The potential effect of Artificial Intelligence on civilisation - a serious discussion

An update on my own personal AI journey.

The good: I started using AI to do a deep dive on the Shelby Cobra in late April and am still on a semi-linked thread that has taken my down things as diverse as the development of motorways and roads in 60s UK and how British trucks were unsuited, to what impact on what cars were sold in Australia due to the tariff and local content laws and how UK firms developed the capacity to race-prepare US V8s.

The bad: AI Slop on YouTube is appalling! Even with well-made AI movies the pacing is extraordinarily slow, the movies are too long and too full of lazily sourced stock pictures and footage, but apparently the algorithm is favouring this style of movie. I can't go from a fascinating AI thread about a topic to watching a YouTube movie on it without being disappointed.

I've started seeing YouTube movies labels as 'no AI', is that the start of a movement away from the algorithm favouring this sort of 'algorithm optimised' slop? Is the current level of slop simply people making money off the initial burst of AI capability and movies will eventually be as good as the research capability can be as people stop watching this bad slop?
 
martinbayer said:
That extremely strongly would depend on who exactly is wielding those authoritarian methods. Hello, Benevolent Wise Alien Overlords, anybody there???
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Yes, I'm here. But, while your species has some undeniable entertainment value, I'm not crazy enough to take on the job of supervising it.
 
galgot said:
<snip>
What strikes me are these doom predictions that AI would become smarter than us, could "escape" and control us, yada yada...
If one check a bit from who these predictions come from, it's mostly from people with connection with big tech, ie these are marketing campaigns.
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Excellent point. The whole AI phenomenon is largely--perhaps even entirely--marketing, as near as I can tell.
galgot said:
AI surely is a great <snip> tool, but it's just that, a tool <snip>
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I'm not sure that it is a tool, at least at present. A tool is designed for a specific function. AI implementations aren't. They're designed to do nothing in particular on the grounds that they will figure out what is required in any given situation and will then decide their function for themselves. Skipping requirements analysis and hoping that the purpose of the effort will automagically emerge during development has seldom produced useful tools in the past.

So I am not worried about AI replacing our species. The danger is that our species will, in the near term, replace our real tools with AI-based nothing at all, while tech CEOs simultaneously replace all of our real tool makers (starting with the software engineers) with more MBAs, middle managers, marketing execs, and investment touts. We will have to retool to recover. Worse, we'll have to relearn how to make tools.
 
iverson said:
I'm not sure that it is a tool, at least at present. A tool is designed for a specific function. AI implementations aren't. They're designed to do nothing in particular on the grounds that they will figure out what is required in any given situation and will then decide their function for themselves. Skipping requirements analysis and hoping that the purpose of the effort will automagically emerge during development has seldom produced useful tools in the past.
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General purposes technology gets specialization figured out late, but it eventually happens. People, people that still doing the work is doing the analysis and implementation in real time. (aka still working)

Which is also to say that independent companies in the future would have their own special ai model/supporting structures for their function.

iverson said:
So I am not worried about AI replacing our species. The danger is that our species will, in the near term, replace our real tools with AI-based nothing at all, while tech CEOs simultaneously replace all of our real tool makers (starting with the software engineers) with more MBAs, middle managers, marketing execs, and investment touts. We will have to retool to recover. Worse, we'll have to relearn how to make tools.
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It is a self correcting problem, and it also happens fast unless it is written into law.

There is also the inverse theory where all the MBA and middle managers should get replaced by AI. If you read Elon Musk, well:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steved...ithout-managers-transformed-the-car-industry/

People are still figuring who or what should get replaced by AI, and the market would sort it out.
 
A teenager sits on the edge of her bed, phone screen glowing, thumbs moving fast. But she isn’t texting a friend. She isn’t calling a parent. She’s asking an artificial intelligence chatbot what to do with the panic in her chest, the loneliness at lunch, the dread that hits at night.

That scenario isn’t rare. A 2025 Pew survey found that 64% of U.S. teens use AI chatbots, and that about 3 in 10 use them daily. A 2026 JAMA Pediatrics survey found that about 1 in 5 U.S. adolescents and young adults had used AI chatbots for mental health advice. Common Sense Media also reported in 2025 that nearly 3 in 4 teens have used “AI companions,” with half using them regularly.

We’re panicking about AI “replacing” friendship. But the real emergency is that too many youth don’t have a trusted human to go to in the first place. If a chatbot feels safer than a parent, teacher, coach, counselor or friend, it’s not a technology story; it’s a culture story.
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Our teens are using AI chatbots daily. It's our fault.
 
The class of 2026 made their feelings about AI clear before they even picked up their diplomas. Graduates at the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona booed speakers mid-sentence for invoking AI, a reaction to being told by the people building the technology and disrupting the job market they were about to enter, to trust the process.

Gen Z leads global adoption of generative AI tools. And yet they trust AI less than any other age cohort in the US — 14 points below Millennials — and are entering a labor market where only 43% of 18-to-29-year-olds say it’s a good time to find a job, down from 75% in 2022 (Gallup). Fluent in the tools, skeptical of who controls them, and clear-eyed about what’s at stake when over-used overused. Two industries in particular — Hollywood and the creator economy — are exposing these fault lines.
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How Hollywood’s youngest filmmakers are exposing Gen Z’s real problem with AI
 
A few weeks ago, a management consultant asked me a question many professionals are now being forced to answer: “If artificial intelligence becomes good enough, what happens to our jobs?” It is an understandable question. For a legal academic, it is also the wrong one. The real question is not whether artificial intelligence will replace teachers. It is whether universities will remember what teaching was meant to do.

Every generation remembers one teacher who made an impossible subject feel possible. Very few remember the textbook. That is because education, at its best, has never been only about the transfer of information. It has been about the formation of judgement, confidence and discipline. A good teacher does not merely explain a subject; she lends the student courage to enter it. The best teaching does not give answers; it gives permission to think.
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AI can teach facts, but not critical thinking
 
When I'm called from a number I don't recognise, I answer the phone and stay silent until the caller identifies themselves.

It feels horribly discourteous and is not the ideal response when, for example, my doctor's surgery phones.

But it might be worth it if it helps protect me from the new wave of sophisticated AI scam techniques doing the rounds.

One of these is voice cloning, where scammers take just a brief audio clipping and use AI to create a digital replica of your voice that sounds exactly like you – and that can be used to say anything the scammer chooses.
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Why I never say 'hello' first when I answer the phone: Rachel Rickard Straus
 
The publishing industry has spent years talking about artificial intelligence in the abstract, wondering how the technology might eventually reshape the way books get written, edited, and sold. Surely, the inevitable would happen, but it couldn't be that soon, right? Well, that hypothetical conversation ended abruptly in 2026, when several major controversies forced everybody in the book and publishing community to confront the issue head-on. We now have to grapple with a question that no longer feels so theoretical: how do you verify authorship in an era when AI-generated prose can convincingly mimic a human voice?

For book lovers, it seems gutwrenching to think that you can no longer pick up a newly published book with absolute guarantee that only human hands have been on it. Even if the author claims to not have used AI, how do you take their word for it? What can you believe in an era where the majority of creative works are no longer projects created painstakingly by human minds, but instead through 300-word prompts sent to ChatGPT?
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What is the future of book publishing with AI-writing on the rise?
 
Graham1973 said:
Why I never say 'hello' first when I answer the phone: Rachel Rickard Straus
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This is my life now, i'm employed by a charity to deliver talks about how to avoid scams, the Voice cloning and even live face cloning is coming soon.

two years ago i was told that they needed 2-3 minutes of your voice to clone you, last week i was told it's down to 30's.

On-line romance scams are endless, they play a long game, setting the victim up for months, isolating them from family and friends before striking and taking money.

It's truly scary how much it goes on.

Top tips, don't answer your phone if you don't know the number (Apple have a setting to screen all unknown numbers, try it, it's good) if you do answer they claim to be from your bank and you're in the UK hang up and ring 159 to speak to the banks fraud team.

Oh and lastly, no it really isn't a famous actor / model / musician messaging you and wanting to be friends / start a relationship, it's simple stunning how many people fall for that, and no they are not stupid or dim, normally just lonely.

Sorry rant over
 
shin_getter said:
<snip>

It is a self correcting problem, and it also happens fast unless it is written into law.

There is also the inverse theory where all the MBA and middle managers should get replaced by AI. If you read Elon Musk, well:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steved...ithout-managers-transformed-the-car-industry/

People are still figuring who or what should get replaced by AI, and the market would sort it out.
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This "market" you speak of gave us Elon Musk and his fellow witless oligarchs. I could rest my case right there.

In classical economic theory (at least as this historian/English major understands it), the market is only an abstraction representing economic interactions between large numbers of participants. It is not some sort of all-wise judge of virtue and value. People define the market according to the outcomes that they want. Not vice versa.

Beleivers in the supposed "wisdom of the market" are usually those that control the current market for their own benefit (monopolists and oligarchs) and those who do not understand how markets actually work in the absence of regulation. Elon fits in both categories.
 
iverson said:
Beleivers in the supposed "wisdom of the market" are usually those that control the current market for their own benefit (monopolists and oligarchs) and those who do not understand how markets actually work in the absence of regulation.
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The market does some things well and other things poorly, and those things must be done by other means such as Government. When it comes to seeing who AI replaces I think the market will be a more important factor than the other means. The Government for example won't have enough data points or agility to pick winners and losers well, compared to the market with it's massive amount of data/decision/action points and ability to reverse bad decisions.
 
iverson said:
Beleivers in the supposed "wisdom of the market" are usually those that control the current market for their own benefit (monopolists and oligarchs) and those who do not understand how markets actually work in the absence of regulation.
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Heavy regulation generally mean monopoly and oligrachs enforced by law. The cases are too many to count.

Without legal moats, actual companies are often not capable of sustaining a monopoly due to natural bureaucratic dysfunction and competition. Consider xerox, IBM, Microsoft, all have-beens in the sector. Most companies are probably quite suboptimal most of the time (like all forms of human organization), but the actually functional ones grows.

And frankly, with the political system selecting for the incoherent senile persons with dementia.... the market selection forces are visibly much better.
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Frankly, AI could be better given the horribleness of observed performance.
 
shin_getter said:
And frankly, with the political system selecting for the incoherent senile persons with dementia.... the market selection forces are visibly much better.
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It's this thought process that got us into this situation in the first place. The sad reality is that we're living in a world where business (and people) haven't been regulated enough.

It's a truth that we'll have to live with.

This is one of the many things why I keep saying that we're in a major sea change in what is considered basic flipping governance. What is authoritarian in one technological context isn't in another.

It's all about that major determinant of practically everything: technology and the understanding of the universe it implies.

The sad reality is... the best future will look like what the government that the protagonist from Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising works for, a surveillance state to end all surveillance states, all because the technology we wield as a species has shifted the ratio between how many people who can ruin humanity's day and the destruction they'll cause to such a low number that every idiot with more ideology than sense (and many of these ideologies have a disturbing tendency to be genocidal) and cause a death toll that can only be counted in megadeaths.
Graham1973 said:
What is the future of book publishing with AI-writing on the rise?
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... to give a real futurist's perspective on the situation? Grim.
Three years old but still relevant because this guy is a real futurist (who looks for the good and bad of the future).
 
GruntFox said:
It's this thought process that got us into this situation in the first place. The sad reality is that we're living in a world where business (and people) haven't been regulated enough.

It's a truth that we'll have to live with.

This is one of the many things why I keep saying that we're in a major sea change in what is considered basic flipping governance. What is authoritarian in one technological context isn't in another.

It's all about that major determinant of practically everything: technology and the understanding of the universe it implies.

The sad reality is... the best future will look like what the government that the protagonist from Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising works for, a surveillance state to end all surveillance states, all because the technology we wield as a species has shifted the ratio between how many people who can ruin humanity's day and the destruction they'll cause to such a low number that every idiot with more ideology than sense (and many of these ideologies have a disturbing tendency to be genocidal) and cause a death toll that can only be counted in megadeaths.

... to give a real futurist's perspective on the situation? Grim.
Three years old but still relevant because this guy is a real futurist (who looks for the good and bad of the future).
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The level of surveillance we are already currently under is so extreme that explaining the most surface level elements to anyone unaware of it makes you sound like a raving lunatic.
Any piece of harvestable information on people has been scraped for decades by the government, and now with models to train, there is ungodly amounts of profit to be made on it - I really don't think the general public knows just how far these companies are willing to dig into their souls to make a cent.
It's hard to optimistic about this future, the next few decades will be extremely interesting.
 
iverson said:
This "market" you speak of gave us Elon Musk and his fellow witless oligarchs. I could rest my case right there.
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LMAO. That "witless" oligarch created SpaceX and made Tesla what it is today. For starters. What have you done?
 
SuperShark said:
The level of surveillance we are already currently under is so extreme that explaining the most surface level elements to anyone unaware of it makes you sound like a raving lunatic.
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For sure.
 
Sferrin said:
That "witless" oligarch created SpaceX and made Tesla what it is today.
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That is a very reductive statement of quite well known historical events in the context of a (quote) serious discussion (unquote) on AI, no matter where one stands on the multitude of issues it might imply. By the vast financial resources accumulated and invested - both publicly and privately - in some few individuals they are proportionally very influential to others.

As AI du jour, it is necessarily, unavoidably part of these evolving power structures. Being part of the human experience, those discussing the issue here and those being discussed all embody some innate witlessness of attention and cognition though the context varies. You could have at least quoted the whole of @iverson 's message since he expresses misgivings on the proportionality of accumulating financial means versus "artificial intelligence" enhanced capabilities. Certainly those who have by definition earned the "technology oligarch" description are accumulating wealth at a considerably greater rate than the economies they operate in grow, if they grow at all. Unabated, this is going to result in exponential ramifications (already has, but the trajectory continues). Given the range of how people's unitary selves can be expressed it is doubtful this is solely based on a select few having attained such better information (and processing thereof) of the market and the known world (access to AI included) that this phenomenon can be explained away let alone justified by that alone.

This is a valid discussion to be had as "what'cha gonna do about it" isn't as determinative a position as to straight out prevent expression of thought on these subjects on a message board such as this.
 
UpForce said:
You could have at least quoted the whole of @iverson 's message since he expresses misgivings on the proportionality of accumulating financial means versus "artificial intelligence" enhanced capabilities.
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I could have but, with a leader like that, I had no reason to believe it would get any more intelligent.
 
Has anyone played with the settings on the LLMs they use, to make it less chatty and more accurate for example? If so, has it made much of a difference?
 
Rule of cool said:
Has anyone played with the settings on the LLMs they use, to make it less chatty and more accurate for example? If so, has it made much of a difference?
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Yeah, I asked it to tell me "vous" instead of "tu" when answering me. To be honest, this whole thing feels way too familiar—we didn't keep the pigs together.
 
galgot said:
To be honest, this whole thing feels way too familiar
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This is my issue as well, I don't need a machine to tell me it's a good question, my self esteem isn't that low I need validation from a glorified roomba!

While the AI seems to remember a lot from previous queries they don't seem to remember the adjectives I use to get the detail level I want and after 3-4 highly detailed questions if I drop one specific descriptor it goes immediately to 'halfwit mode' and gives me the most basic answers. Perhaps the settings can help with that.

That said I've been on a rambling thread that started with Shelby Cobras and has progressed to how British motorway construction helped ruin the British Lorry industry, very engaging so I can't whinge too much.
 
UpForce said:
Certainly those who have by definition earned the "technology oligarch" description are accumulating wealth at a considerably greater rate than the economies they operate in grow, if they grow at all. Unabated, this is going to result in exponential ramifications (already has, but the trajectory continues).
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New research on this subject: "Beyond the Prompt: The Social Costs of Generative Artificial Intelligence"; J. Scott Christianson, Josh Rickard; The Business, Entrepreneurship and Tax Law Review; June 29, 2026.

Abstract:

Christianson said:
The rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence has produced extraordinary value for technology companies while systematically externalizing costs onto society. This Article provides a review of these externalities across three domains: environmental, human health, and digital infrastructure. The environmental burden includes massive energy and water consumption alongside ecologically destructive mining for rare earth elements and accelerating electronic waste. The human toll encompasses a documented pattern of AI-induced mental health crises, including suicide and self-harm linked to anthropomorphic chatbot design, raising novel questions of product liability in cases like Garcia v. Character.AI. The digital commons face degradation through industrialized data scraping enabled by the Ninth Circuit’s hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn decision, which effectively stripped platforms of their primary defense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This Article argues that the AI industry’s business model is predicated on a fundamental market failure: the privatization of benefit and socialization of cost. Until the costs of extraction, defense, and human harm are borne by those who generate the risk, the AI revolution will continue to levy an uncompensated tax on the broader economy.
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Link:

https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/betr/vol10/iss1/4/
 
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An interesting conversation with James Muldoon on AI companions (or more colloquially, boy- and girlfriends) from July 11th, 2026:

View: https://youtu.be/OO0XjRNmQFo


Description:

Novara said:
AI boyfriends and girlfriends are all the rage – for some. For others, they just inspire rage.

So what's the truth about these seductive machines? Do they open up our erotic potential, or are they just an absurd fantasy? And how are they even made?

James Muldoon is the author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships and co-author of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI.

Put these two books together, and his work takes us along the strange journey of AI from deeply exploited workers in the slums of East Africa to the cores of our deepest desires.
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A Chinese company called UBTech has just introduced U1 which brings these AI companions into the physical realm, surely others will follow. An article on the subject, "The first commercial human-like robot is here. Are replicants next?" (Jesus Diaz, Fast Company, 07-10-2026):

https://www.fastcompany.com/91570086/ubtech-first-commercial-human-like-robot

At the time of writing of the article the company had already received 13,000 down payments for the robot.

Diaz said:
UBTech is framing the U1 as a human companion and believes the future of the robotics industry lies in providing emotional support. The company’s chief brand officer, Michael Tam, describes the human-robot companionship economy as “the first essential scenario in human history with unlimited emotional value, boundless companionship, and full-life-cycle coverage.”
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Glitzy launch video:

View: https://youtu.be/jXRbNaFqByo
 
Using fashion to counter tracking and AI surveillance – that is the concept behind Leipzig start-up Urban Privacy. For several years, Nicole Scheller and Daniel Preuß have been developing products such as anti-tracking jackets. They do not make their wearers invisible, but they do make them harder to track.

On the jackets there is a face-like pattern that confuses AI cameras. The asymmetric, loose cut also makes it harder for the software to assign a gender to the person being filmed.

"The main problem is simply that we do not know where the data ends up," explains designer Nicole Scheller. Digital data, she says, is the new resource. As an example, Scheller cites Instagram’s parent company Meta, which sells, among other things, sunglasses with cameras.
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Anti-tracking fashion: Startup designs clothing to foil AI surveillance cameras
 
What's the current widespread vibe on AI slop? Do people know about it and hate it, or do they swallow it whole, or do they discern some slop is better than others?

I have a feeling (based on nothing real, just my experience) that the current AI slop is flooding the market with cheap garbage and people will gobble it up for a while. However, I think ultimately AI videos will have to create a decent product to remain relevant once this initial surge is over. In that video example maybe the first AI video that the second AI video used as a source will survive but the copy of a copy won't. That's won't solve the re-writing of history, which happens outside of AI anyway, but it might lift the bottom of the barrel somewhat.
 
The people who detect and dislike ai slop and other genai output are not the target audience of the slop manufacturers.
 
AI slop is the video production equivalent of US Creationist Duane Gish's arguing style - in effect, AI can spew out bullsh!t faster than humans can fact-check or present logical counter-arguments.

If YouTube wasn't the activating instrument of AI slop, it would actively penalise slop publishers. But YouTube doesn't discourage slop (human-generated or AI). Like many others, YouTube appear to mistake lying for free speech.

Oh, yeah, and slop also earns YouTube piles of money in advertising revenue. So, no conflicts of interest there ...
 
s/Youtube/Facebook and you'll still be just as correct. Good observation about AI being the classic Gish Gallop.
 
Apophenia said:
slop also earns YouTube piles of money in advertising revenue.
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And it's low-effort creators, they even speak slowly to get the 'seconds watched' up.

However, I think most of it is not very entertaining and this will be what bursts the low-effort slop bubble that we appear to currently be in. Personally, I wouldn't mind AI content if it was good, it's the low-effort, low-quality that annoys me.
 

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