Thread

1. Legend2440 · 1791049124 · focus · HN ↗

   This feels like it's going to cause a lot of damage to the commons.

   If one person does this, no big deal.

   If everyone starts doing this, you're basically just creating spam. It'll become like LinkedIn job applications.

   1. jsrozner · 1791049341 · focus · HN ↗

      This is literally AI, in every case. AI is literally the exploitation of the commons, both in the theft of intellectual property for training, and in how it is used.

      1. Legend2440 · 1791049930 · focus · HN ↗

         I disagree, many AI uses are beneficial to the commons. Just not this one.

         For example, it makes coding available to a much wider audience and increases the amount of useful software that can be built.

         Training on data makes the information in that data widely available to general public, which is beneficial.

         1. jsrozner · 1791066511 · focus · HN ↗

            This doesn't change the first aspect, which is that the AI companies seized the commons and monetized them.

            Re coding - the code that is written by a wide audience of unqualified individuals is not useful code. If you aren't an engineer and you prompt a model to build something, you can't attest to its reliability. (Moreover, anyone could have prompted for the same code.) Until it can be verified that it actually works, it's basically just slop. And such verification is meaningless without the person having the capacity to take responsibility. If you are not a civil engineer, it doesn't matter how much you prompt AI to check your designs; you can't reasonably sign off on them. In practice, most people prompting AI are taking zero responsibility. OpenAI and Anthropic's hacking scandals are a really wonderful example of this.

            Moreover, in practice, most of the software being built is probably not useful. There's a nontrivial chance it does something bad, so you can't use it without sandboxing it. It doesn't mean no useful software will be built; I'm saying that much of the software being built is unreliable. In fact, AI almost certainly decreases the number of people who are even qualified to judge software quality because everyone is being deskilled since they are allocating their thinking to the model (or in the case of current middle/high school and college students, never learning to think in the first place).

            The dumping of slop into ecosystems that previously had institutions of trust in place is a HUGE harm. For example, these folks are overwhelming academic publication systems and the internet broadly with their slop. Cyberterrorists will do the same.

            Even if tomorrow AI satisfied the absurd criterion of being able to only produce reliable things (if you prompted it accordingly: "Be reliable!"), you'd still have the problem that a cyberterrorist could come along and say "reliably hack X". The space of bad acts is far bigger and more accessible than good ones. This is what I mean by exploiting / harming the commons.

   2. gruez · 1791050210 · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

      1. ValentineC · 1791050785 · focus · HN ↗

         > I don't get it, so far as I can tell you still need to manually choose whether to RSVP? It's not like it's going to RSVP to all events for you.

         The title itself does say "automatically apply to events".

         I'm guessing this came about because many organisers have some sort of pre-acceptance filter these days, to minimise the attendee signal-to-noise ratio (which, stupidly, often relies on job titles).

      2. slacktivism123 · 1791051534 · focus · HN ↗

         >It's not like it's going to RSVP to all events for you.

         The video embedded in README.md shows ChatGPT instrumenting Chrome to click the RSVP button on Partiful events and fill out the RSVP forms in bulk.

         This is a spam tool.

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