Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.

But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.

Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.

Almost right, but the “I think” sounds out of character.

I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:

• algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it’s “The Algorithm” in capital letters like “The Social Media Algorithm”; then it becomes evil
• machine learning - been out for decades, hasn’t destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
• machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. “Machine intelligence” performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we’ll give it a pass)
• artificial intelligence - machine intelligence’s evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it’s the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists

One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.

Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords