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Can someone please explain why there’s such a concern about the misinformation that could be generated by AI? When the human mind, and typewriter was capable of

Can someone please explain why there’s such a concern about the misinformation that could be generated by AI? When the human mind, and typewriter was capable of the same levels of misinformation for quite a bit longer. I don’t see anyone stare are a typewriter and think: “it’s great but what do we do about the false statements it might produce? Surely we need to regulate this machine and force its manufacture to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences.”

ljbc 3y ago
I can tell you my personal reasons for thinking the concern of misinformation is valid: LLMs offer a tradeoff between time to generate content and credibility. You can generate ten thousand websites worth of misinformation in a day, at the expense of having it sound rather clunky, machine-ey. Sophisticated minds won't fall for it the way they might fall for savvy, hand-crafted propaganda articles. But recent experience seems to have shown that clunky webpages with clunky content is enough to influence a critical mass of low-sophistication citizens, polarize their views, make them very angry, shut down their ability for dialog, etc. That's concern #1. Factoring in the enhancements to LLM output quality (which translates to credibility) we're likely to see in the very near future is concern #2: misinformation, mass propaganda, targeted propaganda, bogus news articles on fake websites, perhaps even crafted opinion pieces that can get through the gates and published onto legitimate news and commentary platforms, or full-blown legitimate-looking bogus news websites, all that kind of stuff will be available by the terabytes at the push of a button. No need for a bright, educated mind to sit at the typewriter, no need for an operator to even have a basic command of the target language. All of this falls in the class of willful misinformation/disinformation/propaganda; reading your comment once more makes me think you might be wondering more about accidental misinformation, is this the case? I can already put forward this much: an immature or insufficiently educated person is unable to cause kind of harm to themselves or their surroundings with a typewriter compared to what can happen when you put an LLM-powered chatbot in their hands. I've heard of, or witnessed a significant number of people in their twenties, be them students or curious-minded guys, who would use ChatGPT as an authoritative resource upon which to base their work. It blew my mind to see this whole new way for not-unintelligent people to act willfully naive, whereas the appearance of the printing press and typewriters was accompanied (mostly) by an ethos of critical thinking, an ability for autonomous questioning and doubt. And if this wasn't the case in the early stages (you might even argue we're somewhat still in this early stage given the relationship of millions of Westerners to the work of toxic fiction known as the Old and New Testaments aka the Bible), then the case for being wary of what might come out of a printing press/typewriter and being concerned about its effect on society then was a valid, warranted one. What you funnily but derisively describe as to "regulate this machine and force its manufacturers to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences" has more realistically been conceived along the lines of: "we need to establish a basic hierarchy of knowledge, as well as a solid epistemological foundation accessible to people at large, a caste of authority figures / educators (clergy, professors) to guide young minds into this new realm of textual abundance, cultural guardrails against the really toxic stuff that might come about, etc."

ljbc 3y ago

I can tell you my personal reasons for thinking the concern of misinformation is valid: LLMs offer a tradeoff between time to generate content and credibility. You can generate ten thousand websites worth of misinformation in a day, at the expense of having it sound rather clunky, machine-ey. Sophisticated minds won't fall for it the way they might fall for savvy, hand-crafted propaganda articles. But recent experience seems to have shown that clunky webpages with clunky content is enough to influence a critical mass of low-sophistication citizens, polarize their views, make them very angry, shut down their ability for dialog, etc. That's concern #1. Factoring in the enhancements to LLM output quality (which translates to credibility) we're likely to see in the very near future is concern #2: misinformation, mass propaganda, targeted propaganda, bogus news articles on fake websites, perhaps even crafted opinion pieces that can get through the gates and published onto legitimate news and commentary platforms, or full-blown legitimate-looking bogus news websites, all that kind of stuff will be available by the terabytes at the push of a button. No need for a bright, educated mind to sit at the typewriter, no need for an operator to even have a basic command of the target language. All of this falls in the class of willful misinformation/disinformation/propaganda; reading your comment once more makes me think you might be wondering more about accidental misinformation, is this the case? I can already put forward this much: an immature or insufficiently educated person is unable to cause kind of harm to themselves or their surroundings with a typewriter compared to what can happen when you put an LLM-powered chatbot in their hands. I've heard of, or witnessed a significant number of people in their twenties, be them students or curious-minded guys, who would use ChatGPT as an authoritative resource upon which to base their work. It blew my mind to see this whole new way for not-unintelligent people to act willfully naive, whereas the appearance of the printing press and typewriters was accompanied (mostly) by an ethos of critical thinking, an ability for autonomous questioning and doubt. And if this wasn't the case in the early stages (you might even argue we're somewhat still in this early stage given the relationship of millions of Westerners to the work of toxic fiction known as the Old and New Testaments aka the Bible), then the case for being wary of what might come out of a printing press/typewriter and being concerned about its effect on society then was a valid, warranted one. What you funnily but derisively describe as to "regulate this machine and force its manufacturers to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences" has more realistically been conceived along the lines of: "we need to establish a basic hierarchy of knowledge, as well as a solid epistemological foundation accessible to people at large, a caste of authority figures / educators (clergy, professors) to guide young minds into this new realm of textual abundance, cultural guardrails against the really toxic stuff that might come about, etc."