5 ms·

Isn't AI (chatgpt) basically too late to the party. If I'm understanding the thrust of the article is that language models can easily generate content that you

Isn't AI (chatgpt) basically too late to the party. If I'm understanding the thrust of the article is that language models can easily generate content that you don't know if it's true or not, with various opinions and points of view. But the internet already has that. And that's how chatgpt can generate it's text, because it's trained on the internet as a corpus. So it can make more of the same, slanted and untrustable and maybe indistinguishable from whether a person wrote it. But that's nothing new.

greesil 4y ago
Yeah but you can fine tune it to generate whatever you want, given your own training corpus. Anybody's whose job is to generate text will have a productivity boost.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  For a while till we've watered down all content so much that chatgpt has no actual useful material to pull from but its own spew. Much of the internet seems to be trending this way, with just low effort content mill sites being propped up by high Google scores that cause more low effort content which further lowering the quality of Google results. It'll be its own downfall I tells ya....
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    We are rapidly going back to square one on the Web: to needing curated guides to good websites. This time, not because search engines don’t exist, but because search results have been gamed by content mills pushing garbage content. It’s almost like the web is turning itself inside out. The web you care about is to some extent “dark”, i.e. not discoverable by conventional means. If systems like ChatGPT just become echo chambers (garbage content feeding AI generation of derivative garbage, ad infinitum), I kind of see things like ChatGPT simply turbo charging this creeping digital benightedness in the face of information over abundance.
    - syntheweave 4y ago
      I really feel like the world is "going dark" along multiple axes, not just the AI one. The globalized economy seems to have passed its peak as the resource dependencies and energy sources have begun a long shift away from 20th century norms, and there's likewise renewed interest in privacy technologies, personalizations/customizations and optimizing around local spaces, vs "connecting the planet" and proceeding further down the path of standardized everything. Which means that most likely, we have a future where we don't have any designated global sources of truth, as was the assumption going into the Enlightenment. It'll be a little more like Aristotle's time, where the true lessons were taught esoterically, by devising puzzle-like texts with intentional tricks and flaws. (This is the Leo Strauss thesis, which is explained very well by Arthur Melzer in "Philosophy Between the Lines".) To uncover the knowledge you have to demonstrate the critical thinking necessary to undermine its surface. It's something I should probably try writing fiction about. It could be a long trend or a temporary blip, but it's worthy of speculation.
    - Atheros 4y ago
      Curated lists of sites is the web. A site links to a few sites that the author knows to be good and those sites do the same for a few more sites. That's the web. It's what enabled the Google page rank algorithm to work in the first place. The Internet we continue to use and enjoy but the web hasn't existed in any practical form for 15 years. If people do start rebuilding the web then Google's search algorithm will suddenly start working better which will cause people to stop building the web. So obviously we'll just end up with a steady state where Google just kindof sucks but is kindof usable. I think that we might be there already.

greesil 4y ago

Yeah but you can fine tune it to generate whatever you want, given your own training corpus. Anybody's whose job is to generate text will have a productivity boost.

grogenaut 4y ago
For a while till we've watered down all content so much that chatgpt has no actual useful material to pull from but its own spew. Much of the internet seems to be trending this way, with just low effort content mill sites being propped up by high Google scores that cause more low effort content which further lowering the quality of Google results. It'll be its own downfall I tells ya....
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  We are rapidly going back to square one on the Web: to needing curated guides to good websites. This time, not because search engines don’t exist, but because search results have been gamed by content mills pushing garbage content. It’s almost like the web is turning itself inside out. The web you care about is to some extent “dark”, i.e. not discoverable by conventional means. If systems like ChatGPT just become echo chambers (garbage content feeding AI generation of derivative garbage, ad infinitum), I kind of see things like ChatGPT simply turbo charging this creeping digital benightedness in the face of information over abundance.
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    I really feel like the world is "going dark" along multiple axes, not just the AI one. The globalized economy seems to have passed its peak as the resource dependencies and energy sources have begun a long shift away from 20th century norms, and there's likewise renewed interest in privacy technologies, personalizations/customizations and optimizing around local spaces, vs "connecting the planet" and proceeding further down the path of standardized everything. Which means that most likely, we have a future where we don't have any designated global sources of truth, as was the assumption going into the Enlightenment. It'll be a little more like Aristotle's time, where the true lessons were taught esoterically, by devising puzzle-like texts with intentional tricks and flaws. (This is the Leo Strauss thesis, which is explained very well by Arthur Melzer in "Philosophy Between the Lines".) To uncover the knowledge you have to demonstrate the critical thinking necessary to undermine its surface. It's something I should probably try writing fiction about. It could be a long trend or a temporary blip, but it's worthy of speculation.
  - Atheros 4y ago
    Curated lists of sites is the web. A site links to a few sites that the author knows to be good and those sites do the same for a few more sites. That's the web. It's what enabled the Google page rank algorithm to work in the first place. The Internet we continue to use and enjoy but the web hasn't existed in any practical form for 15 years. If people do start rebuilding the web then Google's search algorithm will suddenly start working better which will cause people to stop building the web. So obviously we'll just end up with a steady state where Google just kindof sucks but is kindof usable. I think that we might be there already.