8 ms·
Here is one prediction: Because of language models, the amount of fake news online will increase by an order of magnitude (at least) before this decade ends. An
by trention 4y ago
Here is one prediction:
Because of language models, the amount of fake news online will increase by an order of magnitude (at least) before this decade ends. And there is no interpretation of that development as anything else but a net negative.
Another more broad prediction: In a decade, the overall influence of language models on our society will be universally seen as a net negative.
- xmprt 4y agoWhat if that's the push that brings people out into the physical world where they don't have to deal with all this crap online.
- carschno 4y agoSlightly less optimistic, but perhaps more realistic thought: what if that's the push that makes people validate their (internet) sources? Seems like it might become clear that random web pages are just automatically generated content. If you really want to learn something credible at all, you'll really have to be more specific about your sources than "the internet".
- ninkendo 4y agoYeah, that was gonna be my contrarian HN hot-take too. Basically if it becomes really obvious some day that basically all online news publication is noise written by computers, maybe people will stop actually trusting it so much?
- NoMAD76 4y agoFake news and AI generated news are kinda all over the place for a good amount of time. It's faster and cheaper to have AI write news from a press release. My prediction is that in the next 10y we will really struggle to determine between fake-people and real-human. There will be an explosion of fake-identities posting more and more human-like. But I'm not Nostradamus so I could be very very off here.
- shon 4y agoYou’re probably right but it will be an arms race with ever more sophisticated mitigation techniques being deployed to filter. I’d say Neil Stephenson has a pretty good take on what this might look like in his recent book: Fall, where in everyone has a “feed” and those that or more savvy/wealthy have better editors (AI, etc) of their feed.
- NoMAD76 4y agoIt's all about having the right tools, but I wonder how long can we "beat the machine" :)
- paganel 4y agoIt depends. On forums like this it would basically take a machine that would pass the Turing test in order not to be seen as an AI in any "meaningful" conversation that it might join (so, not just a comment posted as a reply here and there). And even if the powers that be manage to get those future AI bots to post stuff that will very much resemble what we now post in here, it is my belief that the uncanny valley will be, in the end, impossible to pass (in fact that's one of the main motifs of many of Asimov's books when it comes to robots).
- jerf 4y agoI'm not particularly convinced by the Dead Internet Theory [1] as of 2022, in the sense that it is completely true right now. But I am convinced it is building around us, and even now, the correct frame for the question isn't whether it is true, but how true it is. There is too many entities with too much reason to build it for it not to be happening. And the nature of it is such that it doesn't need to be one entity doing it for one unified reason; dozens, hundreds can all be participating & fighting with each other on different levels and the sum total of all that is to put it together that much more quickly. You know, the PGP web of trust idea may yet take off all these decades later, not because we need a web of trust to send 100.0000000% safely encrypted messages to each other to protect from governments, but because we need a web of trust just to know who the real humans are. [1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
- l33t2328 4y agoI have already generated fake news-esque things with gpt-3 to send to friends. A lot of the outputs look incredibly genuine. We live in interesting times.
- notahacker 4y agoCost per word of fake news is already very low though, and humans are much better at tailoring it to the appropriate audience and agenda (and not just restating stuff that's already out there that might actually be true) GPT type models are much better suited to low effort blogspam, and whilst that's not a good thing, they produce better blogspam than existing blogspamming techniques. I think we underestimate how bad the Internet already is, and at worst text generated by AI is simply going to reflect that.
- NoMAD76 4y agoIt's about being 1st to publish it. It is mainly use during live press conferences. No human can snap a photo (at least), write a short update in a dedicated article, and so on... all in 1s. Been there (as an independent press member years ago), simply you cannot beat that.
- notahacker 4y agoFirst to publish matters, but GPT-3 is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve that. If you're producing fake news related to a press conference, speed of content generation is entirely unimportant because you don't have to wait for the press conference to start to write the fake article/update/tweet. If you care about fidelity to the message of the press conference, I don't see many situations in which a human who has anticipated the likely message(s) of the conference and therefore has pre-drafted paragraphs about "striking a conciliatory tone" and "confirmed the reversal of the policy" ready to select and combine with a choice quote or two as soon as they're uttered isn't significantly better (and as quick as) GPT-type models prompted by the speech-to-text of the press conference. Sure, more reliable publications will want to stick more validation and at least wait for the conference to finish before summarising its message steps in the way, but those apply to bots as well as journalists (or not, for the publications that prioritise being first over being right).
- NoMAD76 4y agoYou have a solid point, but I wasn't talking abut summarizing or excerpt from a press release (those are anyway handed as press-kits before with all NDA agreements and so on). Real human journalists have a delay of about 1m before making a short tweet. Funny (or not), something similar was in the "live update" article page in less than 10s. Including photo(s). I was on quite a lot of tech-conferences/live events and earned a decent living then as an independent tech journalist (but then I got bored and really it was a 1-man-show). Another personal observation (from field), that was not happening prior to 2010-2012, the years we all got Siri, Cortana.. You can make the dots and dashes.
- jerf 4y agoThat has already happened. manimino linked me to this great page on another thread on HN a few days ago: https://cookingflavr.com/should-you-feed-orioles-all-summer/ https://cookingflavr.com/should-you-feed-orioles-all-summer/ But consider that a particularly easy to detect version of the problem. Click some of the other links on that site and have a look. I especially suggest you click something on a topic you know nothing about. I've been hitting these sites in searches accidentally more and more over the past few months. Goodness help you if you don't realize it's totally fake; some of what I've seen is dangerous, like, bad electrical advice being blithely generated by whichever exact transformer variant is spewing that stuff.
- Vetch 4y agoThere is an economic incentive to detect machine generated output and curate trusted sites since the feedback loop of training models on an unfiltered internet of mostly generated junk output will eventually lead the models into converging on a useless degenerate state.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoPeople don't get their news from random AI-generated blogs. The actually bad consequence is SEO spam of high quality. You can now generate a hundred articles a minute in any topic.
- uni_rule 4y agoWe are already seeing a lot of fucked up SEO spam rising to the top these days. IMO it might actually start picking at Google's market share because prior to this the product actually seemed infallible to the average layman.
- textcortex 4y agoI would not worry about that too much. There are already models that can predict if its transformer generated or not. At the same time google started penalizing transformer generated text; https://youtu.be/EZWx05O6Hss https://youtu.be/EZWx05O6Hss
- hhmc 4y agoIt doesn't seem like there's any real guarantee that the 'generated text detectors' will outpace the 'generated text generators'
- brian_cloutier 4y agoWhat is the issue with fake news? Language models can now pass as human in many situations but there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news, this isn't a new capability. We have already created mechanisms for deciding which voices to trust and no matter how good language models get they will not be able to prevent you from visiting economist.com
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoI think the issue could be volume (and also that the vast majority of humans aren't actively exercising their ability to write fake news at present). Also that language models might be far more convincing.
- Viliam1234 4y ago> there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news You have to pay them, and most of them are not very good at writing. Even with a big budget, you get a limited number of good articles per day. If you can make writing fake news 100x cheaper, and then just throw everything at social networks and let people sort out the most viral stuff, that can change the game. Also, computers can be faster. If something new happens today and hundred articles are written about it, a computer can quickly process them and generate hundred more articles on the same topic, than a group of humans would. (Many humans can do the writing in parallel, but each of them needs to read individually the things they want to react to.)
- Vetch 4y agoThe vast majority of generators of fake news today are from Content Mills, Copy Paste Mills and general SEO spammers. Political misinformation is the other big generator. The economics of it and not "ethical" gate keeping is what will affect their output. Realistically, normal people don't have the ability to coordinate hordes of proxied IPs to attack social networks requiring account sign ups and custom feeds. The value of exercising critical thinking, checking trusted curated sources, information hygiene, recognizing and avoiding manipulation tactics in news and ads will have to go up. The internet is already almost entirely unreliable without requiring any fancy AI. The listed skills will be necessary regardless any increase of politically manipulative content, advertisements or product misrepresentations.
- mgraczyk 4y agoAlternative hypothesis for which I have at least as much evidence: Because of large language models, detecting Fake News becomes trivial and cheap. Building and doing inference on language models is too expensive for most attackers, so they give up. Only well financed state actors are capable of disseminating fake news, and they are no better at it than they are today because content generation is not a bottleneck.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- radford-neal 4y ago"Because of language models, the amount of fake news online will increase by an order of magnitude (at least) before this decade ends. And there is no interpretation of that development as anything else but a net negative." That's not at all clear. You're assuming people will continue to give credence to random stuff they read. But once fake AI-generated content is common, people will surely become less trusting. The end result could easily be that fewer people than before believe fake news is real. Presumably, fewer people will believe real news too, but the result could still be net positive.
- joe_the_user 4y agoBogus content has been available in abundance online for a while and people often are credulous of it still. But still, you have to assume that the cost of creating fake news is the primary limit to it's appearance in front of people to claim AI will seriously have an impact and that's not at all obvious.
- mortenjorck 4y agoI keep seeing this prediction, but have yet to see a convincing argument as to how this content is supposed to circumvent existing trust networks. News outlets are nothing without a track record. People trust names they recognize. You can spin up as many CMS instances, domains, and social media profiles for fake news as you want, but without a history shared with its core audience, all the language models in the world aren't going to convince anyone but the most credulous when the content is coming from unfamiliar sources.
- ramblenode 4y agoMost people now get their news from downstream social media, not from the newsroom. You don't have to sway opinion with fake articles, just a sea of astroturf that supports some opinion and creates the illusion of a crowd, which has traditionally been the main signal for credibility of an idea.
- NoMAD76 4y agoOur grand-grand-granfathers generation believed in most of the things because, you know "I heard it in the church". Our grand-grandfathers generation believed in most of the things because, you know "I read it on the newspaper". Our grandfathers generation believed in most of the things because, you know "I've heard it on the radio". Our parents generation believed in most of the things because, you know "I've seen it on TV". Our generation believed in most of the things because, you know "I've read/seen/watch it on social media". I don't know about the next generations(s), the only thing in common for the above mentions was that they were made by a real-human.
- vintermann 4y agoWell, how is it done today? Twitter is instructive. You have mostly-automated accounts that like, retweet and reply to content from a specific perspective. Often it is an incendiary perspective, and usually it's a perspective underrepresented in regular news, because that's more useful for getting people to hit like and follow on the account's post. Once the account has gained enough real followers, they can carefully start to push payload content, the content the operator really cares about. This drives polarisation. There's this idea that sinister foreign adversaries are trying to "spread chaos", but I don't buy it. I think it's merely a by-product of building an audience. Russia (to pick an example) doesn't care about BLM, anti-BLM, US culture wars or the Assange case. Rather, it cares about exactly the things you'd expect it to care about: sanctions, conflicts it is involved in, allies etc. (For that matter, ad-driven media does much the same. Gawker before its demise had really gone all-in on "outrage bait" stories.) They're going to start with the most credulous, maybe, but they'll build confidence in the same way as everyone else who's an unknown at start.
- jstummbillig 4y ago> And there is no interpretation of that development as anything else but a net negative. Sure there is: An inevitability. I am hoping we will increasingly turn attention towards how to handle it (although I am relatively certain that's already going on at rapidly growing scale at fb, google and openai). I could see updated legislation doing a lot of heavy lifting – strict rules against automated mass-disinformation – but more action is certainly going to be required.
- trention 4y agoThe fact that something is "an inevitability" (which is definitely not the case here) has nothing to do with whether it's a net negative or not. This is like saying "you should classify this as blue" and then a response like "no, it's heavy".
- jstummbillig 4y agoIn actuality, it's more like saying "you can only classify this as blue", being awkwardly wrong with the premise, proceeding to not see reason and then get cute.
- Aeolos 4y agoThis has already happened, to a large extent. Search for most any topic on google, e.g. recipes, and the first two pages will be chock-full of AI-generated copy.
- wruza 4y agoPlot twist, people stop relying on news’ blogs’ meanings and create a system of decision making that is another level and actually works for them and not for the most sound speech talkers. You learn to swim by getting wet.
- tonypace 4y agoIn the shadow end, typically. You can easily stand up and breathe.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoHot take: The majority of information consumed by people is compromised of low quality opinions, misrepresentations, and outright lies. It has always been this way, always will be this way, and every single person who clutches at their pearls over this fact also believes things would be improved by having the correct people control access to information.