TheReturnOfPEB
@TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
- Comment on Amazon has already made a Bond film – it cost $300m and is unwatchable 1 hour ago:
There are 25 Bond films. No matter happens moving forward those films are not going anywhere.
Just like with Indiana Jones … ignore the ones you don’t like and love your favorites. This is not rocket science.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 day ago:
It depends on if Baron is like his father or not.
- Comment on How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*? 1 day ago:
Have we checked inside the billionaires to see what they are made of ?
- Comment on Brady Corbet Says 'The Brutalist' Made Him 'Zero Dollars' & Fellow Oscar-Nominated Directors “Can’t Pay Their Rent” 3 days ago:
They why are they crying if they agree to the game ?
- Comment on Brady Corbet Says 'The Brutalist' Made Him 'Zero Dollars' & Fellow Oscar-Nominated Directors “Can’t Pay Their Rent” 3 days ago:
They are the daft ones agreeing to work under those conditions and then acting like they didn’t agree to bad term.
- Comment on Brady Corbet Says 'The Brutalist' Made Him 'Zero Dollars' & Fellow Oscar-Nominated Directors “Can’t Pay Their Rent” 3 days ago:
They why are they agreeing to work for those terms ?
- Comment on Bracing for a Shutdown Fight, Democrats Warn Their Votes Are Not a Given 6 days ago:
Novel bullshit won’t beat fascism.
MAGAs love being “on the spot”. That is the MAGA entire field of play.
- Comment on guys .002 seconds after learning about the "male loneliness epidemic" 1 week ago:
My penis would like a moment to speak.
…
ok, its done. i’m sorry that never happens. really. i’m just really stressed.
- Comment on Speaking honestly, what has to happen for you personally to take to the street in protest of the current administration. 1 week ago:
Nice try, Elon.
- Comment on 'These Are Some Of The Insane Priorities' USAID Has Funded: Karoline Leavitt 2 weeks ago:
If things were shutdown completely because they don’t make sense to everyone Conservative@lemm.ee would not be a thing.
- Comment on DNC Chair Live Updates: Democrats Elect Ken Martin 2 weeks ago:
Mr. Martin also argued that Democrats did not need to change their message to voters.
“Anyone saying we need to start over with a new message is wrong,” he said. “We got the right message.”
Sounds like someone who owns his home, has health care, and doesn’t want to put anything he has at risk.
- Comment on Plane crashes in Philadelphia, igniting inferno near homes and mall 3 weeks ago:
At this point I am going to float this conspiracy.
- Comment on Is This How Reddit Ends? 3 weeks ago:
The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.
It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.
But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.
The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off of some bones.
Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the fun horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)
For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.
The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.
All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. Such is it with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: eventually, the pot will burn dry.
- Comment on How to make multiple paragraphs render with a space? 3 weeks ago:
Guide: Write cool posts and comments with Markdown for newbies
- Comment on The US is actually going to implement a nationwide abortion ban and the measures for how it's gonna be handled are already in the works 4 weeks ago:
who exactly are you calling the rabble ?
- Comment on Why did trump go after the Gulf of Mexico rather than New Mexico? 4 weeks ago:
Why do we call it New York ? Or New Hampshire ?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Wher are all the people that said calling them NAZIs was disregarding history of “real NAZIs” ?
Where are all those MFers now ?
- Comment on 'The Brutalist' criticised for its use of AI 4 weeks ago:
Yeah low budget used in conjunctivitis with A.I. is like that meetaa guy saying low performers are being fired while saying A.I. coding is going to happen at meetaa in 2025.
- Comment on fight fire with napalm 4 weeks ago:
i’m pretty sure that is named nut weed
- Comment on The future of Blu-ray is looking bleak (and that's a bad thing for everyone) 1 month ago:
You have permission to watch it, and you will need permission to watch it.
- Comment on The future of Blu-ray is looking bleak (and that's a bad thing for everyone) 1 month ago:
Found the center of the universe.
- Comment on There's fucking ads in board games now 1 month ago:
I thought that was a joke. Not a joke..
- Comment on Water 1 month ago:
clearly never been down the hollywood walk of fame
- Comment on Not enough people buying Premium, eh? 1 month ago:
Just recently it has gotten worse. The good thing is that I don’t watch TV at all any longer because I used youtube. Now I’m watching less youtube AND no TV so win win for my free time.
- Comment on Not enough people buying Premium, eh? 1 month ago:
Is that why I am getting about one ad for every 90 seconds of video ?
- Comment on Sure, WSJ. Next do an article on Selection Bias 1 month ago:
First millennials were mocked for wanting part of The American Dream; now Millennials are being mocked for a few of them having a bit of it.
The WSJ should be ripped asunder.
- Comment on nuclear 2 months ago:
- Comment on Hey is Sharing Luigi’s Manifesto on Social Media Actually "Glorifying Violence"? Because Reddit Said So 😭 2 months ago:
For a website with a section called
nsfl and fight porn reddit takes a weird stance on manifestos.
- Comment on How would you forgive someone that poisoned your dog when they only offer bad faith apology ? 2 months ago:
Didn’t survive. Radiator fluid and dog feces. Veterinarian that put him down told me.
- Submitted 2 months ago to [deleted] | 44 comments