If we aren't there already we're well on our way to a bizarre dystopia where our own internet subscriptions somehow cost more than our devices, which somehow generate enough money for their makers to justify embedding wireless modems for constant surveillance. If you buys a device at loss, for them spend a monthly fee to give it access to spy on you, because the data is so valuable, what on earth are they using it for? Or is everyone losing money?
TBH I frequently have a hard time getting Claude to use LSP at all. I'm not sure if it just breaks or what. It's like 10 items down on my list of random crap to figure out eventually.
It's kind of crazy to me that the whole domain was originally set up so that people would buy 2nd and 3rd level pairs. But it also seems really obvious that backtracking is going to be a disaster.
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
I don't know about Claude specifically, but I think people are starting to internalize a sense of when prose reads as having "AI-smell" and I do agree phrases like "Same driver, same track. The LLM is the star." trigger it for me too. That said, that doesn't mean a ton about the whole thing - could be anything from humans starting to echo AI style to someone writing "give my results a headline summary" to an AI to someone saying "here's the data, write an article."
AI is trained on human data. And high quality human data at it's best.
Can we assume everything we think as AI - must have had a high-quality human pattern behind it, and there is no way to 100% prove which is which - unless the author shows a screencast of them typing the artice?
This is not healthy. The right thing to do is – if someone doesn't like an article, they should ignore it – they shouldn't so confidently brand it AI without any proof at all, just because it fits their mood and style.
I think it's more complicated than that. Training does a lot more than just make models imitate the highest quality training data, and even what high quality training data includes can be subjective depending on your goals and tastes. And a lot of effort does go into making sure the models don't have "bad personality" - I'm sure a lot goes into making sure they trend towards appropriate reading levels and various other things that aren't strictly about being a Mark Twain or JRR Tolkien level writer.
AI writing is not high-quality writing. And I don't think it's trained on particularly high-quality writing, I'm pretty sure it's trained on SEO slop. The old outputs of gpt-4o that loved the word "delve" read just like SEO spam blogs.
I was just complaining to someone that token billing is like letting a gasoline company control your gas pedal while you nicely ask them to use a specific gear that may or may not actually be in use and you guess what speed it's actually going based on how fast the trees go by because qualitative judgments have to replace the speedometer unless you can just burn money.
Don't forget also letting them dictate the route you drive while you are increasingly blindfolded till you arrive and then find out you need to tell them to drive you to your correct destination again because they drove you across town instead which burned half your tank.
It should never be shopping in the first place. I live in Canada, my family has needed the hospital and the ER a few times and we never ever had to even reach for our wallet.
Your example is an edge case. Presumably sick people were once healthy. When people are spending their own money, they become a lot more discriminating.
Also, if you're looking for treatment after you're sick, that's not health insurance.
I'd tend to think the majority of healthcare is sought after something happens - car wrecks, cancer diagnosis, sports or exercise injury, stuff like ear infections or strep throat...
Healthy people without concerns aren't looking for treatment, they're visiting their PCP once a year.
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