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AI is just a tool, but holy shit is it a tool. I dream of the day we can build LLM-based "Bullshit Detectors", which are open-source and we have pretty good te

AI is just a tool, but holy shit is it a tool. I dream of the day we can build LLM-based "Bullshit Detectors", which are open-source and we have pretty good test suites on to understand their biases. We run these bullshit detectors over speech, and it gives us a score: Is this an objective statement of fact, or is someone spinning bullshit? The powers that be must quake in their boots of that kind of intellect being available to the general population. They'd be fucked. There would not be enough fools left. Yeah, see if you can sell the general population on horrific policing, economic, social, educational, etc. policies when anyone can turn to "Hey <bullshit detector>, is the governor making good decisions with my tax money, or is this new policy bullshit?" These LLMs are tools that will be able to identify, for example, regulatory capture, trivially. It will provide unbiased (or consistently and testably biased) cost-benefit analyses of projects which exclude influence and corruption. It will lay bare gerrymandering. It will actually be able to read an entire bill and give detailed commentary on its effects and outcomes before it's passed. In minutes. Widely available, trustworthy LLMs will change the world. We should work hard to make them happen.

cutemonster 3y ago
Yes that's a dream (In real life, the dictators will just use such LLM:s as workbenches to make their manipulation AIs better. They're drooling rather than quaking)
- courseofaction 3y ago
  I agree. Unfortunately, the body is ultimately the vessel of ideas, and can be crushed. But we currently have enough democratic institutions in influential nations that populations can use new knowledge tools for themselves, and their decisions will directly influence policymaking through elections. The mechanisms are in place. Despotism (arguably) doesn't currently have the upper hand in the world, let's keep it that way.
nologic01 3y ago
You maybe overestimating what LLM's can do. They are grammatically and syntactically correct mirrors of the corpus they have been trained on. Nothing more. No unbiased representation of ground truth. No logical inference beyond what is embedded in token relations. What you want is already there in a protean form. Its called Wikipedia.

cutemonster 3y ago

Yes that's a dream (In real life, the dictators will just use such LLM:s as workbenches to make their manipulation AIs better. They're drooling rather than quaking)

courseofaction 3y ago
I agree. Unfortunately, the body is ultimately the vessel of ideas, and can be crushed. But we currently have enough democratic institutions in influential nations that populations can use new knowledge tools for themselves, and their decisions will directly influence policymaking through elections. The mechanisms are in place. Despotism (arguably) doesn't currently have the upper hand in the world, let's keep it that way.

nologic01 3y ago

You maybe overestimating what LLM's can do. They are grammatically and syntactically correct mirrors of the corpus they have been trained on. Nothing more. No unbiased representation of ground truth. No logical inference beyond what is embedded in token relations. What you want is already there in a protean form. Its called Wikipedia.