in some sense in their authors as well.
Effective projects seek to expand understanding of software systems across the organization so that relevant decisions can be made about their future. By relegating much of the decision making around structure of the software to AI you lose the systemic knowledge shared across the organization.
How Generative AI is destroying society https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-generative-ai-is-destr... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616713)
Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.
I disagree. The backbone of democratic life are the rule of law and freedom of speech, which makes a big difference. The press has historically been a counter-power inquiring into privileges and breaches of the rule of the law and thus promoted freedom of speech but almost only inasmuch it served the interest of the emerging merchant bourgeoisie . And we are long past that. Universities never have been liberal forces: they backed the Church and refused paradigm shifts. They still are very conservative even though in a peculiar sense, as leftist conservatives.
I'm in the UK and I don't think any institutions have been destroyed or even noticeably harmed by AI. In the US there is general chaos under Trump so it may be hard to differentiate.
Stopped reading here, as these people still believe in that fairytale of theirs.
Later edit: For good measure, Zuckerberg, too [2]
This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.
Every large enough corporate wants to become the new Oracle.
(By the way, are you confusing affordance, the UX concept, with affordability?)
ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.
I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.
I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start?
I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken their classes :)
Also, this is an op-ed, not a science paper. Which you'd know if you had bothered to read it at all.
You say elsewhere you didn't bother to read anything other than the abstract, because "you didn't need to", so besides being a totally uninformed opinion, complaining about something else being speculation when you are literally speculating on the contents of the paper is pretty ironic.
I also find it amazingly humorous given that Jessica's previous papers on IP has been celebrated by HN, in part because she roughly believes copyright/patents as they currently exist are all glorified BS that doesn't help anything, and has written many papers as to why :)
1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future.
2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome.
3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.)
Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is formatted like a scientific paper describing an experimental result I immediately feel I am being manipulated by appeal to authority. And the conflict of interest of the authors is about as irrelevant as pointing out that a paper on why Oxycodone is not addictive is paid for by Perdue Pharma. Perhaps Jessica's papers on IP are respected because they do not suffer from these obvious flaws? I owe the author no deference for the quality of her previous writing nor for her status as a professor.
On the other hand when countries feel the need to legislate a new law enforcing writing documents in the human understandable language, one doesn't need to be an expert to suspect there was a systemic rot in those industries. It is totally valid to cry foul when even a parliament is concerned about about reading texts they produce for 500$/h.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0054/latest/...
2. Get owned out of court because you couldn't afford the $100K (minimum) that you have to pay to the lawyer's cartel to even be able to make your argument in front of a judge.
I'll take number 1. At least you have a fighting chance. And it's only going to get better. LLMs today are the worst they will ever be, whereas the lawyer's cartel rarely gets better and never cuts its prices.
You can criticise the hourly cost of lawyers all you like, and it should be a beautiful demonstration to people like you that no, "high costs means more people go into the profession and lower the costs" is not and has never been a reality. But to think that any AI could ever be efficient in a system such common law, the most batshit insane, inefficient, "rethoric matters more than logic" system is delusional.
Did you read the paper?
More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.
Crypto currency makers can have artificial limits but no amount of limiting gpt-next access is cutting access to good enough.
We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.
Not all of them, but given the same questionable or outright false assumptions (e.g. AI companies are doing interference at a loss, the exaggerated water consumption number, etc) keeping getting repeated on YouTube, Reddit and even HN where the user base is far more tech-savvy than the population, I think misinformation is the primary reason.
The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.
This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.
Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.
What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.
But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.
Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.
In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.
In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.
If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.
It absolutely makes sense to criticize the author's background.
It is hard though. When someone makes an extraordinary claim I feel the urge to look them up. It is a shortcut to some legitimacy to that claim.
Before the printing press, only the clergy could "identity" witches but the printing press "democratized knowledge" of witch identification at larger scale.
The algorithmic version of "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so" is going to cause huge trouble in the short and medium term.
So is the AI better?
No. It's quicker, easier, more seductive.
the church did the thinking for the peasants. the church decided what the peasants heard, etc… this is moving absolutely in that direction.
the models now do the thinking for us, the ai companies decide what we get to see, these companies decide how much we pay to access it. this is the future.
It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."
The automated tagging with a BUSL ID is just how BUSL's system for papers of any sort works.
For reference: I did my first year of law school at BUSL so i'm very familiar with how it all works there :)
This is also very common elsewhere - everything that IBM used to release got tagged with a technical report number too, for example, whether it was or not.
In any case - it is clearly a piece meant to be persuasive writing, rather than deep research.
Law journals contain a mix of essentially op-eds and deeper research papers or factual expositories/kind of thing. They are mostly not like scientific journals. Though some exist that are basically all op-ed or zero op-ed.
Compare something like:
https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
Which is a piece in UC law journal meant as an informative piece cataloguing how california courts adjudicate false advertising law. It does not really take a position.
with
https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3...
Which is a piece in UC hastings law journal meant as, essentially an op ed, arguing that dog sniff tests are bullshit.
I picked both of these at random from stuff in UC hastings law journal that had been cited by the Supreme Court of California. There are things that are even more factual/take zero positions, and things that are even more persuasive writing/less researchy, than either of these, but they are reasonable representatives, i think
But I didn't want to make a value judgement about Martin Luther's ideological legacy, but wanted to introduce some nuance into the narrative about disruptive innovation.
Right, but in my comment I'm explicitly asking about the ones that don't have any relation yet seem to defend it anyways? "Don't people don't actually exists" isn't really an argument...
I see some problems with the above comment. First, using the phrase “stochastic parrot” in a dismissive way reflects a misunderstanding of the original paper [1]. The authors themselves do not weaponize the phrase; the paper was about deployment risks, not capability ceilings. I encourage everyone people who use the phase to go re-read the paper and make sure they can articulate what the paper claims and be able to distinguish that from their usage.
Second, what does the comment mean by “fix that, and the parrot falls off the perch.”? I don't know. I think it would need to be reframed in a concrete direction if we want to discuss it productively. If the commenter can make a claim or prediction of the "If-Then" form, then we'd have some basis for discussion.
Third, regarding "eagerness to please"... this comes from fine-tuning. Even without it (RLHP or similar) LLMs have significant prediction capabilities from pretraining (the base model).
All in all, I can't tell if the comment is making a claim I can't parse and/or one I disagree with.
[1]: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" (Bender et al., 2021)
Yes, a little bit each time. But AI will finish the job.
Because earlier it was writing skills, or attention span that was at stake.
This time it is literally the ability to think.
That “cartel”?
Vs the leaders of an industry that built their tools through insane amounts of copyright infringement, and have forced the coining of “enshittification” to describe all pervasive business strategies?
The same industry which employs acqui-hire to find ways to cull competition?
You read the works of the cognitive elite, when they support AI. When most people sing its praises, it’s from the highest echelons of white collar work priesthood.
AI is fundamentally a tool of the cognitively trained, and shows its greatest capability in the hands of those capable of assessing its output as accurate at a glance. The more complex the realm, the deeper the expertise to find value in it.
Secondly, linguists are not the sole group espousing the concerns with these tools. I’ve seen rando streamers and normal folk in WhatsApp groups, completely disconnected from the AI elite hating what is being wrought. Students and young adults outright wonder if they will have any worthwhile economic future.
Perhaps it is not a “movement”, but there is an all pervasive fear and concern in the population when it comes to AI.
Finally, position is eerily similar to the dismissal of concerns from mid level and factory floor job workers in the 80s and 90s. It was forgivable given the then prevalent belief that people would be retrained and reabsorbed into equivalently sustaining roles in other new industries.
It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM.
If you actually ask them, I bet most linguists will say they are not even excellent English (or whichever language they studied the most) teachers.
Plus, "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT. If linguists really felt that threatened by the time when people's concerns over AI was like "sure it can beat go master but how about league of legends?" you have to admit they did have some special insights, right?
His central argument has always been that language is too complex and nuanced to be learned simply from exposure. Therefore, he concluded, humans must possess an innate, pre-wired "language organ"—a Universal Grammar.
LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise. They prove that with a vast enough dataset, complex linguistic structure can be mastered through statistical pattern recognition alone.
The panic from Chomsky and his acolytes isn't that of a humble linguist. It is the fury of a high priest watching a machine commit the ultimate heresy: achieving linguistic mastery without needing his innate, god-given grammar.
It really isn't. While I personally think the Universal Grammar theory is flawed (or at least Chomsky's presentation is flawed), LLM doesn't debunk it.
Right now we have machines that recognized faces better than humans. But it doesn't mean humans do not have some innate biological "hardware" for facial recognition that machines don't possess. The machines simply outperform the biological hardware with their own different approach.
Also, I highly recommend you express your ideas with your own words instead of letting an LLM present them. It's painfully obvious.
I have learned one foreign language just by being exposed to it almost daily, by watching movies spoken in that language, without using any additional means, like a dictionary or a grammar (because none were available where I lived; this was before the Internet). However, I have been helped in guessing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the language, not only by seeing what the characters of the movie were doing, correlated to the spoken phrases, but also by the fact that I knew a couple of languages that had many similarities with the language of the movies that I was watching.
In any case, the amount of the spoken language to which I had been exposed for a year or so, until becoming fluent in it, had been many orders of magnitudes less than what is used by a LLM for training.
I do not know whether any innate knowledge of some grammar was involved, but certainly the knowledge of the grammar of other languages had helped tremendously in reducing the need for being exposed to greater amounts of text, because after seeing only a few examples I could guess the generally-applicable grammar rules.
There is no doubt that the way by which a LLM learns is much dumber than how a human learns, which is why this must be compensated by a much bigger amount of training data.
Seeing how the current inefficiency of LLM training has already caused serious problems for a great number of people, who either had to give up on buying various kinds of electronic devices or they had to accept to buy devices of a much worse quality than previously desired and planned, because the prices for DRAM modules and for big SSDs have skyrocketed, due to the hoarding of memory devices by the rich who hope to become richer by using LLMs, I believe that it has been proven beyond doubt that the way how LLMs learn, for now, is not good enough and it is certainly not a positive achievement, as more people have been hurt by it than the people who have benefited from it.
But not before LLMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
Rehashing text in a language is not mastering that language, and no, is not feared by linguists.
There is the option of small claims court which is massively cheaper, but it has very low limits for damages, so it's barely worth the effort.
Just wait till you see tomorrow's, trained on the slop fabricated by today's.
I also used to maintain up to date reading lists of various areas (compiler optimization, for example) because I would read so many of the papers.
Let me give you a piece of advice:
First, gather facts, then respond.
Here you start by sarcastically asserting i wouldn't have read it, but it would generally be better to ask if i read it (fact gathering), and then devise a response based on my answer. Because your assertion is simply wrong, making the rest of it even sillier.
As for the strawman about the bible - i'm kinda surprised you are really trying to equate not reading any part of something with not reading every part of something, and really trying to defend what you did here, instead of just owning up to it and moving on.
This speaks a lot more about you than anything else.
That said -
When you make a claim covering that everything in a book is the literal truth, you only have to find a part that is not the literal truth to prove the claim wrong. Which may or may not require reading the entire thing to start (if it turns out your counter-claim is wrong, you at least have to read and find another)
In the original comment, you'll note your claim was "This is nothing but speculation" - IE all of the paper is speculation.
If we are being accurate, this would require you reading the entire thing to be able to say all of it is speculation. How could you know otherwise?
Even if we were being nice, and treat your claim colloquially as meaning "most of it is speculation", this would still require reading some of the paper, which you didn't do either.
Perhaps you should just quit while you are behind, and learn that when you screw up, the correct thing to do is say "yeah, i screwed up, i should have read it before saying that", instead of trying to double down on it.
Doubling down like this just makes you look worse.
As an aside - I was always an avid reader, and very bored in synagogue, so i have read every word of a number of books of the hebrew bible because it was more interesting than paying attention to the sermons.
Law review articles look like this. Scientific journals don't own the concept of an abstract, nor are law review articles pretending to be scientific research.
Perhaps that's the point of the paper: to warn us not to use the technology in the dumbest possible way.
Worries about reduced quality of work are overblown, because there's always a human operator of the AI, reviewing the text between copying and pasting (no different from StackOverflow!). Enter vibe-coding.
Worries about AI becoming malicious or Skynet are overblown. Again, it's just a text interface, so the worst it can do is to write text that says "launch the nukes". Enter agents and MCP.
It still staggers me that I occasionally read about a judge calling out a lawyer for citing non-existent cases (this far into chatgpt's life). It was bound to happen to the first moron, but every other lawyer should have heard about it then. But it still happens.
Dumbest possible way is what we do.
Unfortunately no there is not.
> I occasionally read about a judge calling out a lawyer for citing non-existent cases (this far into chatgpt's life). It was bound to happen to the first moron, but every other lawyer should have heard about it then. But it still happens.
There you go.
One might say that deinstitutionalization is actually good for plurality of opinions (some call it a democracy). If AI cause it, I'm fine with that.
Pointing to a system with problems and then saying you have no issue with something that has the potential to be orders of magnitude more problematic seems an odd approach to me.
If AI leads to decentralisation of press, it sounds better to me. We certainly do not need one or few big entities that follows political tendencies.
The linked page says this:
``` How AI Destroys Institutions
77 UC Law Journal (forthcoming 2026)
Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623
40 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2025 Last revised: 13 Jan 2026 ```
What exactly is this document? It reads like a heavily cited op-ed, but is coming out of a law school from a professor there and calls itself a "research paper". Very strange.
EDIT: I looked up UC Journal of Law, and I think I was misled because I'm not familiar with the domain. They describe themselves as:
> Since 1949, UC Law Journal, formerly known as Hastings Law Journal, has published scholarly articles, essays, and student Notes on a broad range of legal topics. With roughly 100 members, UCLJ publishes six issues each year, reaching a large domestic and international audience. Each year, one issue is dedicated to essays and commentary from our annual symposium, which features speakers and panel discussions on an area of current interest and development in the law.
So this is congruent with the Journal's normal content (it's an essay), but having the document call itself a "research paper" conjured an inflated expectation about the rigor involved in the analysis, at least for me.
I did read a some of it. The abstract. Which is there for the specific purpose of providing readers a summary to decide whether it is worth their time to read the whole thing.
And, yeah, obviously I didn't mean literally all because that just isn't how people talk. e.g. the author's names are not speculation. But the central premise of the paper "How AI Destroys Institutions" is speculative unless they provide a list of institutions that have been destroyed by AI and prove that they have. The institutions they list, "the rule of law, universities, and a free press," have not been destroyed by AI, so therefore, the central claim of the paper is speculative. And speculation on how new tech breakthroughs will play out is generally useless, the classic example being "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," by the CEO of IBM.
Furthermore their claim here: > The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt within a hierarchy of authority and a framework for roles and rules while maintaining legitimacy in the knowledge produced and the actions taken. Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.
This just completely contradicts any experience I have ever had with such institutions. Especially "empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo". Yeah. If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you. These guys are some serious koolaid drinkers. Large institutions are where creativity and risk taking go to die. So yeah, not reading 40 pages by these guys.
You can tell a lot from a summary, and the entire premise that you have to read a huge paper to criticize is just bullshit in general.
Right. And I think it is weird that people immediately leapt to this being some sort of deception by the authors and I think it was weird that when a lawyer who has experience in both domains clarified this that people doubled down.
Most people would say this is a defense of the person, or at least a defense of the person's choice to not read the full paper. It is no fun to debate with intellectual dishonesty.
Anyway, I'm tired of this now.
> If AI leads to decentralisation of press, it sounds better to me.
Seems optimistic to me, given the trend with pretty much everything AI since ChatGPT was announced is concentrating as much power as possible in the hands of a few big tech companies.
As an added example: decentralization was a big promise of crypto; at present, hard for me to see how that's lived up to the promise. I don't see how the current trend with the hands of control over AI will work out any better in this regard.
Whats wrong with crypto decentralisation?
Yeah but you're not going to get your news from local AI, are you? you have to connect it to the internet and look up news for you, but if a lot of what's found online is AI generated and there isn't a clear way to distinguish it, then how are you better off?
> Whats wrong with crypto decentralisation?
It hasn't really happened? To my knowledge, a large proportion of crypto volumes are going through a handful of centralised exchanges. Traditional finance sector is also increasing its presence/hold.
Can't tell if you're referring to media outlets or AI companies here.
I do remember this incident - it was an embarrassment for the outlets that jumped on that story. Especially because the general public has come to know there is a overriding tendency towards sensationalism.
But surely this is very different from actual outright propaganda operations?
And it isn't different than outright propaganda operations because it is an outright propaganda operation. If you read the link in my comment, you will see that the report is just repeating claims from the government nearly verbatim.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-launches-grokipedia-wi... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo
P.S. feel free to "do your own research" if the above are included in your supposed propaganda operation conspiracy.
I don't have numbers for crypto but auctions are not only way to buy crypto. And they do not have power to regulate value. Isn't that a sign of decentralization?
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-...
> start a competitor
Very charitable way of referencing an observably-obvious disinformation generator
"Charitable" is irrelevant to my reference because "competitor" is a term completely devoid of any indication of the quality of the product.
He's pushing a platform that uses AI to generate content that's riddled with far-right misinformation. The context for him doing this is because he didn't like that Wikipedia now chronicles the very real fact that he made a Nazi salute. This doesn't constitute just starting an alternative, this is actively pushing an agenda of misinformation, while demonizing platforms that he doesn't like. He can't buy Wikipedia like he did with Twitter, so he's pushing to undermine & harm it, via defunding or other means (see government threats to "investigate" while Musk was running DOGE).
> "Charitable" is irrelevant to my reference because "competitor" is a term completely devoid of any indication of the quality of the product.
I was being nice; your characterizing of Musk's platform as a genuine "competitor" is BS. Every indication is that he's doing this because he wants to choose what constitutes fact and what doesn't.