8 ms·

While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass

While not exactly the same, the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church. With the printing press, people could mass produce and spread information relatively easily. I'm sure a lot of it was considered "low quality" (also heretical)[1]. Seems like we're going through similar growing pains now. Yes I know it's different, but it rhymes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

dougmwne 3y ago
I really dislike the comparison. The printing press democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal. And the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output. I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people and the LLM is the death.
- vosper 3y ago
  > The printing press democratized knowledge That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland. (Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - b112 3y ago
    I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.
    - mmcdermott 3y ago
      Henry VIII created the Church of England in 1534 for the purposes of granting himself an annulment. Most histories count Martin Luther's 95 Theses as beginning of the Reformation in 1517 (a crisp date for a less-than-crisp event; Luther did not originally see himself as protesting the Roman Catholic Church). The Protestant Reformation was a heterogeneous movement from the beginning.
    - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
      Not really, no. It was Luther who kick-started Protestantism. Henry VIII attempted to supplant the Pope, and kind of slid into Protestantism by accident.
    - vladms 3y ago
      That was the case just for the anglican church, which is only one "part" of the reformation.
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      Protestantism started in Germany with Martin Luther nailing his theses to a church door. Henry's reproductive problems came later and where only sort of related.
  - gnarbarian 3y ago
    Long before that in 1054, was the East - West Schism that split the Catholic and Orthodox churches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
- peab 3y ago
  I'm reminded of the Library of Babel
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > The printing press democratized knowledge. Not for centuries. Due to the expense of the technology and the requirement in some locations for a royal patent to print books, the printing press just opened up knowledge a bit more from the Church and aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but it did little for the masses until as late as the 1800s.
  - ls612 3y ago
    A big part of this is that literacy didn’t come to the masses until the 1800s. But in England and the Netherlands you had (somewhat) free press by the late 1600s and early 1700s.
- jedberg 3y ago
  If you asked the Church back then, they would tell you that the printing press was the death of truth, because to them only the word of god was truth, and only the church could produce it. It's all just a matter of perspective. Yes, right now it looks like white noise, just like back then it looked like white noise which could drown out the religious texts. But we managed to get past it then and I'm sure we'll manage now.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    I'd argue that giving a group with unique thoughts and ideas a voice is different than creating a noise machine.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      I think the jury is still out on whether an LLM produces ideas any more or less unique than most humans. :)
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    This is an astoundingly bad take. Surely you aren't trying to suggest that original, factual, human-authored content has no more inherent value than randomly generated nonsense?
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      The discussion here is that we're not able to distinguish them. If we cannot distinguish, I'd argue they have similar value. They must have. Otherwise, how can we demonstrate objectively the higher value in the human output?
      - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        If they were of similar value would there be a problem with the deluge?
        3y ago
- Supply5411 3y ago
  You could argue that speech is literally noise that drowns out the signals of your environment. If you just babbled, it would be useless, but instead you use it intelligently to communicate ideas. LLM output is a new palette with which humans can compose new signals. We just have to use it intelligently. Prompt engineering is an example of this. A clever prompt by a domain expert can prime an LLM interaction to yield better information to the recipient in a way that the recipient themselves could not have produced on their own.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  I really feel like you can't have used any advanced LLMs if you legitimately think the out put "perfect white noise". The results that you can get from an LLM like GPT-4 are incredibly useful and are providing an enormous amount of value to lots of people. It isn't just for generating phony information to spread or having it do your work for you. I get the most value out of asking for examples of things or asking for basic explanations or intuitions about things. And I get so much value from this that I really think the printing press is the most apt comparison.
  - softg 3y ago
    The problem is advanced LLMs are controlled by large corporations. Powerful local models exist (in part thanks to Meta's generosity oddly enough) and they're close to GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is far ahead of them and by the time other models reach to that point whatever OpenAI or Antropic, Meta etc. have developed behind closed doors could be significantly better. In that case open models will be restricted to niche uses and most people will use the latest model from a giant corp. So it is possible that LLMs will centralize the production and dissemination of knowledge, which is the opposite of what people think the printing press did. I hope I'm wrong and open models can challenge/overtake state of the art models developed by tech giants, that would be amazing.
    - courseofaction 3y ago
      Precisely. I spent weeks learning about cybersecurity when GPT-4 first came out, as I could finally ask as many stupid questions as I liked, get detailed examples and use-cases for different attacks and defenses, and generally actually learn how the internet around me works. Now it refuses, because OpenAI's morals apparently don't include spreading openly available knowledge about how to defend yourself. Scary. I have also been using it to generate useful political critiques (given a particular theoretical tradition, some style notes, and specific articles to critique, it's actually excitingly good). What if OpenAI decides that's a threat? What reason do we have to think that a powerful institution would not take this course of action, in the cold light of history?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pacman2 3y ago
  I was told publishers dont promote a good book anymore these days. They ask how many instagram followers do you have? Maybe the self-publishing and BoD will decline in the long term due to ML white noise and publishers are a sign of quality again.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  > the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output Doesn't that make human content look bad in the first place? If we can't distinguish a Python book written by a human engineer or by ChatGPT, how can we demonstrate objectively that the machine-generated one is so much worse?
  - Nashooo 3y ago
    The problem is not that no one can distinguish it. It's that the intended audience (beginners in Python in your example) can't distinguish it and are not able to easily find and learn from trusted sources.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      Aren't there already bad Python books written by humans? I bet ChatGPT can come up with above-average content to teach Python. We should teach beginners how to prompt engineer in the context of tech learning. I bet it's going to yield better results than gate-keeping book publishing.
      - rmbyrro 3y ago
        Another great contribution would be fine-tuning open source LLMs on less popular tech. I've seen ChatGPT struggling with htmx, for example (I presume the training dataset was small?), whereas it performs really well teaching React (huge training set, I presume)
      - nneonneo 3y ago
        There are, but it used to take actual time and effort to produce a book (good or bad), meaning that the small pool of experts in the world could help distinguish good from bad. Now that it’s possible to produce mediocrity at scale, that process breaks down. How is a beginner supposed to know whether the tutorial they’re reading is a legitimate tutorial that uses best practices, or an AI-generated tutorial that mashes together various bits of advice from whatever’s on the internet?
- courseofaction 3y ago
  The LLM does democratize knowledge, but you have to be the user of the LLM, not the target of the user of the LLM. The LLM is the most powerful knowledge tool ever to exist. It is both a librarian in your pocket. It is an expert in everything, it has read everything, and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable topic. Yes it has no concept of human value and the current generation hallucinates and/or is often wrong, but the responsibility for the output should be the user's, not the LLM's. Do not let these tools be owned, crushed and controlled by the same people who are driving us towards WW3 and cooking the planet for cash. This is the most powerful knowledge tool ever. Democratize it.
  - ForHackernews 3y ago
    > and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable topic Yeah, I mean, so can I, as long as you don't care whether the answers you receive are accurate or not. The LLM is just better at pretending it knows quantum mechanics than I am.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      Even if a human expert responds about something in their domain of expertise, you have to think critically about the answer. Something that fails 1% of the time is often more dangerous than something that fails 10% of the time. The best way to use an LLM for learning is to ask a question, assume it's getting things wrong, and use that to probe your knowledge which you can iteratively use to prove the LLM's knowledge. Human experts don't put up with that and are a much more limited resource.
  - halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
    > but the responsibility for the output is the user's, not the LLM's. The current iteration of the internet (more specifically social media) has used the same rationality for its existence but at a level, society has proven itself too irresponsible and/or lazy to think for itself but be fed by the machine. What makes you think LLMs are going to do anything but make the situation worse? If anything, they’re going to reenforce whatever biases were baked into the training material, of which is now legally dubious.
- woah 3y ago
  It used to be that a scribe would painstakingly copy a manuscript, through the process absorbing the text at a deep level. This same scribe could then apply this knowledge to his own writing, or just understand and curate existing work. The manual labor required to copy at scale employed many scribes, who formed the next generation of thinkers. With the press, a greasy workman can churn out hundreds of copies an hour, for whichever charlatan or heretic palms him enough coin. The people are flooded with falsehoods by men whose only interest in writing is how many words they can fit on a page, and where to buy the cheapest ink. The worst part is that it is impossible to distinguish the work of a real thinker from that of a cheap sophist, since they are all printed on the same rough paper, and serve equally well as tomorrow's kindling.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Where are the good AI-generated books that serve as the positive side of this development?
- ben_w 3y ago
  > LLM output is perfect white noise. Not even close to white noise. White noise, in the context of the token space, looks like this: auceverts exceptionthreat."<ablytypedicensYYY DominicGT portaelight\- titular Sebast Yellowstone.currentThreadrition-zoneocalyptic which is literally the result of "I downloaded the list of tokens and asked ChatGPT to make a python script to concatenate 20 random ones". No, the biggest problem with LLMs is that the best of them are simultaneously better than untrained humans and yet also nowhere near as good as trained humans — someone, don't remember who, described them as "mansplaining as a service", which I like, especially as it (sometimes) reminds me to be humble when expressing an opinion outside my domain of expertise, as it knows more than I do about everything I'm not already an expert at. Specific example: I'm currently trying to use ChatGPT-3.5 to help me understand group theory, because the brilliant.org lessons on that are insufficient; unfortunately, while it knows infinitely more than I do about the subject, it is still so bad it might as well be guessing the multiple choice answers (if I let it, which I don't because that would be missing the point of using a MOOC like brilliant.org in the first place).
- mrighele 3y ago
  > Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. That's because they are trying very hard not to check what they are selling, hoping that their own users and a few ML algorithms can separate the signal from the noise for them. It seems to me that the approach is no longer working, and they should start doing it by themselves.
- __loam 3y ago
  People comparing the AI bullshit spigot to the printing press are clowns.
BarryMilo 3y ago
You're implying that what is being produced has actual value, the problem is they're acting in patently bad faith. Weep not for the spammers.
gamepsys 3y ago
The rhyme has a lot to do with how existing power structures handle a sudden increase in the amount of written text generated. In this comparison, they both try to apply the breaks. Banned books didn't work well for the Catholic Church. I think increasing QA for Amazon might actually help their book business. Of course, a book seller has a greater responsibility to society than to make money.
Barrin92 3y ago
>similar growing pains For what it's worth, these 'growing pains' took the form of the wars of religion in Europe, which in Germany killed up to 30% of the population, that's in relative terms significantly worse than the casualties of World War I and II. So maybe the Catholic Church had a point
- lovemenot 3y ago
  >> So maybe the Catholic Church had a point Is that really the take-away? If the Catholic Church had not been so belligerent, those wars would not have been needed. Now that we are past that time, we should surely be thanking those combatants who helped disseminate knowledge in spite of the Church whose interest was in hoarding it.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    I think that's a pretty bad reading of history frankly. The Church didn't hoard knowledge, in fact they were arguably the primary preservers of knowledge and disseminator of it, through the monastic tradition in Medieval Europe. Many thousands of which were destroyed during the religious wars, which is a common theme as far sectarian wars go. They are first and foremost destroyers of knowledge. More importantly I certainly wouldn't want to live through that period for any reason, and much less repeat it. If an ordinary printing press caused that much chaos I'm not sure I want to figure out what one on steroids is going to do
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum The example is from the sixteenth century, but the printing press is from the seventh century. I don't think the Catholic Church bothered to take any notice at all?
langsoul-com 3y ago
The incentive system is completely different. The new AI generated content is for a quick buck, just spamming out content because $1 x 10,000 is a lot. If it was written with the aid of AI, that's different. At least someone tried to make something good and just used avalible tools to enhance the quality.

dougmwne 3y ago

I really dislike the comparison. The printing press democratized knowledge. The LLM destroys it. LLM output is perfect white noise. Enough of it will drown out all signal. And the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output. I mean think about it. Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. The printing press was the birth of knowledge for the people and the LLM is the death.

vosper 3y ago
> The printing press democratized knowledge That's true, but it also allowed protestant "heretics" to propagate an idea that caused a permanent schism with the Catholic church, which led to centuries of wars that killed who-knows-how-many people, up to recent times with Northern Ireland. (Or something like that, my history's fuzzy, but I think that's generally right?)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 3y ago
  I thought it was a king wanting a divorce, and as he couldn't get it from the catholic church, created his own.
  - mmcdermott 3y ago
    Henry VIII created the Church of England in 1534 for the purposes of granting himself an annulment. Most histories count Martin Luther's 95 Theses as beginning of the Reformation in 1517 (a crisp date for a less-than-crisp event; Luther did not originally see himself as protesting the Roman Catholic Church). The Protestant Reformation was a heterogeneous movement from the beginning.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    Not really, no. It was Luther who kick-started Protestantism. Henry VIII attempted to supplant the Pope, and kind of slid into Protestantism by accident.
  - vladms 3y ago
    That was the case just for the anglican church, which is only one "part" of the reformation.
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    Protestantism started in Germany with Martin Luther nailing his theses to a church door. Henry's reproductive problems came later and where only sort of related.
- gnarbarian 3y ago
  Long before that in 1054, was the East - West Schism that split the Catholic and Orthodox churches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
peab 3y ago
I'm reminded of the Library of Babel
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> The printing press democratized knowledge. Not for centuries. Due to the expense of the technology and the requirement in some locations for a royal patent to print books, the printing press just opened up knowledge a bit more from the Church and aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but it did little for the masses until as late as the 1800s.
- ls612 3y ago
  A big part of this is that literacy didn’t come to the masses until the 1800s. But in England and the Netherlands you had (somewhat) free press by the late 1600s and early 1700s.
jedberg 3y ago
If you asked the Church back then, they would tell you that the printing press was the death of truth, because to them only the word of god was truth, and only the church could produce it. It's all just a matter of perspective. Yes, right now it looks like white noise, just like back then it looked like white noise which could drown out the religious texts. But we managed to get past it then and I'm sure we'll manage now.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I'd argue that giving a group with unique thoughts and ideas a voice is different than creating a noise machine.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    I think the jury is still out on whether an LLM produces ideas any more or less unique than most humans. :)
- duskwuff 3y ago
  This is an astoundingly bad take. Surely you aren't trying to suggest that original, factual, human-authored content has no more inherent value than randomly generated nonsense?
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    The discussion here is that we're not able to distinguish them. If we cannot distinguish, I'd argue they have similar value. They must have. Otherwise, how can we demonstrate objectively the higher value in the human output?
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      If they were of similar value would there be a problem with the deluge?
      - 3y ago
Supply5411 3y ago
You could argue that speech is literally noise that drowns out the signals of your environment. If you just babbled, it would be useless, but instead you use it intelligently to communicate ideas. LLM output is a new palette with which humans can compose new signals. We just have to use it intelligently. Prompt engineering is an example of this. A clever prompt by a domain expert can prime an LLM interaction to yield better information to the recipient in a way that the recipient themselves could not have produced on their own.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rockemsockem 3y ago
I really feel like you can't have used any advanced LLMs if you legitimately think the out put "perfect white noise". The results that you can get from an LLM like GPT-4 are incredibly useful and are providing an enormous amount of value to lots of people. It isn't just for generating phony information to spread or having it do your work for you. I get the most value out of asking for examples of things or asking for basic explanations or intuitions about things. And I get so much value from this that I really think the printing press is the most apt comparison.
- softg 3y ago
  The problem is advanced LLMs are controlled by large corporations. Powerful local models exist (in part thanks to Meta's generosity oddly enough) and they're close to GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is far ahead of them and by the time other models reach to that point whatever OpenAI or Antropic, Meta etc. have developed behind closed doors could be significantly better. In that case open models will be restricted to niche uses and most people will use the latest model from a giant corp. So it is possible that LLMs will centralize the production and dissemination of knowledge, which is the opposite of what people think the printing press did. I hope I'm wrong and open models can challenge/overtake state of the art models developed by tech giants, that would be amazing.
  - courseofaction 3y ago
    Precisely. I spent weeks learning about cybersecurity when GPT-4 first came out, as I could finally ask as many stupid questions as I liked, get detailed examples and use-cases for different attacks and defenses, and generally actually learn how the internet around me works. Now it refuses, because OpenAI's morals apparently don't include spreading openly available knowledge about how to defend yourself. Scary. I have also been using it to generate useful political critiques (given a particular theoretical tradition, some style notes, and specific articles to critique, it's actually excitingly good). What if OpenAI decides that's a threat? What reason do we have to think that a powerful institution would not take this course of action, in the cold light of history?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pacman2 3y ago
I was told publishers dont promote a good book anymore these days. They ask how many instagram followers do you have? Maybe the self-publishing and BoD will decline in the long term due to ML white noise and publishers are a sign of quality again.
rmbyrro 3y ago
> the worst part is that it’s impossible to distinguish it from real human output Doesn't that make human content look bad in the first place? If we can't distinguish a Python book written by a human engineer or by ChatGPT, how can we demonstrate objectively that the machine-generated one is so much worse?
- Nashooo 3y ago
  The problem is not that no one can distinguish it. It's that the intended audience (beginners in Python in your example) can't distinguish it and are not able to easily find and learn from trusted sources.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    Aren't there already bad Python books written by humans? I bet ChatGPT can come up with above-average content to teach Python. We should teach beginners how to prompt engineer in the context of tech learning. I bet it's going to yield better results than gate-keeping book publishing.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      Another great contribution would be fine-tuning open source LLMs on less popular tech. I've seen ChatGPT struggling with htmx, for example (I presume the training dataset was small?), whereas it performs really well teaching React (huge training set, I presume)
    - nneonneo 3y ago
      There are, but it used to take actual time and effort to produce a book (good or bad), meaning that the small pool of experts in the world could help distinguish good from bad. Now that it’s possible to produce mediocrity at scale, that process breaks down. How is a beginner supposed to know whether the tutorial they’re reading is a legitimate tutorial that uses best practices, or an AI-generated tutorial that mashes together various bits of advice from whatever’s on the internet?
courseofaction 3y ago
The LLM does democratize knowledge, but you have to be the user of the LLM, not the target of the user of the LLM. The LLM is the most powerful knowledge tool ever to exist. It is both a librarian in your pocket. It is an expert in everything, it has read everything, and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable topic. Yes it has no concept of human value and the current generation hallucinates and/or is often wrong, but the responsibility for the output should be the user's, not the LLM's. Do not let these tools be owned, crushed and controlled by the same people who are driving us towards WW3 and cooking the planet for cash. This is the most powerful knowledge tool ever. Democratize it.
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  > and can answer your specific questions on any conceivable topic Yeah, I mean, so can I, as long as you don't care whether the answers you receive are accurate or not. The LLM is just better at pretending it knows quantum mechanics than I am.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Even if a human expert responds about something in their domain of expertise, you have to think critically about the answer. Something that fails 1% of the time is often more dangerous than something that fails 10% of the time. The best way to use an LLM for learning is to ask a question, assume it's getting things wrong, and use that to probe your knowledge which you can iteratively use to prove the LLM's knowledge. Human experts don't put up with that and are a much more limited resource.
- halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
  > but the responsibility for the output is the user's, not the LLM's. The current iteration of the internet (more specifically social media) has used the same rationality for its existence but at a level, society has proven itself too irresponsible and/or lazy to think for itself but be fed by the machine. What makes you think LLMs are going to do anything but make the situation worse? If anything, they’re going to reenforce whatever biases were baked into the training material, of which is now legally dubious.
woah 3y ago
It used to be that a scribe would painstakingly copy a manuscript, through the process absorbing the text at a deep level. This same scribe could then apply this knowledge to his own writing, or just understand and curate existing work. The manual labor required to copy at scale employed many scribes, who formed the next generation of thinkers. With the press, a greasy workman can churn out hundreds of copies an hour, for whichever charlatan or heretic palms him enough coin. The people are flooded with falsehoods by men whose only interest in writing is how many words they can fit on a page, and where to buy the cheapest ink. The worst part is that it is impossible to distinguish the work of a real thinker from that of a cheap sophist, since they are all printed on the same rough paper, and serve equally well as tomorrow's kindling.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Where are the good AI-generated books that serve as the positive side of this development?
ben_w 3y ago
> LLM output is perfect white noise. Not even close to white noise. White noise, in the context of the token space, looks like this: auceverts exceptionthreat."<ablytypedicensYYY DominicGT portaelight\- titular Sebast Yellowstone.currentThreadrition-zoneocalyptic which is literally the result of "I downloaded the list of tokens and asked ChatGPT to make a python script to concatenate 20 random ones". No, the biggest problem with LLMs is that the best of them are simultaneously better than untrained humans and yet also nowhere near as good as trained humans — someone, don't remember who, described them as "mansplaining as a service", which I like, especially as it (sometimes) reminds me to be humble when expressing an opinion outside my domain of expertise, as it knows more than I do about everything I'm not already an expert at. Specific example: I'm currently trying to use ChatGPT-3.5 to help me understand group theory, because the brilliant.org lessons on that are insufficient; unfortunately, while it knows infinitely more than I do about the subject, it is still so bad it might as well be guessing the multiple choice answers (if I let it, which I don't because that would be missing the point of using a MOOC like brilliant.org in the first place).
mrighele 3y ago
> Amazon had to stop publishing BOOKS because it can no longer separate the signal from the noise. That's because they are trying very hard not to check what they are selling, hoping that their own users and a few ML algorithms can separate the signal from the noise for them. It seems to me that the approach is no longer working, and they should start doing it by themselves.
__loam 3y ago
People comparing the AI bullshit spigot to the printing press are clowns.

BarryMilo 3y ago

You're implying that what is being produced has actual value, the problem is they're acting in patently bad faith. Weep not for the spammers.

gamepsys 3y ago

The rhyme has a lot to do with how existing power structures handle a sudden increase in the amount of written text generated. In this comparison, they both try to apply the breaks. Banned books didn't work well for the Catholic Church. I think increasing QA for Amazon might actually help their book business. Of course, a book seller has a greater responsibility to society than to make money.

Barrin92 3y ago

>similar growing pains For what it's worth, these 'growing pains' took the form of the wars of religion in Europe, which in Germany killed up to 30% of the population, that's in relative terms significantly worse than the casualties of World War I and II. So maybe the Catholic Church had a point

lovemenot 3y ago
>> So maybe the Catholic Church had a point Is that really the take-away? If the Catholic Church had not been so belligerent, those wars would not have been needed. Now that we are past that time, we should surely be thanking those combatants who helped disseminate knowledge in spite of the Church whose interest was in hoarding it.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  I think that's a pretty bad reading of history frankly. The Church didn't hoard knowledge, in fact they were arguably the primary preservers of knowledge and disseminator of it, through the monastic tradition in Medieval Europe. Many thousands of which were destroyed during the religious wars, which is a common theme as far sectarian wars go. They are first and foremost destroyers of knowledge. More importantly I certainly wouldn't want to live through that period for any reason, and much less repeat it. If an ordinary printing press caused that much chaos I'm not sure I want to figure out what one on steroids is going to do

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> the invention of the printing press caused a lot of controversy with the Catholic Church > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum The example is from the sixteenth century, but the printing press is from the seventh century. I don't think the Catholic Church bothered to take any notice at all?

langsoul-com 3y ago

The incentive system is completely different. The new AI generated content is for a quick buck, just spamming out content because $1 x 10,000 is a lot. If it was written with the aid of AI, that's different. At least someone tried to make something good and just used avalible tools to enhance the quality.