I mean this is true of most communities really. People dislike blatant self promotion, no matter the medium. If you're not already a valuable contributor to a community, advertising your work there will get you seen as deeply suspicious at best.
It's just that most marketers seem to be incredibly short sighted, and wrongly assume that doing nothing but marketing their own product/service is somehow the way forward.
Also any forum or subreddit dedicated to self promotion isn't really worth bothering with. Your audience won't be there, just other marketers trying to promote their own stuff.
If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.
Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:
- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes
- Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman
- Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history
- Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.
The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.
That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.
> If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.
What's even more amazing is how long they can go in this fashion without being caught.
Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
I can imagine that being a reaction to the negativity and backlash from a substantial (or very active) part of the audience, to anything built with AI. I don't imagine that shame for using AI for something, or fear of disclosing it, is self-imposed.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
Yes there are more employees than founders, because there are more employees than founders in society. If Hacker News was just founders, it'd be about a hundredth of its current size.
But the negativity is likely because it's just harder to impress people here than on a site like say Twitter or Reddit. If you've been in tech, startups, etc for years, you've seen loads of crazy ideas get proposed, get tested and fail miserably. Loads of startups try these things and fold in about 6 months or so due to a lack of demand.
So, there's probably a bit more scepticism here. You've seen enough massive failures in the tech world that you're probably a little jaded towards another 'world-changing' idea seemingly unfounded in reality.
> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.
A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.
Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.
What would be nice too is if it lowers the bar for entry, then people closer to the real problem can work on it. There are a lot of mediocre or overpriced products due to the fact a team of software engineers don't understand the problem well
100%. A lot of the time the people who understand a problem the most are the people who work in that field/industry every day, not the tech folks that often do the work/startups that try to 'revolutionise' said industry.
The vibe-coded product the actual users put out will probably be nowhere near as good as a professionally built one tech wise, but will actually be built to solve relevant pain points.
The conclusion doesn't follow the rest of the article:
> It’s astonishingly simple. If you can’t prove you’re a human, you can’t upload your music. This would get rid of 99% of slop and streaming fraud overnight.
No. No it wouldn't. Most AI artists have human identities tied to them.
Like sure, there are probably some bot networks automating all of this stuff. But a lot of the posters want to be seen as musicians without actually learning to make any of the music. They want their name associated with their AI-generated songs, not hidden away behind a label.
Also not a huge fan of the support for gatekeepers either. Feels like society is better when people don't need to get third party approval to distribute their work to the world, and when artists don't need to abide by predatory contracts from labels.
This advice is good though. All platforms should make this a thing:
> Legacy catalog tracks must be reviewed by humans before being taken down.
> Artists must be granted a mandatory notice and appeal window with human customer support.
> Wrongly removed music must be restored with stream counts and royalties left intact.
We need to make it illegal to have AI moderate content without human involvement, in the same way it shouldn't be allowed to act as a police officer or judge.
Eh, I don't think it'll be the end. Note two things:
1. A lot of AI coded products and services are also open source. In many fields, the number of open source projects has arguably exploded since AI driven development took off.
2. Not everyone builds open source projects because they want to monetise them, restrict how others use them or become popular for their efforts.
So, I think the effects will be... somewhat more limited. Hobbyist fields will be mostly unaffected, but there will likely be a huge drop in the number of commercial ventures making their work open source. If you're trying to sell people on an SaaS, then AI is likely terrifying to you, and making your work open source is just gonna be seen as a way to encourage more competitors. If you're working on a video game mod, then it probably won't change much at all.
I think this is definitely one of the bigger risks here, and the only way AI could 'kill us all' in the foreseeable future:
> 3.4% named existential risk, and the most common answer was malicious use, at 10.6% (UCL).
The danger isn't about sentient or human level AI, it's about how AI gives everyone capabilities beyond their wildest dreams, often without the knowledge or experience necessary to use those capabilities responsibly.
Forget Terminator, the two risks I can see being the most important here are
"major security risk/system failure due to incompetent engineers/maintainers using AI without knowing how things work" and "criminals/terrorists/rogue states use it make their crimes easier and more efficient".
The latter seems especially bad when political stability is down across the board and a lot of people seem frustrated or outright furious with society at the moment.
Still, I feel the risks are still on the manageable side, simply due to both automated systems and malicious actors being constrained by logistics and a human driven society.
I think this is something that a lot of people miss when arguing about AI.
I completely believe ASI will be able to wipe us from the planet, I don't know if ASI will get the chance to do that because humans with almost ASI will very likely either kill us all or mess up things so bad that everything falls apart before then.
And that's ignoring all the other bad and destabilizing outcomes that are almost certain. We must look at our world like it's in a 1930s state right now. Rapid technology changes and things like large scale 'decoherence' of societies are very likely to lead to very large chunks of the population willing to revolt.
Right. In order for AI to take us out, it has to survive long enough for the incoming Ukraine/Russia/Iran/USA WWIII debacle that we're already in to not kill us all off first. Oil markets are in trouble and things are about to go sideways.
And then Elon is going to have an army of killbots at his command. Those Tesla bots are going to be given guns and they're going to go around, door-to-door, making sure you comply. Thankfully hands are really hard to do so they haven't been able to scale up production yet.
This is the issue I have with everyone running agents writ large. Will Muse do people harm? Eh, maybe through some sort of bug because software has bugs and software bugs have hurt (and even killed!) people in the past. Those are the edge cases though.
Will malicious people take advantage of Muse? Now you're talking. Muse is functioning like the world's most open ended API that people are running without having any idea what it does. You're inviting other people to run it so that they can do good things for you. Doordash use my API (Muse) to send me food! Random stranger use my API to do something good for me! Random stranger wants to do something bad? Well the API is designed to do that. Hopefully it does it well but when it's people vs. API, people have a track record (especially when incentivized by money) of doing pretty well.
Not just bloggers either. One look at the average YouTube video, and you'd think most people making those things had never heard the word 'brevity' in their life.
This is by far the biggest challenge you'll encounter writing a tutorial, video game walkthrough, recipe, etc:
> “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing”
Because as the article says, it's hard to know what your audience already knows, and far too easy to take 'shortcuts' when helping them by forgetting how many things you've assigned to muscle memory.
Teaching people is difficult, and it's really easy to leave a lot of crucial information out if you're not careful.
That said, I do have one more antipattern (and one more recommended design pattern) worth considering here too.
For the antipattern, it's when the tutorial doesn't work anymore because of updates to the subject in question. I remember this being a big issue when I was trying to learn Angular a few years back, since the official tutorial was clearly written for a long obsolete version of the framework that functioned very differently from the current one.
The number of times I've had issues like that is far too high online, and it's usually because the person that wrote the tutorial didn't check back in on it whenever the language, framework or relevant dependencies got a major update.
So, if you write about a topic and things change significantly, go back and check your work from before. If you can, update the article, and if you can't, at least put a notice at the top saying the article is now obsolete and should be skipped.
On a different note, a good pattern to keep in mind is that you don't need to be chained to a specific format. Way too many people assume that because they're providing a written tutorial, there's no place for images or video content there.
But the truth is that in many cases, an image is literally worth a thousand words. In other cases, showing people how a step should go in video or GIF format can be more helpful than just providing a list of bullet points.
So, take that into account. Provide all the information in your chosen format for sure, but provide relevant images and videos when the info is clearer in that format, or for when people need a visual cue. That way, you can check them if you're struggling with the written instructions, and figure out whether your setup is wrong (or the tutorial has left out some crucial information) based on how similar the author's screen is to your own at that point.
Just because you're using text doesn't mean you have to treat your guide like it's going on GameFAQs in a .txt file in the mid 90s.
100% agree. Including the original date an article was posted makes it a lot easier to track which software/framework/OS/whatever versions might have been in use at the time, and to see if the info is still relevant.
It's just that most marketers seem to be incredibly short sighted, and wrongly assume that doing nothing but marketing their own product/service is somehow the way forward.
Also any forum or subreddit dedicated to self promotion isn't really worth bothering with. Your audience won't be there, just other marketers trying to promote their own stuff.
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