RU version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
46% Positive
Analyzed from 3761 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#internet#more#agents#agent#human#don#insurance#things#sure#social
Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Got 'em
Sure, not for the same reason, but... got'em.
You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?
Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.
Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.
Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.
Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?
Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?
Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.
To fix the health care system is possible.
To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.
Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.
Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."
Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.
There are healthcare concierge services for this, my job offers one, which I use any time I need something like this.
Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.
It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.
If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.
1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.
2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.
so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.
A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.
One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.
To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.
Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.
Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.
Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.
It's not good news but the old open internet is rapidly filling with feces. The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.
This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.
There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.
Or you assumed that they pay for only one bot and that bot will be allowed to make 500 posts per second?
I am disillusioned about it, because agents have been huge part of the traffic and all they do is to spend our money but generate absolute nothing positive.
people have been considering to simply close all doors but one person who has quite important hat and believes it would be very negative to people who needs the free tier the most. (And who is also the one with more to loose than everyone else...)
I guess that's the end of the collaboration era as we expected. "Those" people taking everything away and giving nothing back but crumbs that they will soon take from us too.
I’m not exactly sure what will replace it yet but communication infrastructure built for humans isn’t going to scale with the volume of communication created by artificial intelligence.
There might be some solutions requiring proof of work to introduce friction but that comes with a real environmental cost.
I’ve personally spent the least amount of time over the past three decades on the Internet this recent year. There are some niche corners I frequent but I find the overall experience more draining than rewarding lately.
As much as I have a distaste for what passes as "AI agents" as a technology, I think it's a mistake to put any of the blame on the tech. People are the problem!
We've been making a societal mistake for a long time, accepting and even celebrating obnoxious people who do obnoxious things. Letting your AI agents loose on others is one such obnoxious thing.
The internet is growing with some ugly parts - but there are other people generating more interesting content precisely because their abilities are amplified with LLMs.
In other words, maybe we ought to focus on the positive possibilities instead of doom and gloom all day long, we will be all dead in 10 years or the internet will be dead, or I and you will be dead, or my dog will be dead or the universe will expand to cold death, or whatever..
Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
The golden era of nerd filled internet is over. Now, even nerd parts of the internet are getting filled with AI slop and marketing.
I barely do social media, and mostly HN. I will probably just do some more nerd stuff IRL where I can meet people. I text and call people more.
I actually think AI will cause people to do more in real life because it degrades the value of the internet in general.
I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
My time reading (e-)books has skyrocketed.
I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.
I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.
I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.
But who knows -- I've been hoping we settle on accepted social norms for smartphones and social media and we're still not quite there yet either. Hell, if anything that seems to have taken a turn for the WORSE in the past few years.
I hadn't considered the impact on manga. Machine translations are probably helping with fan translations for more niche projects. I haven't seen any obvious AI art myself yet but I do tend to read stuff from smaller creators on slower release cycles.
So many people think splitting hairs about whether an LLM is a token predictor or an "agen will somehow change the impact they're having. Or people post about how they use, or will never use AI agents.
Surely the unwashed, tech-illiterate masses won't spam the internet with these things? Why yes, they can; And will. In the meantime, companies and early adopters, the crowd with the least ethics, will start ruining the show already.
did we just do full-circle back to an AI writing about AI writing about AI writing ..?
I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.
Which is more likely, let's Occam's Razor this. That the AI agents are teaching every individual to "write better" or that the AI agents are crapping out the articles with the emdashes.
Your cast iron detection mechanism will be gone!
What makes you say that, specifically?
AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.
More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.
Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.
I don't think it is useful to detect AI writing. I told my AI not to use em dashes.
A human puts em dashes to emphasize the break in thought or rhythm. Where there is already a break in thought or rhythm a human would just write a comma or nothing.
Another tell is what is inside the em dash. It often doesn’t logically follow – like an ad on a radio show.
I feel heard!
What constantly amazes me is how many people don't get this after interacting with them for a while.
While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.