5 ms·

I just read the abstract and wanted to add that a critical difference between subreddits and Stack Overflow is that you go to the latter for an objective answer

I just read the abstract and wanted to add that a critical difference between subreddits and Stack Overflow is that you go to the latter for an objective answer (even though you might not always get one), whereas subreddits often provide subjective content, like advice or reviews. I think this kind of opinionated community will still thrive because LLMs are great for quick answers but don't yet provide strong opinions, and likely won't for a while due to regulations. In that way, having a close-knit human community with strong opinions on a subject will become even more valuable.

lovethevoid 2y ago
Nothing about LLMs prevent them from writing what looks like strong opinions. Actually that's what I assume most bots that utilize LLMs on social platforms are doing, adhering to a "style" and writing "strong opinions" on a product. Here's one I asked chatGPT to generate about a hypothetical video game (related to a real one as source for what to reference): > hypothetical video game is sooo fggin trash. like, the parkour is meh, combat is a complete joke, and the whole game just feels off. seriously, what a waste of time. People only take safety in opinionated communities with the assumption everyone else is a human being offering their sincere take, and due to this assumption it's also much easier to get your bot to "fit in", pushing whatever narrative you want or letting it go wild.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  The value of opinions comes from the fact that they were written by humans. For example, I’m sure you could get an LLM to write about how delicious peanut butter and pickles is as a combination, but most people do not agree.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    But there is no tell on reddit who is a human without strong opinion biases, who is a human who is uninformed or otherwise biased, who is a human paid to market opinion or product, or who is a bot written to market opinion or content. Right now the only value is in the sense of the emporer not having clothes, of people assuming most comments are the first case when they really are more likely to be the last case. Reddit doesn't even pass the eye test. Look at /r/programming. over 6 million subscribed accounts, but the activity is like barely anyone is there. The top three posts of the last 24hrs currently have 72, 218, and 39 comments respectively, and after that engagement falls off to like 0-5 comments a post. So we have around 350 comments a day on a board supposedly subscribed by 6 million account holders. The comment making rate of this community is apparently 0.006%, and a good deal of that is liable to be bot traffic. Dead internet theory is probably right. I should pack up and leave with the rest too I guess.
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    Remember the pineapple and pizza trend? It's pretty old now, but a lot of people were buying it to try it out because of what people were saying online. Now that we have very accessible LLM, that same trend can be artificially created with ease. You can dominate entire subreddits with artificial content, and nobody cares as long as it isn't a giant glaring outlier. You can make people think a certain way, act a certain way, buy certain things, just as long as you seem human enough to pass the sniff test and that a large enough group of "people" were doing so. These opinionated communities will not survive much longer without implementing more severe human ID verification measures. You can bet against that, but I see the writing on the wall in my smaller public communities. They already don't trust much that isn't coming from someone in real time video.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
I think its more that the shills have been on reddit for so long that people are blind to the marketing techniques they are being exposed to. You can probably get an LLM to spit out some boilerplate that passes the snuff for a reddit comment already. True for HN as well, I have seen a user mention they used a language model to reformulate their comment before posting as some security measure. In either case LLM are really a steam shovel technological moment for the shill marketing world. What used to take active posting and constant maintenance of your bank of canned responses can now be done with one operator running a script that simulates all these active posters with enough variance to not have the responses seem to be from the same bank of material. You could dominate an entire subreddit, have 1000 of your accounts to 1 user putting out enough AI derived signal that even the few real users who post start regurgitating it.

lovethevoid 2y ago

Nothing about LLMs prevent them from writing what looks like strong opinions. Actually that's what I assume most bots that utilize LLMs on social platforms are doing, adhering to a "style" and writing "strong opinions" on a product. Here's one I asked chatGPT to generate about a hypothetical video game (related to a real one as source for what to reference): > hypothetical video game is sooo fggin trash. like, the parkour is meh, combat is a complete joke, and the whole game just feels off. seriously, what a waste of time. People only take safety in opinionated communities with the assumption everyone else is a human being offering their sincere take, and due to this assumption it's also much easier to get your bot to "fit in", pushing whatever narrative you want or letting it go wild.

janalsncm 2y ago
The value of opinions comes from the fact that they were written by humans. For example, I’m sure you could get an LLM to write about how delicious peanut butter and pickles is as a combination, but most people do not agree.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  But there is no tell on reddit who is a human without strong opinion biases, who is a human who is uninformed or otherwise biased, who is a human paid to market opinion or product, or who is a bot written to market opinion or content. Right now the only value is in the sense of the emporer not having clothes, of people assuming most comments are the first case when they really are more likely to be the last case. Reddit doesn't even pass the eye test. Look at /r/programming. over 6 million subscribed accounts, but the activity is like barely anyone is there. The top three posts of the last 24hrs currently have 72, 218, and 39 comments respectively, and after that engagement falls off to like 0-5 comments a post. So we have around 350 comments a day on a board supposedly subscribed by 6 million account holders. The comment making rate of this community is apparently 0.006%, and a good deal of that is liable to be bot traffic. Dead internet theory is probably right. I should pack up and leave with the rest too I guess.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  Remember the pineapple and pizza trend? It's pretty old now, but a lot of people were buying it to try it out because of what people were saying online. Now that we have very accessible LLM, that same trend can be artificially created with ease. You can dominate entire subreddits with artificial content, and nobody cares as long as it isn't a giant glaring outlier. You can make people think a certain way, act a certain way, buy certain things, just as long as you seem human enough to pass the sniff test and that a large enough group of "people" were doing so. These opinionated communities will not survive much longer without implementing more severe human ID verification measures. You can bet against that, but I see the writing on the wall in my smaller public communities. They already don't trust much that isn't coming from someone in real time video.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

I think its more that the shills have been on reddit for so long that people are blind to the marketing techniques they are being exposed to. You can probably get an LLM to spit out some boilerplate that passes the snuff for a reddit comment already. True for HN as well, I have seen a user mention they used a language model to reformulate their comment before posting as some security measure. In either case LLM are really a steam shovel technological moment for the shill marketing world. What used to take active posting and constant maintenance of your bank of canned responses can now be done with one operator running a script that simulates all these active posters with enough variance to not have the responses seem to be from the same bank of material. You could dominate an entire subreddit, have 1000 of your accounts to 1 user putting out enough AI derived signal that even the few real users who post start regurgitating it.