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The immediate bummer about ChatGPT and its ilk for me isn’t scammers (though I’m sure it’s an issue that will get worse), but… insufferably dull people. I figu

The immediate bummer about ChatGPT and its ilk for me isn’t scammers (though I’m sure it’s an issue that will get worse), but… insufferably dull people. I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.

mentalpiracy 4y ago
> Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with? Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.
- phdelightful 4y ago
  > Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience. I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mentalpiracy 4y ago
    I think you may be right! Thanks for the clarity.
- braingenious 4y ago
  What is the difference in value between a person that pastes questions into ChatGPT and then pastes the results to your feed versus a browser extension that does the same exact thing for you? It’s not really a fun party trick if literally everyone can do it. If I want to know what GPT has to say about something, I can find out myself in seconds.
  - baby 4y ago
    Humans have always been input machines that produce outputs.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      So are toilets? What’s the insight here?
- bakugo 4y ago
  Maybe I'm in the minority at this point, but I like talking to people, not robots. If you think there's no difference, why not just cease all contact with other humans and spend the rest of your life talking to ChatGPT since you love it so much?
- somenameforme 4y ago
  In online discussions many people do not really make arguments from knowledge. People will arbitrarily choose a "side" on some topic, and then formulate arguments by searching for "proof for why my random opinion is totally right" or "proof for what this guy is saying is totally wrong." There's no exchange of ideas or views, the entire point of discussion, because the person you're discussing the issue with doesn't know what they're talking about. So it's a complete waste of time. Yet this can be hard to see at first because, thanks to the internet, even a blind man could describe the art of the Sistine Chapel with absolute clarity. ChatGPT will make this orders of magnitude worse. Because now that "proof my biases are right" will become more eloquent and more dynamic. And the lack of knowledge even more extreme, because now you need not even be able to paraphrase what you're reading. Just dump it straight from the bot. And then there will be active abuse. Now spammers and governments alike can have a million bots spamming either for viagra or war. And it will be done using dynamically generated text that can be tied into any arbitrary topic. And populating those bots with "real" histories will be trivial by having them formulate random, but relevant, comments in topics outside their "real" purpose. It feels hyperbolic, yet it seems very possible that text-generation software may kill off meaningful discourse on the internet, at least outside of small vetted communities. And while internet dialogue has always been a bit of a bubble, the inevitable "dynamic propaganda" now means you'll never be able to even get a remote sense of the views of the public at large.
baby 4y ago
First, this comment seems like a hater perspective. "I hate things people like." Second, this was already going on for much longer than you think. If you read reddit now, or if you were 5 years ago, most of the posts are reposts from bots, and most of the top comments are reposts from top comments of the exact same posts. People, or bots, I don't know, literally find the previous posts of the exact same thing and copy/paste the top comments from there to have a higher chance at getting karma, and it's working.
- braingenious 4y ago
  What is a hater? Is it somebody that pops up to tell people that their opinions are wrong and insult them?
capybara_2020 4y ago
Didn't that already happen well before chatGPT? With the rise of "personal branding". Every medium seems to be filled with people churning out empty meaningless content at an impossible rate just to get a few likes/follows. People with interesting ideas walked away because they could not create quality content at that rate. Or they had these "experts" shout them down. ChatGPT just seems to be more of the same.
cableshaft 4y ago
> The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality. As opposed to the usual high-quality, high-effort content on social media of one of the following: pictures of pets, pictures of kids, pictures of food, pictures of an insightful quote you copied somewhere, videos of you lip synching to something, videos of you dancing the exact same dance that a million other people have done on other videos, pictures of you in front of a landmark or at a beach or pool to show how "wordly and cultured" you are, your quiz results for some bullshit made-up quiz, some five-second hot take commentary on some current event topic (likely just parroting another hot take you read five minutes earlier), how much you loved or hated the newest blockbuster film or tv show, etc etc. I'd rather see what a good A.I. has to say about various subjects compared to most of those, personally.

mentalpiracy 4y ago

> Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement. This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with? Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.

phdelightful 4y ago
> Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience. I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mentalpiracy 4y ago
  I think you may be right! Thanks for the clarity.
braingenious 4y ago
What is the difference in value between a person that pastes questions into ChatGPT and then pastes the results to your feed versus a browser extension that does the same exact thing for you? It’s not really a fun party trick if literally everyone can do it. If I want to know what GPT has to say about something, I can find out myself in seconds.
- baby 4y ago
  Humans have always been input machines that produce outputs.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    So are toilets? What’s the insight here?
bakugo 4y ago
Maybe I'm in the minority at this point, but I like talking to people, not robots. If you think there's no difference, why not just cease all contact with other humans and spend the rest of your life talking to ChatGPT since you love it so much?
somenameforme 4y ago
In online discussions many people do not really make arguments from knowledge. People will arbitrarily choose a "side" on some topic, and then formulate arguments by searching for "proof for why my random opinion is totally right" or "proof for what this guy is saying is totally wrong." There's no exchange of ideas or views, the entire point of discussion, because the person you're discussing the issue with doesn't know what they're talking about. So it's a complete waste of time. Yet this can be hard to see at first because, thanks to the internet, even a blind man could describe the art of the Sistine Chapel with absolute clarity. ChatGPT will make this orders of magnitude worse. Because now that "proof my biases are right" will become more eloquent and more dynamic. And the lack of knowledge even more extreme, because now you need not even be able to paraphrase what you're reading. Just dump it straight from the bot. And then there will be active abuse. Now spammers and governments alike can have a million bots spamming either for viagra or war. And it will be done using dynamically generated text that can be tied into any arbitrary topic. And populating those bots with "real" histories will be trivial by having them formulate random, but relevant, comments in topics outside their "real" purpose. It feels hyperbolic, yet it seems very possible that text-generation software may kill off meaningful discourse on the internet, at least outside of small vetted communities. And while internet dialogue has always been a bit of a bubble, the inevitable "dynamic propaganda" now means you'll never be able to even get a remote sense of the views of the public at large.

baby 4y ago

First, this comment seems like a hater perspective. "I hate things people like." Second, this was already going on for much longer than you think. If you read reddit now, or if you were 5 years ago, most of the posts are reposts from bots, and most of the top comments are reposts from top comments of the exact same posts. People, or bots, I don't know, literally find the previous posts of the exact same thing and copy/paste the top comments from there to have a higher chance at getting karma, and it's working.

braingenious 4y ago
What is a hater? Is it somebody that pops up to tell people that their opinions are wrong and insult them?

capybara_2020 4y ago

Didn't that already happen well before chatGPT? With the rise of "personal branding". Every medium seems to be filled with people churning out empty meaningless content at an impossible rate just to get a few likes/follows. People with interesting ideas walked away because they could not create quality content at that rate. Or they had these "experts" shout them down. ChatGPT just seems to be more of the same.

cableshaft 4y ago

> The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality. As opposed to the usual high-quality, high-effort content on social media of one of the following: pictures of pets, pictures of kids, pictures of food, pictures of an insightful quote you copied somewhere, videos of you lip synching to something, videos of you dancing the exact same dance that a million other people have done on other videos, pictures of you in front of a landmark or at a beach or pool to show how "wordly and cultured" you are, your quiz results for some bullshit made-up quiz, some five-second hot take commentary on some current event topic (likely just parroting another hot take you read five minutes earlier), how much you loved or hated the newest blockbuster film or tv show, etc etc. I'd rather see what a good A.I. has to say about various subjects compared to most of those, personally.