Based Camp: How AI's Will Hack People (with Spencer Greenberg of Clearer Thinking)

In this thought-provoking discussion, Spencer Greenberg shares his predictions for how AI could transform society in the next 10 years. He envisions prolific AI spam, propaganda bots, highly addictive personalized content streams, and hacked emotions. But AI also holds promise for revolutionary advances in healthcare and entertainment. Overall, Spencer emphasizes AI's vast potential for both tremendous benefit and harm to humanity.

Spencer: [00:00:00] systems like tick tock, imagine a world where it's generating billions of new pieces of content every day with, with generative AI, or even going a step further, generating custom AI content for your mind.

Spencer: And then it sees how much you like it and then generate it and it tweaks its generation process. So we could imagine a world in 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, where you're actually seeing AI generated content personalized to you that you just kind of. Receive in a stream and become just insanely addicted to.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: Hello. We are so excited to be here today with Spencer Greenberg of the clearer thinking podcast, and also famously like the clearer thinking organization.

Malcolm: We the, the guy who is running this project, which is now fact checking trying to review psychological research to see if it's replicable as it's being published, which is just so cool. We've known him for years, almost as long as we've known each other, and he is... One [00:01:00] of the sort of social leaders of the EA rationalist diaspora in the New York area.

Malcolm: And just an incredibly respected gentlemen scientists in our opinion. And by gentlemen scientists, we mean one of those people who is out there. outside of mainstream academia conducting really great

Spencer: research.

Simone: And you can tell he's one of the leaders because he vehemently denies it. And yet he like builds all the stuff that everyone uses.

Simone: So.

Spencer: Well,

Malcolm: I so I mean, he's definitely a thought leader in the Gentleman's Science Network because he's created the software that everyone's using to do it right now. Like I would say. 80% of the independent research is probably done on his software right now. But where we wanted to go with this one is we wanted to talk about where humanity is going into the future.

Malcolm: So let's start with the question of where do you think we're going to be in 10 years?

Spencer: So I should start by saying, this is wild speculation, predicting the future is incredibly hard. So take everything I say with a massive grain of salt. A lot of that's going to be wrong, [00:02:00] but with that caveat behind me, I will speculate.

Spencer: I think that AI is going to have an absolutely massive effect on society. I think it's. It's hard to really fathom right now all the different ways, but, but I think we're going to see it coming. I think a few areas we'll see it coming. One is in spam and manipulation. There are already a bunch of countries that have warehouses of people that are essentially putting propaganda onto Twitter and social media.

Spencer: This is well known, but I think that that is going to be nothing compared to. A million bots that are powered by AI, right? It's one thing to have, 300 people in a warehouse. It's another thing to have a million AI bots, right? It's also these AI bots are now at the point where they could all have different personalities.

Spencer: They could all say unique things in line with those personalities. They could have a lot, they can be sleeper agents where mostly they just tweet or post totally normal stuff 99% of the time, but then go into full gear. to promote propaganda. So that's just one little facet. Let's start there.

Malcolm: I was going to [00:03:00] ask.

Malcolm: So Elon is right when he's saying you need to limit access to these platforms now and any platform that doesn't is just going to become swarmed with bots.

Spencer: I think it's complicated. I mean, I do think, I do think this is going to be a massive problem. Whether the current approaches Twitter wants to use will work.

Spencer: I don't know. I mean, almost nobody's on Twitter blue relative to the whole Twitter population. So I'm not sure how they're going to do that. Maybe what they'll do is make it harder and harder. To do anything as a non Twitter blue user, but I don't know that that solution will actually work. I think it's going to be an arms race and the very difficult one.

Spencer: The closer and I guess to be able to do what a human can do. The harder it is to actually detect that it's an AI, right?

Malcolm: Actually that brings me to something that's been happening recently on Reddit, and I don't know if you've seen this phenomenon, but, reddit's in this big fight right now with like the mod teams, and it appears that Reddit Corporate is using lots of AIs.

Malcolm: Actually, they recently had to block out like the programming [00:04:00] subreddit or something like that, because they figured out that the Reddit Corporate was using their own AIs to try to make it seem like the community was more okay with what was happening. I'm wondering how you Think social media companies, do you think that this sort of action would be like a death penalty to a social media company in the future?

Malcolm: Or do you think the future will be like companies that are anti AI versus companies that are pro ai? Like where do you think we'll begin to see a a, a differentiation and evolution of social media platforms as it relates to ai?

Spencer: Yeah. It's an interesting question because I think you'll start to see AI on social media that are actual just kind of creators.

Spencer: Right. So some people will make this proliferation of AIs that are tweeting about different things or posting on social media about different things in a certain, in a benign or even helpful way where they're just kind of content creators. And then you'll see other ones that are, I think, going to be like sleeper agents that are really like propaganda bots, but they're just imitating being a real person.

Spencer: You'll see other ones that are attempting to scam [00:05:00] people, like even attempting to befriend people over a period of months or years. Which I think is we're going to, we're going to start to see that where bots will let, create extended relationships with people and then scam them. And I think some of these things, all social media companies are going to have to be against because it's just going to really affect the the performance of their platform so much.

Spencer: It's going to be such a bad experience being on the platform that they just have to be against it. Other ones they might embrace like. AI content creators where it's okay, well, maybe it's okay to have a million different bots that are just creating content of specific types, each with specific personalities trying to appeal to the masses.

Spencer: And then there'll be an interesting question about disclosure. Will you have to disclose that it's an AI making the content or if it's a hybrid between human and AI, how does that work? So yeah, a lot of really tricky questions.

Simone: So you're making me think actually is that a lot of social media platforms are probably going to require, for example, government identification.

Sim