4 ms·

I am more optimistic here. While LLMs allow you to produce tons of garbage, they also provide the tools to filter through that garbage, something we didn't have

I am more optimistic here. While LLMs allow you to produce tons of garbage, they also provide the tools to filter through that garbage, something we didn't have before. LLMs allow us to view content in a way that we decided, not the content creator. That's extremely powerful and lets us sidesteps a lot of the old methods used to manipulate us. The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world.

pmoriarty 3y ago
> overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world There's going to be a progressive de-skilling and dumbing down of humans, as AI's and robots do and think more and more for them.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  It’s already happening at scale, people are already deciding there’s no point to continue education unless required.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Aren't people going further in education now than ever before?
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Going further in schooling maybe, but getting degrees nowadays is usually not primarily for personal enlightenment. Nor does it usually make people any more intelligent, in fact there may be an inverse correlation...
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      Bachelors degrees have mostly been a signal for a long time. The problem is that we have credential inflation, so now you need a masters or phd to send that same signal to employers. As a result, you have fewer people going to college, but a greater percentage of people who go to college are getting advanced degrees.
frozenwind 3y ago
> The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world. You've underlined the major risk these LLMs are for humanity. For a brief time in the history of human race, after information was democratized, most of us (at least educated people) had to use our own critical faculties to understand the world we live in. Now, that capacity will be outsourced to custom LLMs, most of them derived from other pre-trained with some ideological biases built-in. The informational Dark Ages of the technological era. If they provide the tools to filter through the garbage, it'll probably be standardized in some way as an interface to the web. So just as HTML and its satellite technologies limit and standardize the representational aspect of information on the web, I think this AI-interface will severely limit the knowledge/wisdom aspect you can derive from information on the web. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, I hope you can understand what I'm saying.
- tough 3y ago
  I see LLM's as the new UX layer, mobile was it for a while after mouses/keyboards. Since LLM's work mostly with text, I see how a downgrade in the interaction medium can become a downgrade in the information outputs. The thing is, lets hope the current web doesn't totally disappears/obliterates. HN will still be HN LLM's or not, shitty comments are shitty however they get produced.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    Reflexively then, good comments are good, no matter what produced them. Or is a quality comment impugned by knowing it came from an LLM? Does it cheapen what it means to be human if other humans think highly of an LLMs attempts at English? Is it at all impressive that ChatGPT is able to spell words correctly, given that it's a computer? What does that mean for the spelling bee industry?
levesque 3y ago
Predicting whether a text was written by a LLM or not is not trivial. What was the latest number by OpenAI? 30%? As LLMs get better, it seems like we won't be able to distinguish real text from fake text. Your LLM will be able to summarize it, but it will still be 99% spam.
- grumbel 3y ago
  You don't need to predict if it what written by LLM, if it's a human or machine makes no difference to the validity of a text. You just need to be able to extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources. The summary that an LLM can provide is not just of one text, but of all the texts about the topic it has access to. Thus you never need to access the actual texts itself, just whatever the LLM condenses out of them.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >cross check it against other sources. The problem comes in when 99.999999% of other sources are also bullshit.
  - Sindisil 3y ago
    "just" need to "extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources". How do you determine the trustworthiness of those other sources when an ever increasing portion are also LLM generated? All the "you just need to" responses are predicted on being able to police the LLM output based upon your own expertise (e.g., much talk about code generation being like working with junior devs, and so being able to replace all your juniors and just have super productive seniors). Question: how does one become an expert? Yep, it's right there: experts are made through experience. So if LLMs replace all the low experience roles, how exactly do new experts emerge?
  - jerf 3y ago
    You're trusting the LLM a lot more than you should. It's entirely possible to skew those too. (Even ignoring the philosophical question of what an "unskewed" LLM would even be.) I'm actually impressed by OpenAI's efforts to do so. I also deplore them and think it's an atrocity, but I'm still impressed. The "As an AI language model" bit is just the obvious way they're skewed. I wouldn't trust an LLM any farther than I can throw it to accurately summarize anything important.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Nothing new under the sun. The king, the church, the state, the media, etc. there has always been gatekeepers who decide what the populace sees. Just look at the second largest economy in the world where truth hasn’t existed for decades
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
LLMs check the answers? How do they check the answers? By what appears most frequently in the training corpus - that's the "answer". So, how well curated are the texts that make up the training corpus? Is it just what's generally available on the internet? How much do you think that text accurately reflects reality? "Truth is determined by the most frequent posters" seems like really bad epistemology.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
LLMs don’t know what garbage is or is not, depends on what they are trained on.

pmoriarty 3y ago

> overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world There's going to be a progressive de-skilling and dumbing down of humans, as AI's and robots do and think more and more for them.

ChatGTP 3y ago
It’s already happening at scale, people are already deciding there’s no point to continue education unless required.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Aren't people going further in education now than ever before?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Going further in schooling maybe, but getting degrees nowadays is usually not primarily for personal enlightenment. Nor does it usually make people any more intelligent, in fact there may be an inverse correlation...
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Bachelors degrees have mostly been a signal for a long time. The problem is that we have credential inflation, so now you need a masters or phd to send that same signal to employers. As a result, you have fewer people going to college, but a greater percentage of people who go to college are getting advanced degrees.

frozenwind 3y ago

> The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world. You've underlined the major risk these LLMs are for humanity. For a brief time in the history of human race, after information was democratized, most of us (at least educated people) had to use our own critical faculties to understand the world we live in. Now, that capacity will be outsourced to custom LLMs, most of them derived from other pre-trained with some ideological biases built-in. The informational Dark Ages of the technological era. If they provide the tools to filter through the garbage, it'll probably be standardized in some way as an interface to the web. So just as HTML and its satellite technologies limit and standardize the representational aspect of information on the web, I think this AI-interface will severely limit the knowledge/wisdom aspect you can derive from information on the web. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, I hope you can understand what I'm saying.

tough 3y ago
I see LLM's as the new UX layer, mobile was it for a while after mouses/keyboards. Since LLM's work mostly with text, I see how a downgrade in the interaction medium can become a downgrade in the information outputs. The thing is, lets hope the current web doesn't totally disappears/obliterates. HN will still be HN LLM's or not, shitty comments are shitty however they get produced.
- zamnos 3y ago
  Reflexively then, good comments are good, no matter what produced them. Or is a quality comment impugned by knowing it came from an LLM? Does it cheapen what it means to be human if other humans think highly of an LLMs attempts at English? Is it at all impressive that ChatGPT is able to spell words correctly, given that it's a computer? What does that mean for the spelling bee industry?

levesque 3y ago

Predicting whether a text was written by a LLM or not is not trivial. What was the latest number by OpenAI? 30%? As LLMs get better, it seems like we won't be able to distinguish real text from fake text. Your LLM will be able to summarize it, but it will still be 99% spam.

grumbel 3y ago
You don't need to predict if it what written by LLM, if it's a human or machine makes no difference to the validity of a text. You just need to be able to extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources. The summary that an LLM can provide is not just of one text, but of all the texts about the topic it has access to. Thus you never need to access the actual texts itself, just whatever the LLM condenses out of them.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >cross check it against other sources. The problem comes in when 99.999999% of other sources are also bullshit.
- Sindisil 3y ago
  "just" need to "extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources". How do you determine the trustworthiness of those other sources when an ever increasing portion are also LLM generated? All the "you just need to" responses are predicted on being able to police the LLM output based upon your own expertise (e.g., much talk about code generation being like working with junior devs, and so being able to replace all your juniors and just have super productive seniors). Question: how does one become an expert? Yep, it's right there: experts are made through experience. So if LLMs replace all the low experience roles, how exactly do new experts emerge?
- jerf 3y ago
  You're trusting the LLM a lot more than you should. It's entirely possible to skew those too. (Even ignoring the philosophical question of what an "unskewed" LLM would even be.) I'm actually impressed by OpenAI's efforts to do so. I also deplore them and think it's an atrocity, but I'm still impressed. The "As an AI language model" bit is just the obvious way they're skewed. I wouldn't trust an LLM any farther than I can throw it to accurately summarize anything important.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

Nothing new under the sun. The king, the church, the state, the media, etc. there has always been gatekeepers who decide what the populace sees. Just look at the second largest economy in the world where truth hasn’t existed for decades

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

LLMs check the answers? How do they check the answers? By what appears most frequently in the training corpus - that's the "answer". So, how well curated are the texts that make up the training corpus? Is it just what's generally available on the internet? How much do you think that text accurately reflects reality? "Truth is determined by the most frequent posters" seems like really bad epistemology.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

LLMs don’t know what garbage is or is not, depends on what they are trained on.