6 ms·
Do you all realize that accessing to correct information+truth is getting hard?
With LLM and hallucinating AI our access to unfiltered, correct information is filtered in a way that it's just getting harder and harder to learn the correct thing. This is not what tech progress should be? Is there hope that GPT 5 or next one will be able give correct information? We peaked accesing to correct information years ago. Now everything is filtered or will be made via BS AI so much that it will just so hard and time consuming to know the truth. Not trying to be pessimist this is sad reality.
- talldayo 2y agoFrankly, I noticed a cliff-dive in information veracity the moment social media started getting popular. It's a great tool for whistleblowers, but also the perfect stage for attention-seeking sensationalists.
- verdverm 2y agoI agree, this has much more to do with social media, internet, and the impact that had on the news industry business model. Everything became a competition for attention and the most clicks. Outrage is winning Jon Stewart had a great segment on this yesterday: https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1792752676830085605 https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1792752676830085605
- figassis 2y agoAI is on a completely differnt level than social media. With social media, you can still find information if you do some research. With AI, even supposetly reliable sources will be indistinguishable from fake ones. Scientific researchers are using AI indiscriminately, governments, etc. It will get to the point where when asked to show proof of something, you'll realize there is no way to actually find it.
- dannyobrien 2y agoWhat were you using to discriminate between true information and false before?
- talldayo 2y agoI kinda agree. AI is indeed a reductive technology that very rarely (if ever) returns factual content. But that's tangential to the real problem, in my opinion; how much we trust people who are entirely capable of disseminating lies. Researchers and government employees know that they're doing the wrong thing when they delegate important work to language models. They are liable to be audited, questioned under-oath and punished if they deliberately publish wrong information. AI doesn't really change that, besides enabling them to fabricate lies faster (which was never something people struggled with in the first place). > It will get to the point where when asked to show proof of something, you'll realize there is no way to actually find it. This I think is just blatantly wrong. For all the hubbub around AI, I've seen pretty much nothing AI-generated persist past maybe 2 days after it was uploaded. AI-generated news articles and photos simply aren't held in high-regard, relative to the prevalence of factual and cross-referenced knowledge. People remember Pixar films, nobody remembers that stupid Pope Balenciaga trend from Twitter a few months back. Nobody likely ever will.
- figassis 2y agoThis is today. Society tends to have what I call generational amnesia. Some food today taskes like crap, but people from 2004 think it always tasted like that. Same is/will be true for information, but at a much larger scale. People 20 years from now will look at today's AI garbage as truth, or a least as valid alternatives to what science tells them for example. Science already has a trust problem today, this will make it much worse. Same for history.
- h2odragon 2y ago"correct information" ... you may have been placing too much faith in what's been available before the output of LLM's became widespread.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoYeah. LLMs are going to make it worse. But between propaganda, shills, people with ideological axes to grind, advertising, and others that had reason to try to obscure the truth, finding correct, unbiased information was not easy.
- h2odragon 2y agoI can't recall the time when the Internet was a fountain of Truth, and I've been around a while. So many seem to think that there was a Golden Age when the Ancients issued nothing but Gospel, and its is only modern Sin that has stained the purity of the collective intellect. I think Spafford's Usenet quote [1] has been applicable, in spriti at least, to most publishers. since long before the internet became extant. [1] https://publicquotes.com/quote/448/usenet-is-like-a-herd-of-performing-elephants-with-diarrhea--massive-difficult-to-redirect-awe-inspiring.html https://publicquotes.com/quote/448/usenet-is-like-a-herd-of-...
- pixodaros 2y agoI suggest these things printed on dead trees called "books" with publication dates in 2021 or earlier or from established publishers which don't print a Word doc emailed them by "T.T. Notchatgpt"
- silverquiet 2y agoI'm pretty sure that an AI can write a book and put any date it wants on it. There are methods of disinformation that obviously long pre-date LLMs.
- standardUser 2y agoAnd that AI will also hack the publishing company's databases? Create convincing fake profiles for the imagined authors and respond to correspondence as that person? Brianwash all librarians?
- pixodaros 2y agoIt can't get that book authentically aged, printed with non-PoD methods, and in to libraries and publishers' websites, with contemporary reviews and advertisements, etc. AdVon was having overseas workers and LLMs write online product reviews for the publisher's website not getting books into libraries, revue venues, etc. https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content
- flipbrad 2y agoDon't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.
- mpeyton 2y agoDoes anyone know a way to get a full dump of pre-2021 Wikipedia? Their dumps page only has current dumps. I know it’s not perfect (i.e. anyone can edit Wikipedia), but I think having it would be a good hedge in case things get really bad.
- standardUser 2y agoThis link should lead you to whatever backups you might desire... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download I was able to quickly find some 2007/08 dumps, but it looks like there is a whole ecosystem of backups out there.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoCorrect = JTB or something else?
- FrankWilhoit 2y agoTruth was so last century. Now everything is performance. It doesn't matter what you say -- or read -- as long as you look good doing it. This is irreversible. We are very near the end.
- light_triad 2y agoThere's been a paradox at the heart of the tech revolution - the world's information is more easily available than every before, for free and at everyone's fingertips. However it's making it harder to filter through the information overload, the low quality content, the misinformation, the true and the false. There's a confusion between quantity and quality. Your skills and ability to differentiate need to increase with the tech - even though consumption is always getting easier. Also understanding the limitations of these AI systems, which relatively few people do relative to how many use these tools now (also Social Media is largely to blame for the general decrease in content quality, even though it's one of the best distribution systems ever created).
- deepfriedchokes 2y agoRead Hoffman. Natural selection optimizes for fitness, not truth.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoI haven't noticed a significant uptick since GPT. Maybe it's just my own browsing habits, but it has always been difficult for me to find non-spam, detailed, accurate information on most topics without spending hours or days digging for credible sources and cross-referencing. And the search engine and social media spam has been around long before GPT. Mind you, "always" here means the last 15 years for me.
- nonameiguess 2y agoAs always, this depends on what type of information you're looking for. If it's inherently subjective like "what is the best X for Y?" Good luck, but that has always been the case. If it's something objectively measurable but highly individual, like what diet should you eat for a particular goal or how should you train for some sport or just optimal health, I would advise you to cut through anyone trying to sell you anything and look at widely available examples of what people have actually done who achieved what you're looking to achieve. It won't always work because your genetics and life situation are unique, but you can see the variety of approaches available and try them until you find something that works for you. There is no universal answer that the Internet can give you and there never has been. If you're looking for what is the ground-level situation in some part of the world today or as close to today as possible, then well, I would say that has also never been something you could rely on to have factually accurate accounts widely available, at least in any form you could verify yourself. If this is something you care about, you'll learn over time what sources are more reputable than others and some ways to spot outright obvious misinformation, but if you have any kind of ideological bent to you, it's going to be very hard because purveyors of misinformation will be targeting people exactly like you in ways proven to grease the wheels of your desire to be told you're right. On the other hand, if you're simply looking to learn about topics, this is easily the best time ever to be alive. MIT has had OCW for two decades now. I think Stanford has put much of their class material online. University of Illinois, Georgia Tech, and probably others at this point have put entire degree programs on MOOC platforms for a way more affordable than in-person schooling price. The current best known body of knowledge for any particular science is always changing, but stick to the fundamentals and even old textbooks are not going to mislead you. This is especially true of mathematics, in which everything you ever learn or are shown you can independently verify. Finally, if you're looking for basic state of the world information and don't require a narrative, US government bodies collect and publish enormous amounts of statistics. The BLS, FRED, Census Bureau, CIA world factbook all put out tons of data, often with APIs. If you want the ground level truth of what some organization is doing, government budgets are all publicly available, though not always easy to find. The financial statements of publicly traded private companies are all publicly available. The tax returns of any qualified non-profit other than churches are publicly available. Stop relying on news organizations to do the research for you and definitely don't rely on LLMs. The data itself is there and it is factually accurate.
- BeetleB 2y agoAdvice: When saying stuff like this, you'll get more engagement if you provide concrete examples. Personally for me, it got really bad years before GPT - because of SEO crap on Google. Trying to get accurate information on anything related to nutrition or health became, and still is, really hard.
- dmarchand90 2y agoNot really a new problem: Take this quote from George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War "I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant."
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoAsk HN:
- RandonGuy4567 2y ago[dead]
- philomath_mn 2y agoWhat is truth? I believe in objective truth, but finding it has always been very difficult.