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I'm genuinely curious if this will play out in a real way. Now with a few years of distance from this essay, I feel like AI is still in a zone where most "non-h
by noirbot 2y ago
I'm genuinely curious if this will play out in a real way. Now with a few years of distance from this essay, I feel like AI is still in a zone where most "non-human interactions" are almost more recognizable. The internet at large seems to have gotten pretty good at spotting AI art and LLMs posting on sites. I'm not sure I can exactly describe what it is about the GPTbots, but they remain fairly obvious.
Which isn't to say we're not still headed for something like this. I do think some of the most sensitive to this sort of crass misuse of platforms already got off when human-created ads and bots started becoming prevalent, so the question is if LLM-based bots are notably worse in a way that people care about differently.
I'm already a few steps down the "logging off" path at this point, but it's unclear to me that I'm not the outlier here. I worry that there's many people who are lonely and don't have a better way to interact socially where they're totally fine talking to some catfishing LLM that wants their money in some way or other.
It seems clear to me that a disconcerting amount of LLM startups are started by people who are, or are willing to take money from, people who see a relentlessly positive/comforting/sexually open faux human as their best way forward in life. Every week brings some new "it's a social network where everyone's an LLM that's nice to you" or "this app is your best friend". It just feels predatory to me in a way where even if it's well intended, it feels like an admission or exploitation of a serious ill in our society.
- kredd 2y agoCounterpoint - confirmation bias. If you make the LLMs respond with specific tones, mix in some casual grammar mistakes, I don’t think you can distinguish it.
- noirbot 2y agoSure, but that feels like a lot more work than most bot makers are putting in. I'm not claiming folks have 100% hit rate on detecting bots, but the run of "disregard instructions" memes have shown a good amount of pretty low effort bots. It takes a lot of work, patience, and practice to make a bot that feels human. I don't doubt that there's influence operations out there that are putting in the effort, but just like I still get spam email about V1AGRA multiple times a day, it's not clear the cost benefit is worth it for scammers and influence operations to pay the cost in LLM tokens to do that just yet. Do you have any input on anything after my first paragraph?
- xeyownt 2y agoCan you prove you are not a bot? Your pseudo is SUS.
- adastra22 2y agoPeople think they can recognize an LLM, but what they're actually recognizing is the ChatGPT default prompt.
- 123yawaworht456 2y agothey're all tainted with GPTisms, which are trivial to spot.
- kredd 2y agoI’m a bit surprised with the reaction in the comments section. My genuine belief, and beliefs of what I assume the bubbles I’m part of, LLMs are not detectable by any means. And I assumed the problem is, the less technical people have not been made aware enough in real life, so they’re still not skeptical. It was a bit hard for me to come into terms with, in the last 7-8 years, too. I remember my 2000s, where talking to anyone online or playing with them would guarantee that there’s a real person behind it. Or at least the chances were incredibly high. Now? I assume the chances are incredibly low. Or at least extreme financial incentives for online interactions. Which ruined the internet somewhat for me. Which, I think, will get worse. Eh, good old days.
- willvarfar 2y agoJust a thought, are there any spell-checkers-backwards? They take some good prose and introduce some common mistakes?
- Kiro 2y agoI don't think you realize how many of the accounts you interact with online are actually bots.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoHow many accounts do folks typically interact with online? For me it's just HN, which has some bots but probably not many. GH too, but that's even less likely to be bots (whats the motive?)
- noirbot 2y agoAlso this. I pretty much follow accounts I know the owner of. If they've swapped out their posting with an AI, sure, maybe it's fooling me, but I'm generally not interacting with just random people online in the same way I was 5 years ago. The terrible obvious bots of the past killed that for me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kredd 2y agoComment sections of social media get a substantial amount of reads without much interaction. We might not be the target audience, but looking around, quite a lot of people consume the text-media without putting too much thought into it.
- ben_w 2y agoIndeed. Back when my blog was wordpress, if I linked to it here I got about 10x the number of views as karma. This was about 100 views, so it's possibly not representative…
- kredd 2y agoYeah, anyone who has ran a website, or even better, worked at a high-traffic user generated content company has experienced the lurker/creator ratio. Even if you discount 90% of it as bots, it's still insanely high. 8 billion people is a hell lotta pair of eyes.
- tc4v 2y agoBoomer facebook is filled to the brim with bad AI generated stuff and people actually buying it, so... maybe you're sample is biased.
- magic_hamster 2y ago> The internet at large seems to have gotten pretty good at spotting AI art and LLMs posting on sites I beg to differ. We are at a point where it's almost impossible to know both art and conversation are AI generated. New models like Flux Pro will definitely fool you easily, this is it. The latest LLMs are also very good especially in short interactions to the point it's impossible to know. The only real issue keeping these models from completely flooding the internet is that they are costly to run, but as costs come down and models improve, we have zero chance actually differentiating AI from human output.
- xeyownt 2y agoFully agree. I'm pretty sure that even specialists in the matter can be fooled. Not fooled most of the time, but a few times because their attention would be lowered by other things. My natural reaction is to consider now everything likely-fake unless proven genuine.
- grugagag 2y agoI got fooled briefly when an audiobook started playing on youtube. It was autoplay and while doing something else I was listening in. Imagine a completely AI generated audiobook. When looking at comments and views I was saddened, most can’t tell.
- XorNot 2y agoIt's also selection bias: people spot bad AI fakes, convince themselves this represents all AI fakes, and then gain undue confidence in their ability to spot AI fakes. Disinformation actors also know this: the value of flooding Facebook with bad AI fakes, is it primes people to believe either the good ones or human-crafted content which is intended to promote disinformation (since you've changed the ground assumptions - "AI == fake", "human written == true" is how people wind up operating).
- ben_w 2y ago> Disinformation actors also know this: the value of flooding Facebook with bad AI fakes I'm not disagreeing, but is that an "I reckon/it is widely believed" or an "I've seen quality evidence of this"?
- creata 2y ago> I'm not sure I can exactly describe what it is about the GPTbots, but they remain fairly obvious. What makes you so confident? This sentence, on its own, sounds pretty toupee fallacy.
- croes 2y agoI doubt that. More than once I got replies to YouTube comments that tried to jailbreak my "prompt". There is are just more obvious bad AI texts, but also many good ones you can't simply detect as artificial generated.
- visarga 2y ago> "this app is your best friend" AI could be more aligned to you than random internet users, give you less bullshit if involuntary hallucinations are excepted. It is more patient and generally puts more effort than most human interactions, and often better informed from its huge training set. These models are now "the worst they are ever going to get", I expect the quality of dialogue to improve. Claude Sonnet for example was a big leap, and the latest 4o and o1 are showing good signs of progress.
- torginus 2y agohonestly I'm kinda bummed out that stuff like AI dungeon has folded. I had an amazing time with creative storytelling in the early days of LLMs, even if tripped up sometimes by the occasional filters etc. It seems nobody is actually really invested in this space, it's mostly amateurs trying to cobble together some homemade solution, using openly available LLMs and finetunes.
- Filligree 2y agoAI Dungeon may have folded, but NovelAI is doing better than ever.
- torginus 2y agoThat's good to hear. I dropped at the time they started training their own models, and it taking forever, while simultaneously finding success with imagegen, and kinda pivoting to that, which further delayed their text model, at which point I stopped kinda checking them out.
- Filligree 2y agoIt definitely took forever, though I’m given to understand the training finished a while ago and they’ve been stuck due to lack of hardware. Coincidentally however, just yesterday they announced that it arrived this week. The newest model, based on Llama 3.1, should be available for use next week.
- jgalt212 2y agoThe language LLMs speak is not English, but moreso a language I like to call "Delvish".
- binary132 2y agoSome people can, some people can’t. That division will become more apparent over the coming years.
- dyauspitr 2y agoMy only counterpoint here is you only notice the AI bots that are obvious. If you ask ChatGPT to speak in a different voice and add in grammatical errors, the text quickly becomes pretty indistinguishable from a real human already.