4 ms·

It's nice to see a little realism starting to poke through the hype. The rush for automatic bullshit generation for me is very much in the bucket of, "Your scie

It's nice to see a little realism starting to poke through the hype. The rush for automatic bullshit generation for me is very much in the bucket of, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." As with every new technology, we should be looking at LLMs through a lens of maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms.

deleted 4y ago
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smackeyacky 4y ago
There is one thing that ChatGPT has done, which is highlight the amount of bullshit we are exposed to. If ChatGPT does nothing else but replace the bullshit generators, then we know on the whole we are safe to ignore all bullshit (a pretty safe course of action). Over the past few months I've found myself second guessing whether the article I am reading was generated bullshit or "real" bullshit. It's certainly made me re-think what I waste my time reading. If I can't get through the first paragraph before asking myself "is this AI bullshit?" it's a really good indication that the entire article is going to be bullshit, at which time it doesn't matter whether a human wrote it or not.
- wpietri 4y ago
  For sure. And it's worth asking what we were getting out of those articles before. As an example, there's an Android video game called Splash Wars. It has algorithmically generated levels with no sense of progression. In some sense it's not a good game, in that there's no narrative, no progression, no increasing cleverness. But I have played an embarrassing number of levels of it because for me it's soothing to have something modestly challenging but ultimately familiar. I realized that there are some video games I use to think. With the ADHD lets-go-ride-bikes portion of my brain pacified, I can ruminate on problems that I might otherwise get distracted from. Similarly, I suspect that bullshit articles fill other unspoken needs for people. That in the morning over cereal, maybe what I want from my newspaper is not actual news so much as news-shaped or news-flavored textual product. Maybe I want comfortable familiarity or confirmation of my biases. So I hope you're write, that others start asking those same questions. That the coming vast bullshit surplus puts many of us off it for good.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
But but but, there's money to be made!
- wpietri 4y ago
  Hah! I am honestly not even sure about that. There's clearly investment money to be raised. But sustained ways to generate value in the world? That's not as clear to me. I wonder if this more in the category of Groupon, which everybody thought was worldchanging for about 20 minutes. Or Shazam, which was an absolutely fucking mindblowing technology at first, and then it quickly became banal. Or perhaps the closest analogy was Qwiki, which was sort of inspired by the Star Trek voice interface where the computer would tell you about things on request. It was a hot startup, something people were watching closely. And then when people actually got to use it, turned out nobody cared.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    The key thing is that most people are obsessed with get rich quick, as long as you're first and you're fast you can make your money, damn the consequences.

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smackeyacky 4y ago

There is one thing that ChatGPT has done, which is highlight the amount of bullshit we are exposed to. If ChatGPT does nothing else but replace the bullshit generators, then we know on the whole we are safe to ignore all bullshit (a pretty safe course of action). Over the past few months I've found myself second guessing whether the article I am reading was generated bullshit or "real" bullshit. It's certainly made me re-think what I waste my time reading. If I can't get through the first paragraph before asking myself "is this AI bullshit?" it's a really good indication that the entire article is going to be bullshit, at which time it doesn't matter whether a human wrote it or not.

wpietri 4y ago
For sure. And it's worth asking what we were getting out of those articles before. As an example, there's an Android video game called Splash Wars. It has algorithmically generated levels with no sense of progression. In some sense it's not a good game, in that there's no narrative, no progression, no increasing cleverness. But I have played an embarrassing number of levels of it because for me it's soothing to have something modestly challenging but ultimately familiar. I realized that there are some video games I use to think. With the ADHD lets-go-ride-bikes portion of my brain pacified, I can ruminate on problems that I might otherwise get distracted from. Similarly, I suspect that bullshit articles fill other unspoken needs for people. That in the morning over cereal, maybe what I want from my newspaper is not actual news so much as news-shaped or news-flavored textual product. Maybe I want comfortable familiarity or confirmation of my biases. So I hope you're write, that others start asking those same questions. That the coming vast bullshit surplus puts many of us off it for good.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

But but but, there's money to be made!

wpietri 4y ago
Hah! I am honestly not even sure about that. There's clearly investment money to be raised. But sustained ways to generate value in the world? That's not as clear to me. I wonder if this more in the category of Groupon, which everybody thought was worldchanging for about 20 minutes. Or Shazam, which was an absolutely fucking mindblowing technology at first, and then it quickly became banal. Or perhaps the closest analogy was Qwiki, which was sort of inspired by the Star Trek voice interface where the computer would tell you about things on request. It was a hot startup, something people were watching closely. And then when people actually got to use it, turned out nobody cared.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  The key thing is that most people are obsessed with get rich quick, as long as you're first and you're fast you can make your money, damn the consequences.