8 ms·

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contamin

I wonder if there will be a human information/knowledge equivalent of low-background steel (pre-WWII/nukes). Data from before a certain point won't be 'contaminated' with LLM stuff, but it'll be everywhere after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

DayDollar 3y ago
There will be a web of trust, with a valuation of nodes by trustworthyness. And people will get only one id for this. Ones name is ones value and a reputation will be a hard earned thing again.
- ratg13 3y ago
  This was how the "internet" functions in the book "Ender's Game". There is a small sub-plot about how he had to give a fake persona credibility on the untrusted network in order to be able to leverage a creating a fake account on the trusted network.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    I find the xkcd interpretation more realistic: <https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/> Explained: <https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_Demosthenes https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De...>
    - notahacker 3y ago
      I love that interpretation, but in today's retweet driven world of politically commentary, I actually find it quite plausible that pseudonymous kids with no grasp of the real world who think rational political debate is the nonsensical slogans they're spouting on the internet become major Twitter influencers that actual politicians want to court for their "authenticity" and "willingness to say the unsayable", and maybe their dank memes.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        The conceit of Ender's Game was that thoughtful discourse would be influential online. Reality has largely demonstrated that far more thoughtless propaganda of the Big Lie, Firehose of Bullshit (or Falsehood), associated with Russia, floods of irrelevance which tend to bury more significant stories, favoured by China, and outrage / hot-button topics, which are common in US-centric media, though a timeless technique. Memes and simple messages attract attention and spread. Complex narratives and analyses ... not so much. But yes, voices that deserve no attention whatsover have dominated the media landscape of the past decade or so. Not that this is entirely novel.
    - acover 3y ago
      Good and unlikely predictions can thrust you into popularity: see deepfuckingvalue.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Isn't this how it has been since the dawn of time?
- thenickdude 3y ago
  Will you join my Webring?
- grotorea 3y ago
  Not disagreeing, but that's the end of anonymity. But yeah, maybe the idea that you can even 1% trust random content on the Internet without having a source doesn't really make sense if you think about it IMHO. Either you do this web of trust, coming from a well know real world source, or be Wikipedia-like with linked reliable sources for the viewer to check. By the way, wasn't this how Google ranked pages back in the day? Ranking pages that get linked to higher? And even before that there were P2P web rings.
RandomWorker 3y ago
My sense is to avoid this have a personal blog. That being said how many people write blogs with grammerly or chatgpt these days. The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. My sense is that you use this technology you might be happy with the results at first but on later review you just notice something off in some sentences and maybe it just doesn’t flow right. I’m not convinced that it will replace writers jobs yet. Especially when you want to create something authentic and unique.
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  Sometimes the value is specifically because my voice won't come through. When I'm stressed and being asked for unreasonable things at work, I know that I tend toward passive aggression. But professionally, that isn't the way I want my message to come across. I use ChatGPT all the time to suggest how I could make sure something isn't passive aggressive. It'll point out parts that aggression and suggested changes. It can be for a short slack message, or a many paragraph message.
- tredre3 3y ago
  > The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. I don't know about that. I have played with ChatGPT/Copilot/etc enough to know what they're capable of doing. But the thing is, I enjoy programming. I enjoy breaking down a problem and solving it with code. I enjoy crafting elegant code. So I don't use AI even though I'm fully aware it could save me hours on projects. Why? Because I enjoy those hours very much. Why am I telling you all this? Because I suspect many writers are the same and personal blogs are their canvas. They enjoy communicating. They enjoy crafting articles. They might have AI proof-read them, but they won't let them write everything. So, to me, there is hope that personal blogs will maintain their human element, as opposed to news websites or tabloids or learning platforms.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Agree. I've never even looked at any of these AI tools. I enjoy the process and the challenge of programming, and the rewards of doing it well. I have no desire for someone or something else to write code for me.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
There's the branch of philosophy called epistemology.
BitwiseFool 3y ago
Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate. At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine. Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      ~/name at an edu is pretty attainable. .edu domains can be had for any otherwise eligible "U.S.-based postsecondary institutions" per Educause: <https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm> Pages at extant domains might variously be available to undergraduate or graduate students, faculty, staff, and adjuncts. Those might either directly host emulative material or be convinced or compromised into hosting content. If there's one thing that the Internet's history to date has proved, its that perverse incentives lead to perverse consequences.
      - l33t7332273 3y ago
        It is not easy for a regular person to obtain access to a .edu webpage.
ryanklee 3y ago
People are vastly everestimating how unique this problem of hallucinations is. It seems to me it relies mostly on discounting just how much we've already had to deal with this same problem in humans over the millenia. The problem of proliferation of bad information might be getting worse, but this isn't native to generative AI. The entire informational ecosystem has to deal with this. GPTs compound the issue, but as far as I can tell, no where near what social media has forced us to deal with.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  The thing is when you call a human on bullshit, they usually can't back it up well enough to pass the smell test. When you call an AI on bullshit it can instantly fabricate plausible, credible seeming sources/evidence. A human's lie is different than an AI's hallucination, since it's still based on (distorting) the truth, whereas the hallucination is based on an invented reality (yes I know it's applied statistics and there's no true model of the world in there, but it can report as if there is)
  - ryanklee 3y ago
    Intelligent people can fill the void of ignorance with plausible sounding but factually incorrect information. They are apt to engage cognitive biases in such a way that the biases produce assertions that are deeply indistinquishable from factual assertions. They fool themselves in this way and they fool others. This happens all the time. LLMs are no different in this respect.
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      Sure people lie and spread misinformation (willingly or unwittingly). But coming up with plausible sounding lies take effort. LLMs on the other hand are amazing and prolific liars and can produce a lot of bullshit for a price that’s effectively free - in fact it’s cheaper to create a LLM that’s inaccurate than one that’s … less inaccurate. The truth to lie ratio on the internet is about to take a huge hit. LLMs really are a Pandora’s Box.
  - 3y ago
carlosjobim 3y ago
The shadow libraries.
robinsonb5 3y ago
I suspect in the coming years the Wayback Machine at archive.org will become ever more important - always assuming it's not lost as collateral damage in their copyright battles. Indexing that dataset and making it searchable would massively increase its value. My inner conspiracy theorist can't help wonder if the continued reduction in search usefulness isn't part of an ongoing deliberate disempowerment of everyday people - but my rational side says it's merely an unfortunate emergent behaviour of the systems we've built.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Generative Wayback Machine
  - civilitty 3y ago
    That would be the best thing ever. Just ask GPT to hallucinate an entire page based solely off the URL when it doesn’t exist in the database.
  - StableAlkyne 3y ago
    Honestly, I would love to see a LLM based plugin that would take a website, remove all the tracking garbage and filler, and just give me back a no-frills static html+CSS site that looks like it was made in 1995. "Oh, you want a guide to writing your own loss function for Tensorflow? Here's an FAQ that could have existed on comp.lang.python3.tensorflow"
    - creata 3y ago
      So you want a... reader mode plugin? How would it use an LLM beneficially?
      - zirgs 3y ago
        LLMs can write summaries of articles.
      - thewakalix 3y ago
thih9 3y ago
I wonder how we'd test for AI contamination. And would there be attempts to sell a larger data set, one that pretends to be human generated, but instead is padded with some AI content. Does this mean we'd end up with a finite set of verified human only data? Would people start going through all kinds of offline archives via AI-gapped means, trying to uncover and document new sources of human input?
Agree2468 3y ago
Right now is best time to buy encyclopedias.
- visarga 3y ago
  Why, you can dl any version of wikipedia from before 2023
dotnet00 3y ago
In some ways it already is that way. If I come across an artist I suspect is passing off AI generated stuff as their own (without using the tagging features the site has to indicate as much), an easy test is to just check if they've been posting since before ~2020. If they have, and the style has recognizable similarities, it's clear that it's honestly human made or at most blends characteristics of both together.
dongping 3y ago
Actually, that's great in my opinion. Assuming that semi-convincing misinformation spreads everywhere, people will finally have to find the original source of a certain statement, verify their "knowledge supply chain", and maybe use logic to evaluate every single statement made.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
redstonefreedom 3y ago
I've said as much as to one extra incentive (besides retrain cost) as to why openai has frozen the training period for post-2022. I think it's trying to generate as much data as possible before itself has contaminated its training set. They'll effectively have a monopoly over it; it's interestingly a rare example of "we can only do this once, then it's forever degraded". You really want a clean & discrete start.
downboots 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain But who's gonna pay for it?
bpiche 3y ago
Hey, you're internet famous now. Check out the end of this boingboing post. https://boingboing.net/2023/10/05/ai-search-chatbots-output-lies-nonsense-and-hallucinations.html https://boingboing.net/2023/10/05/ai-search-chatbots-output-...

DayDollar 3y ago

There will be a web of trust, with a valuation of nodes by trustworthyness. And people will get only one id for this. Ones name is ones value and a reputation will be a hard earned thing again.

ratg13 3y ago
This was how the "internet" functions in the book "Ender's Game". There is a small sub-plot about how he had to give a fake persona credibility on the untrusted network in order to be able to leverage a creating a fake account on the trusted network.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  I find the xkcd interpretation more realistic: <https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/> Explained: <https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_Demosthenes https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De...>
  - notahacker 3y ago
    I love that interpretation, but in today's retweet driven world of politically commentary, I actually find it quite plausible that pseudonymous kids with no grasp of the real world who think rational political debate is the nonsensical slogans they're spouting on the internet become major Twitter influencers that actual politicians want to court for their "authenticity" and "willingness to say the unsayable", and maybe their dank memes.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      The conceit of Ender's Game was that thoughtful discourse would be influential online. Reality has largely demonstrated that far more thoughtless propaganda of the Big Lie, Firehose of Bullshit (or Falsehood), associated with Russia, floods of irrelevance which tend to bury more significant stories, favoured by China, and outrage / hot-button topics, which are common in US-centric media, though a timeless technique. Memes and simple messages attract attention and spread. Complex narratives and analyses ... not so much. But yes, voices that deserve no attention whatsover have dominated the media landscape of the past decade or so. Not that this is entirely novel.
  - acover 3y ago
    Good and unlikely predictions can thrust you into popularity: see deepfuckingvalue.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Isn't this how it has been since the dawn of time?
thenickdude 3y ago
Will you join my Webring?
grotorea 3y ago
Not disagreeing, but that's the end of anonymity. But yeah, maybe the idea that you can even 1% trust random content on the Internet without having a source doesn't really make sense if you think about it IMHO. Either you do this web of trust, coming from a well know real world source, or be Wikipedia-like with linked reliable sources for the viewer to check. By the way, wasn't this how Google ranked pages back in the day? Ranking pages that get linked to higher? And even before that there were P2P web rings.

RandomWorker 3y ago

My sense is to avoid this have a personal blog. That being said how many people write blogs with grammerly or chatgpt these days. The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. My sense is that you use this technology you might be happy with the results at first but on later review you just notice something off in some sentences and maybe it just doesn’t flow right. I’m not convinced that it will replace writers jobs yet. Especially when you want to create something authentic and unique.

pseudosavant 3y ago
Sometimes the value is specifically because my voice won't come through. When I'm stressed and being asked for unreasonable things at work, I know that I tend toward passive aggression. But professionally, that isn't the way I want my message to come across. I use ChatGPT all the time to suggest how I could make sure something isn't passive aggressive. It'll point out parts that aggression and suggested changes. It can be for a short slack message, or a many paragraph message.
tredre3 3y ago
> The temptation to use these technologies all the time is too strong for even self preservation of your own (writers) voice. I don't know about that. I have played with ChatGPT/Copilot/etc enough to know what they're capable of doing. But the thing is, I enjoy programming. I enjoy breaking down a problem and solving it with code. I enjoy crafting elegant code. So I don't use AI even though I'm fully aware it could save me hours on projects. Why? Because I enjoy those hours very much. Why am I telling you all this? Because I suspect many writers are the same and personal blogs are their canvas. They enjoy communicating. They enjoy crafting articles. They might have AI proof-read them, but they won't let them write everything. So, to me, there is hope that personal blogs will maintain their human element, as opposed to news websites or tabloids or learning platforms.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Agree. I've never even looked at any of these AI tools. I enjoy the process and the challenge of programming, and the rewards of doing it well. I have no desire for someone or something else to write code for me.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

There's the branch of philosophy called epistemology.

BitwiseFool 3y ago

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

dredmorbius 3y ago
Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate. At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine. Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    ~/name at an edu is pretty attainable. .edu domains can be had for any otherwise eligible "U.S.-based postsecondary institutions" per Educause: <https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm> Pages at extant domains might variously be available to undergraduate or graduate students, faculty, staff, and adjuncts. Those might either directly host emulative material or be convinced or compromised into hosting content. If there's one thing that the Internet's history to date has proved, its that perverse incentives lead to perverse consequences.
    - l33t7332273 3y ago
      It is not easy for a regular person to obtain access to a .edu webpage.

ryanklee 3y ago

People are vastly everestimating how unique this problem of hallucinations is. It seems to me it relies mostly on discounting just how much we've already had to deal with this same problem in humans over the millenia. The problem of proliferation of bad information might be getting worse, but this isn't native to generative AI. The entire informational ecosystem has to deal with this. GPTs compound the issue, but as far as I can tell, no where near what social media has forced us to deal with.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
The thing is when you call a human on bullshit, they usually can't back it up well enough to pass the smell test. When you call an AI on bullshit it can instantly fabricate plausible, credible seeming sources/evidence. A human's lie is different than an AI's hallucination, since it's still based on (distorting) the truth, whereas the hallucination is based on an invented reality (yes I know it's applied statistics and there's no true model of the world in there, but it can report as if there is)
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Intelligent people can fill the void of ignorance with plausible sounding but factually incorrect information. They are apt to engage cognitive biases in such a way that the biases produce assertions that are deeply indistinquishable from factual assertions. They fool themselves in this way and they fool others. This happens all the time. LLMs are no different in this respect.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    Sure people lie and spread misinformation (willingly or unwittingly). But coming up with plausible sounding lies take effort. LLMs on the other hand are amazing and prolific liars and can produce a lot of bullshit for a price that’s effectively free - in fact it’s cheaper to create a LLM that’s inaccurate than one that’s … less inaccurate. The truth to lie ratio on the internet is about to take a huge hit. LLMs really are a Pandora’s Box.
- 3y ago

carlosjobim 3y ago

The shadow libraries.

robinsonb5 3y ago

I suspect in the coming years the Wayback Machine at archive.org will become ever more important - always assuming it's not lost as collateral damage in their copyright battles. Indexing that dataset and making it searchable would massively increase its value. My inner conspiracy theorist can't help wonder if the continued reduction in search usefulness isn't part of an ongoing deliberate disempowerment of everyday people - but my rational side says it's merely an unfortunate emergent behaviour of the systems we've built.

beebeepka 3y ago
Generative Wayback Machine
- civilitty 3y ago
  That would be the best thing ever. Just ask GPT to hallucinate an entire page based solely off the URL when it doesn’t exist in the database.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  Honestly, I would love to see a LLM based plugin that would take a website, remove all the tracking garbage and filler, and just give me back a no-frills static html+CSS site that looks like it was made in 1995. "Oh, you want a guide to writing your own loss function for Tensorflow? Here's an FAQ that could have existed on comp.lang.python3.tensorflow"
  - creata 3y ago
    So you want a... reader mode plugin? How would it use an LLM beneficially?
    - zirgs 3y ago
      LLMs can write summaries of articles.
    - thewakalix 3y ago

thih9 3y ago

I wonder how we'd test for AI contamination. And would there be attempts to sell a larger data set, one that pretends to be human generated, but instead is padded with some AI content. Does this mean we'd end up with a finite set of verified human only data? Would people start going through all kinds of offline archives via AI-gapped means, trying to uncover and document new sources of human input?

Agree2468 3y ago

Right now is best time to buy encyclopedias.

visarga 3y ago
Why, you can dl any version of wikipedia from before 2023

dotnet00 3y ago

In some ways it already is that way. If I come across an artist I suspect is passing off AI generated stuff as their own (without using the tagging features the site has to indicate as much), an easy test is to just check if they've been posting since before ~2020. If they have, and the style has recognizable similarities, it's clear that it's honestly human made or at most blends characteristics of both together.

dongping 3y ago

Actually, that's great in my opinion. Assuming that semi-convincing misinformation spreads everywhere, people will finally have to find the original source of a certain statement, verify their "knowledge supply chain", and maybe use logic to evaluate every single statement made.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

redstonefreedom 3y ago

I've said as much as to one extra incentive (besides retrain cost) as to why openai has frozen the training period for post-2022. I think it's trying to generate as much data as possible before itself has contaminated its training set. They'll effectively have a monopoly over it; it's interestingly a rare example of "we can only do this once, then it's forever degraded". You really want a clean & discrete start.

downboots 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain But who's gonna pay for it?

bpiche 3y ago

Hey, you're internet famous now. Check out the end of this boingboing post. https://boingboing.net/2023/10/05/ai-search-chatbots-output-lies-nonsense-and-hallucinations.html https://boingboing.net/2023/10/05/ai-search-chatbots-output-...