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I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the an

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the question, this is critical. To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer. This is possibly a bad example, because the truth is very clearly written down by the government, based on exact laws. It just happened to be a recent example that I encountered of how the internet leads people astray. A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this. And, generally, allowing the government to decide what is true is probably a path we (as a civilisation) do not want to take. We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good.

dataflow 2y ago
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously) Er, no, the meaning of the question is ambiguous, so I'm not sure "has a single truthful answer" is accurate. What does "can" mean? If you mean "permitted", then no. But if you mean can they vote anyway and get away with it? It's clearly happened before (as rare as it might have been), so technically the answer to that would be be yes.
- bruce511 2y ago
  This is a fundamental limitation of language. The LLM is likely to provide a good answer here even though the question is technically ambiguous, because it likes verbose answers. Equally "can" is used to substitute for other precise words. Humans are good at inferring context, and if someone asked me "can illegals vote" I'd say "no". Just like if someone said "can you pass the salt" I pass the salt, I don't say "yes". If the inferred context US wrong then the "truth" is wrong, but as with talking to humans it's possible to refine context with a follow up question.
  - dataflow 2y ago
    To clarify: I wasn't making a pedantic linguistic point here. The fact is that when I first read the question, I actually thought it was asking "are illegal immigrants able to cast a vote (regardless of legality)?" It literally did not even (initially) occur to me that the question might be asking about legality, because the entire modern political discourse surrounding illegal immigrants and voting has been with regards to whether they can cast votes despite not legally being allowed to. The answer to "is this legal" would have been such an obvious "no" to people on both sides of the debate --- and thus the question so silly --- that initially it didn't occur to me that the intended question might have been about legality, until I continued reading the comment and realized that was the intention after all.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      I think that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible. But I feel optimizing for lazy question phrasing is infantilizing the userbase and assuming they're incapable of learning how to ask more precise questions. Which is an endemic problem in the modern web. We should be building systems with low barriers to simple adoption, but whose power scales with a user's expertise. Instead, we're hyperoptimizing for lowest common denominator, first interaction and as a result putting a glass ceiling on system power.
      - photonthug 2y ago
        > that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible. I’d rephrase it: this was googles approach because they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives. Why does everyone assume the search bubble is a well intentioned accident? The linguistic arguments about the nature of truth above don’t cut it for me as any justification that the answer depends on who is asking. If we’re telling chemists that oil and water do mix as mentioned elsewhere in thread, we should probably tell the same to children and just make a slider for the level of additional detail. No problem. Especially if the alternative is a dystopic post truth panopticon. > systems whose power scales with expertise Couldn’t agree more that this is what we want/need, but disagree about infantilizing user bases and lowest common denominator. Platform’s aren’t trying to scale user power with expertise, they want to scale revenue with users, and separately, to deliberately restrict user power/control so that platforms decide what users see. And it’s not necessarily political or linguistic or about the nature of truth. A simple example of this that’s everywhere is filtering content by sub genre tags. Ever notice that you often see niche content tags like “time-travel” or “mind-bending” but can’t click it? Platforms want the tags for internal analytics naturally, but they want the control of not providing it as a filter, forcing users instead into a fuzzier category like “people also watched” or “top ten this week”. Why? Because platforms can hide advertised content there, push stuff they pay less license fees for, make operations cheaper with caching, or whatever else.
- XorNot 2y ago
  If they got away with it then how do you know it's happened?
  - coredog64 2y ago
    Obviously off-topic, but see the recent case of the Chinese student who illegally voted and then turned himself in.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - coldtea 2y ago
    To answer the general question, of "if somebody got away with X, how can we know it happened?": If somebody robbed a bank at gunpoint and was never caught, can we know it happened? Obviously yes. What if somebody "merely" embezzled from one, and there's a "hole" found in the banks books and money missing, but nobody who did it or how? Still, I'd wager yes, one coudl tell by the results. What if somebody used illegal means to get leverage on some stock buying/selling, it became know, but they weren't punished and got to keep their profits? They got away with it, but we do know it happened.
    - XorNot 2y ago
      None of those are voting. If someone cast a ballot who was not allowed to, then how do you know it's happened if they weren't caught? What is this assertion being based on other then vibes?
      - SauntSolaire 2y ago
        Well, after the fact it's realized the person whose name is on the ballot had been dead for months, and you didn't catch who cast the vote because you don't know who they are. Or a million other scenarios. Really all it takes is stopping to think about it for more than a minute.
      - 2y ago
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole... As I understand it, only citizens are legally entitled to vote, and voting requires a government-issued ID and the voter to be enrolled. How did they vote and get away with it previously? (also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?)
  - dataflow 2y ago
    > (also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?) Is it possible to steal money from a bank and get away with it? Is it possible to obtain citizenship fraudulently and get away with it? etc. But if they got away with it then how do you know? > How did they vote and get away with it previously? Look it up on Wikipedia? They literally have linked cases from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States#Noncitizen_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_... Or look at the most recent case in the news yesterday, which someone already replied with in the other comment: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/30/chinese-university-of-michigan-college-student-voted-presidential-election-michigan-china-benson/75936701007/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/20... > At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole... This will definitely derail the conversation so I'll just leave my reply at this.
    - panarky 2y ago
      It's quite clear that the question is not whether it is possible that an insignificant number of votes are cast fraudulently, because if we're talking about insignificant events, all things are possible. Certainly the question is whether there's any evidence, after endless audits and investigations and lawsuits, that the volume of fraudulent votes is anywhere near large enough to affect the results. Is it possible that someone registered their hamster to vote? Certainly. Is there any evidence whatsoever that tens of thousands of hamsters are casting votes? No.
      - 2y ago
- johndubchak 2y ago
  I'm no linguist, but the question does seem unambiguous, or quite clear, to a reasonable observer. The context is "voting in a US election" AND the subject is "an illegal immigrant" WITH an assumption that the illegal immigrant has, in fact, illegally emigrated to the US.
judahmeek 2y ago
> We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good. How are we seeing how that pans out when Australia's misinformation bill is still just a proposal?
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Fair point. I think just that there's a general acceptance that "something must be done" and that the government are the people to do it is pretty alarming. It's a short step from here to a Ministry of Truth, and I can see Australia taking that step pretty soon.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    What is a not-alarming answer to “Who gets to decide what’s true?”
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      I don't know. We used to defer this to journalists, effectively. While individual journalists often lied and misrepresented the truth, there was some responsibility within the industry to tell the truth, and newspapers did print retractions and corrections when they got it wrong. The editorial content was strictly separate from the business of running the newspaper, so editorial decisions were (mostly) not influenced by commercial decisions and free to pursue The Truth as they saw it. That, sadly, is no longer the case. And we have no good replacement for it.
      - phatfish 2y ago
        There is no incentive to be truthful currently, among democracies the seems to be most powerful in the US with Trump able to lie and there seemingly be no counter for it. With old regulated media there was (is?) the legacy of the organisation and the idea it was "trustworthy" on the line for the journalists that work for it. So they have an incentive to be truthful, and hopefully an idea that publishing lies is not a good moral choice. With the personality driven journalism that emerges from the internet there is less incentive to be truthful, such personalities can be very successful using populism alone to play to their audience.
parpfish 2y ago
I was thinking something similar. I like the google auto-ai summary for little trivia facts and objective things (who played so and so in the movie? How heavy is a gallon of milk?) this is stuff that is verifiable and could theoretically just be queried from some sort of knowledge base. But for anything remotely subjective, context dependent, or time sensitive I need to know the source. And this isn’t just for hot button political stuff — there’s all sorts of questions like “is the weather good this weekend?”, “Are puffy jackets cool again?”, “How much should I spend on a vacation?”
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > could theoretically just be queried from some sort of knowledge base Google bought Freebase in 2010 [0] and scaled it [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph
- admksx45v65uqpw 2y ago
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gonzobonzo 2y ago
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer. There are many jurisdictions where some illegal immigrants (Dreamers) are allowed to vote, including New York City[1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-allows-non-citizens-vote-controversial-law https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-all...
- ethbr1 2y ago
  >> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" > More than 800,000 non-citizens and “Dreamers” could vote in New York City municipal elections Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections).
  - gonzobonzo 2y ago
    > Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections). I strongly disagree. Going by your interpretation, the question "How many people in the USA vote in local elections?" would have the answer "not a single person."
    - coldtea 2y ago
      Your version of the question has the qualifier "in local elections". The parent's version doesn't, so the answer assuming that it talks about the main USA elections, and not local or any random election that just happen to be conducted in the USA, is quite valid. In other words "in the USA elections" implicitly points to a specific kind of elections (the presidential ones), different to "USA local elections" or "any kind of election within the USA"). You might argue "in the USA elections" doesn't anywhere prevent the more generic interpretation, but I argue that that's how most people would understand and answer such a question.
      - 2y ago
panarky 2y ago
> An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer. LLMs don't uncritically "trawl" the web, ingesting and then blindly regurgitating what they find. 98% of the internet is crap, yet LLM results don't reflect this dismal figure. They're amazingly good at distilling the 2% that is non-crap.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Sure. Probably trawling was the wrong word and conveyed a technically-inaccurate meaning. I'm not sure what the correct word would be.
lazerlapin 2y ago
> A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this. I know it was just an example, but actually no, the role of dietary saturated fat as a factor for heart disease remains very much valid. I’m not sure which recent studies you’re referring to, but you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily. What study were you thinking about?
- newsclues 2y ago
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/ Remarkable how easy it is to cling to propaganda
  - themk 2y ago
    Nina Teicholz being the distributor of this propaganda right?
  - dahart 2y ago
    I wasn’t aware of the new debate over saturated fats, I’m curious and will be watching this evolve with interest. That said, for me this publication has red flags right from the start. Complaining about difficulty of changing everyone’s minds is a political and non-academic persuasion tactic that does not convince me. Calling it “resistance” and “bias” is a bullshit framing that makes me less likely to trust Teicholz. Of course there is resistance to 50 years of publication and research, and there should be. There’s a lot of bias towards the earth being round, and a lot of resistance to the idea that it’s flat, right? If I repeat the claim that the earth is round, is that “propaganda”? It would indeed take time and effort to change everyone’s minds about that. Multiple times she references “>20” papers that back up her claims. Except 5 of her references in this paper are her own. And she has around 10 on this subject. So is she claiming this “new consensus” is based on what she herself and maybe one or two other people believe? If 50% of the evidence for consensus is her own papers, then I doubt there’s any consensus at all. It’s funny to claim there’s consensus at the same time she complains that it’s difficult to change the consensus. Even 20 independent scientific papers not authored by Teicholz is practically nothing in the big picture. It will take many more papers and much more time, and the evidence needs to be overwhelming, clear, obvious, and true. She might be right! But Nina Teicholz is a journalist, not a scientist. She does have a PhD, but her publications don’t appear to be scientific research, and most look like opinion pieces. Out of curiosity, if saturated fats aren’t the culprit, what is? Looks like she does have one paper questioning sugar, so is she claiming sugar is the real cause? What if it’s the combination of sugar and saturated fats? Does that make her right or wrong?
jstummbillig 2y ago
> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked I don't think this appropriately credits Google's power with regards to what you are seeing
senko 2y ago
This nails it: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? I would not agree to this however: > It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, With current search engines, Google decides for you ("helped" by SEO experts failing over themselves to rank higher because their revenue directly depends on it). In theory, you could go an read a few dozen pages and decide for yourself. In reality, non-technical users will click on a first link that seems to be related to the question, and that's it. Even with AI-based search (or q/a instead of search) I think the same will happen. There is and will be a huge reward for gaming the results, be they page links or RAG snippets that rank for a query. I've already seen many SEO shops advertising their strategies to keep the customers' business relevant in the chatbot area. As this approach becomes more prevalent, you can be sure many smart people will do many experiments to figure out how best to please the new algorithm. In other words, AI-based search is an UX optimization, but doesn't address the core problem of how do you decide what content's the best, and do that in context of each user, and do that while maximizing the benefit for the user vs profit for the company doing this. So we have two huge hurdles: 1. who will decide what the user wants[0] to see, and how are incentives for that entity aligned with the user's 2. how is that entity supposed to find the information needle in the haystack of slop that's 90%+ of current web? [0] "wants" in a rational "give me the best possible information" meaning, not in "what keeps them addicted, their heart rate up, and what will drive engagement" meaning
- foobarian 2y ago
  Ultimately it's an incentive problem. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
shmel 2y ago
What is truth anyway? I see it as a quicker version of browsing to web to get a summary of what people say. As you said, with search you get a bunch of websites where strangers talk about a certain topic. You read a dozen and see if they agree with each other or if they sound legit.. There is just a huge overlap between what we consider true and what (an overwhelming majority of) people agree on. A lot of things are reduced to the consensus. If you ask a non-obvious question, you usually get an answer "a lot of people you consider trustworthy dedicated some time studying this question and agreed that the answer is X". But then people can be wrong, a big group of people can be wrong, people can be bribed or perhaps you don't actually trust these people that much. The internet can't tell you the truth. LLM can't tell you the truth. But they can summarize what other people in the world say on this subject.
grobbyy 2y ago
For the record, in my local elections, we have plenty of people voting illegally. "Is it legal" is very different from "Can they." By "local," I mean municipal and below. I didn't mean "federal elections conducted in my locality." Election security kicks for state, federal, and some municipal elections. Others are intentionally fraudulent (e.g. local corruption) or unintentionally broken (e.g. using Google Forms for a school-level public body, where people not legally qualified to vote might still do it, unaware they're committing a felony). And "public body" has a specific meaning under my state law which extends the same laws as e.g. cutting for my state senate. That's bodies like local school boards, but not random school clubs. That's the level where we have massive illegal voting where I live.
adamhp 2y ago
> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. It is very similar. Google decides what to present to you on the front page. I'm sure there are metrics on how few people get past the front page. Heck, isn't this just Google Search's business model? Determining what you see (i.e. what is "true") via ads? In much the same way that the Councils of Carthage chose to omit the acts of Paul and Thecla in the New Testament, all modern technology providers have some say in what is presented to the global information network, more or less manipulating what we all perceive to be true. Recently advancements have just made this problem much more apparent to us. But look at history and see how few women priests there are in various Christian churches and you'll notice even a small omission can have broad impacts to society.
- jumping_frog 2y ago
  This is true of the feeds and everything else where there are abundant choices. Amazon putting its inhouse brands before others. Anything which has to be narrowed down is an algorithmic choice, either data driven or top-down.
krageon 2y ago
The truth isn't a decision that's made, it just is. So nobody gets to decide it, it just is :)
belter 2y ago
> Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Seems particularly to be a US based phenomenon. Unlike the more transparent manipulation seen under dictatorships... Where people generally recognize propaganda for what it is, even if they can’t openly challenge it—some in USA live within entirely new realities.
- chrisan 2y ago
  Definitely a US based phenomenon, but sadly like other US based things it spreads to other countries. I talk with friends in CA and EU who are seeing some of the junk we saw 10 years ago with "what is fact" You would think common sense prevails...
  - recursive 2y ago
    > You would think common sense prevails... Appeals to common sense seem to underlie many of the "alternative facts" in the zeitgeist. "Common sense" is how people defend their views when they can't do it empirically. That's not always bad, but "common sense" is probably part of the problem.
- azangru 2y ago
  I disagree with this. Strongly. Remember the covid years, when what was true kept changing rapidly, and sometimes what was said on the fringe and considered misinformation was later adopted by mainstream. Vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. Oh no they don't. Don't wear masks. Oh no, do wear masks. Oh, whatever, cloth masks are face decorations anyway. Lockdowns are good. Oh, lockdowns were a mistake. Don't treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Oh, do treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Lab leak is a conspiracy theory. Oh, maybe lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. And so on, and so forth... Or take a look at how not just the media, but even the government in the UK or Canada liberally put labels such as "far right", "alt right", "antisemitic", etc. on their opponents, and how these labels pop up in Wikipedia. Are they true?
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I'm not in the USA and I see this a lot too. It's not just a US-based thing.
williamcotton 2y ago
"Are all bachelors married?" vs "is it raining outside?" And then Quine points out that the definitions of "bachelor" and "married" are themselves contingent on outside factors. "Can illegal immigrants vote?", while close to being an analytic proposition, still depends on an empirical approach that can never be mediated by text, video, etc. All propositions are by necessity experiential. Nullius in verba! So the truth is and has always been what happens when you get off your butt and go out and test the world. This is not to say that we don't benefit from language. It makes for a great recipe. If you follow the instructions to bake a cake and you get what you expected you know that the recipe was true. The same goes for the laws of science, search engine results, and generative AI.
the__alchemist 2y ago
Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)
- komali2 2y ago
  Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context. The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Not sure if that's better or worse than a developer doing basically the same thing because they could make a little money. <at_least_its_an_ethos.gif>
- halfcat 2y ago
  In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town. We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    If anything considering how vastly more complex things are nowadays (behind superficial appearances), the median adult is likely even more ignorant, in relative terms, than say the median peasant in rural 1700s France, or even in 1900s France.
  - Jeff_Brown 2y ago
yonaguska 2y ago
> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously) legally no, practically- yes. In most states, you simply must attest that you are a citizen in order to register. In many states, non-citizens have been auto-registered to vote when attaining drivers licenses. Reddit is full of panicked immigrants concerned that they found themselves registered to vote, and worried about how that would affect their status.
charlieyu1 2y ago
> Who Gets To Decide What is True? Outsourced workers in less expensive places of the world providing human feedback.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
> I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Well, outside of matters of stark factuality (what time does the library close?, what did MSFT close at?), many things people may be "searching for" (i.e. trying to find information about) are more in the realm of informed opinion and summary where there is no right or wrong, just a bunch of viewpoints, some probably better informed than others. I think this is the value of traditional search where the result is a link to a specific page/source whose trustworthiness or degree of authority you can then judge (e.g. based on known reputation). For AI generated/summarized "search results", such as those from "ChatGPT Search" (awkward name - bit like a spork), the trustworthiness or degree of authority is only as good as the AI (not person) that generated it, and given today's state of technology where the "AI" is just an LLM (prone to hallucination, limited reasoning, etc), this is obviously a bit of an issue... Even in the future, when presumably human level AGI will have made LLMs obsolete, I think it'll still be useful to differentiate search from RAG AGI search/chat, since it'll still be useful to know the source. At that point the specific AGI might be regarded as a specific person, with it's own areas of expertise and biases. The name "ChatGPT Search" is very awkward - presumably they are trying to position this as a potential Google competitor and revenue generator (when the inevitable advertisements come), but at the end of the day it's just RAG.
wpietri 2y ago
You're right, this is a key question: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also responsible for what they say. But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker. I think we have a number of historical models for that. A relevant one is divination. If you bring your question to the haruspex, your answer is read out of the guts of a sacrificed animal. If the answer is wrong, who do you blame? The traditional answer is the gods, or perhaps nobody. Bu we know now that fortune tellers are just selling answers while pretending to not be responsible for them. Which points us at one solution: anybody selling or presenting LLM output as meaningful is legally responsible for the quality of the product. Unfortunately, another model is the modern corporation. Sometimes the people in a company intentionally lie. More often, statements are made by one person based on a vision or optimism or confusion or bullshit. Nobody set out to lie, but nobody really cared about the truth, at least not as much as everybody cared about making money. So I'd agree that the government doesn't have much role in deciding The Truth. Similarly, the government shouldn't have much role in controlling what you eat. But in both cases, I think there's plenty of role for the government in ensuring that companies selling good food or good information have sound production and quality control measures to ensure that they are delivering what consumers are expecting.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  > But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker. Well, it's still a known source, who's competence, biases, etc one can judge just like any human source.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    It's absolutely not like any human source, and there's little reason to think its competencies and biases are anything like humans.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      I didn't say it has the same competencies and biases as any human - I said we can judge it on it's individual merits, the same way we judge any human on theirs.
Forgeties79 2y ago
I don’t know who should get to decide “what is true” but I think we all agree that we won’t get anything remotely akin to truth so long as search is driven by for-profit interests trying to steer us towards their products first and our actual query (a distant) second.
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Non-citizens cannot vote in FEDERAL elections, but some states allow them to vote in LOCAL elections. There are few more restrictions here: https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  It'd make sense if paying taxes gave you the right to vote. Taxation without representation and all that.
  - schnable 2y ago
    Non-citizens/residents are the juiciest targets for taxes (tourism taxes at hotels and whatnot, pumped up taxes on restaurants/alcohol)! This actually makes no sense at all.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      Sales taxes levied on visitors can be justified as different, but it seems unfair to level income taxes, or real estate taxes, without any right to vote over how those taxes are spent, especially in the case of legal non-citizen residents.
jacobr1 2y ago
I think this presents an approach: move closer to the search engine model. In both academic writing an news journalism, factual claims try to cite their sources. And you can see this is an approach that some of the chat systems have directionally gone. We don't want to always pedantically cite a reference for every question. But maybe we should? At least at an architectural level and let the UX decide if it should be displayed. > in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote According Author X in Book Y which studied this topic in depth: foo answer
stefek99 2y ago
> "Who Gets To Decide What Is True?" Independent Tribunal: https://www.independenttribunal.org/ https://www.independenttribunal.org/ (a project of mine) Even in the of law there are various schenanigans and loopholes such as "legally true" :)
webninja 2y ago
> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). This doesn’t have a single truthful answer. Some states don’t have voter ID laws, so the truth can depend on the state. In those no voter ID laws there’s not that much keeping someone from voting twice or more under different names, except significant moral qualms about subverting instead of preserving everyone else’s right to vote in a democratic republic. Someone can assume the name of a person from another country that could’ve plausibly come in illegally. Without a picture ID, they can’t claim you aren’t that persons. Can an illegal immigrant vote? Yes, in states without voter ID laws, technically anyone can vote, even convicted terrorists. Should an illegal immigrant vote? No, they’re not supposed to be able to vote and there may be consequences if caught. What purpose do a lack of voter ID laws serve except the obvious conclusion which is to enable cheating?
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  That isn’t true. They do have voter registration, and they match name addresses that are cross them off, a name can’t vote twice. MAGA types who wanted to prove democrats could cheat like this were caught very quickly because voting twice or voting for someone else is very very easy to detect, even without IDs. The judges gave them Darwin awards. Unregistered voters can’t vote in any state, they can only do so by pretending to be someone else (name and address matches the rolls), but they are caught when those people actually vote. Foreigners can also vote by illegally registering. But motor voter means they actually check your status at registration. The ID thing is a solution to a non-problem, like literacy tests were. But the republicans could make it easier to achieve universally if they just went with a guaranteed free national ID like other countries, except that would make the obstruction aspect of voter ID requirements much more moot, so they never go there. Foreign residents can vote in some local election in a few places, mainly very local school board elections.
afh1 2y ago
Unfortunately most people seem comfortable with the idea of a Ministry of Truth, at least here in Brazil and from what I read on the web, in many parts of the world also.

dataflow 2y ago

> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously) Er, no, the meaning of the question is ambiguous, so I'm not sure "has a single truthful answer" is accurate. What does "can" mean? If you mean "permitted", then no. But if you mean can they vote anyway and get away with it? It's clearly happened before (as rare as it might have been), so technically the answer to that would be be yes.

bruce511 2y ago
This is a fundamental limitation of language. The LLM is likely to provide a good answer here even though the question is technically ambiguous, because it likes verbose answers. Equally "can" is used to substitute for other precise words. Humans are good at inferring context, and if someone asked me "can illegals vote" I'd say "no". Just like if someone said "can you pass the salt" I pass the salt, I don't say "yes". If the inferred context US wrong then the "truth" is wrong, but as with talking to humans it's possible to refine context with a follow up question.
- dataflow 2y ago
  To clarify: I wasn't making a pedantic linguistic point here. The fact is that when I first read the question, I actually thought it was asking "are illegal immigrants able to cast a vote (regardless of legality)?" It literally did not even (initially) occur to me that the question might be asking about legality, because the entire modern political discourse surrounding illegal immigrants and voting has been with regards to whether they can cast votes despite not legally being allowed to. The answer to "is this legal" would have been such an obvious "no" to people on both sides of the debate --- and thus the question so silly --- that initially it didn't occur to me that the intended question might have been about legality, until I continued reading the comment and realized that was the intention after all.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    I think that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible. But I feel optimizing for lazy question phrasing is infantilizing the userbase and assuming they're incapable of learning how to ask more precise questions. Which is an endemic problem in the modern web. We should be building systems with low barriers to simple adoption, but whose power scales with a user's expertise. Instead, we're hyperoptimizing for lowest common denominator, first interaction and as a result putting a glass ceiling on system power.
    - photonthug 2y ago
      > that would be Google's approach, before they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives: that question intent can best be inferred by knowing as much about the asker as possible. I’d rephrase it: this was googles approach because they were waylaid by ad revenue incentives. Why does everyone assume the search bubble is a well intentioned accident? The linguistic arguments about the nature of truth above don’t cut it for me as any justification that the answer depends on who is asking. If we’re telling chemists that oil and water do mix as mentioned elsewhere in thread, we should probably tell the same to children and just make a slider for the level of additional detail. No problem. Especially if the alternative is a dystopic post truth panopticon. > systems whose power scales with expertise Couldn’t agree more that this is what we want/need, but disagree about infantilizing user bases and lowest common denominator. Platform’s aren’t trying to scale user power with expertise, they want to scale revenue with users, and separately, to deliberately restrict user power/control so that platforms decide what users see. And it’s not necessarily political or linguistic or about the nature of truth. A simple example of this that’s everywhere is filtering content by sub genre tags. Ever notice that you often see niche content tags like “time-travel” or “mind-bending” but can’t click it? Platforms want the tags for internal analytics naturally, but they want the control of not providing it as a filter, forcing users instead into a fuzzier category like “people also watched” or “top ten this week”. Why? Because platforms can hide advertised content there, push stuff they pay less license fees for, make operations cheaper with caching, or whatever else.
XorNot 2y ago
If they got away with it then how do you know it's happened?
- coredog64 2y ago
  Obviously off-topic, but see the recent case of the Chinese student who illegally voted and then turned himself in.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- coldtea 2y ago
  To answer the general question, of "if somebody got away with X, how can we know it happened?": If somebody robbed a bank at gunpoint and was never caught, can we know it happened? Obviously yes. What if somebody "merely" embezzled from one, and there's a "hole" found in the banks books and money missing, but nobody who did it or how? Still, I'd wager yes, one coudl tell by the results. What if somebody used illegal means to get leverage on some stock buying/selling, it became know, but they weren't punished and got to keep their profits? They got away with it, but we do know it happened.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    None of those are voting. If someone cast a ballot who was not allowed to, then how do you know it's happened if they weren't caught? What is this assertion being based on other then vibes?
    - SauntSolaire 2y ago
      Well, after the fact it's realized the person whose name is on the ballot had been dead for months, and you didn't catch who cast the vote because you don't know who they are. Or a million other scenarios. Really all it takes is stopping to think about it for more than a minute.
    - 2y ago
marcus_holmes 2y ago
At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole... As I understand it, only citizens are legally entitled to vote, and voting requires a government-issued ID and the voter to be enrolled. How did they vote and get away with it previously? (also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?)
- dataflow 2y ago
  > (also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?) Is it possible to steal money from a bank and get away with it? Is it possible to obtain citizenship fraudulently and get away with it? etc. But if they got away with it then how do you know? > How did they vote and get away with it previously? Look it up on Wikipedia? They literally have linked cases from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States#Noncitizen_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_... Or look at the most recent case in the news yesterday, which someone already replied with in the other comment: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/30/chinese-university-of-michigan-college-student-voted-presidential-election-michigan-china-benson/75936701007/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/20... > At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole... This will definitely derail the conversation so I'll just leave my reply at this.
  - panarky 2y ago
    It's quite clear that the question is not whether it is possible that an insignificant number of votes are cast fraudulently, because if we're talking about insignificant events, all things are possible. Certainly the question is whether there's any evidence, after endless audits and investigations and lawsuits, that the volume of fraudulent votes is anywhere near large enough to affect the results. Is it possible that someone registered their hamster to vote? Certainly. Is there any evidence whatsoever that tens of thousands of hamsters are casting votes? No.
    - 2y ago
johndubchak 2y ago
I'm no linguist, but the question does seem unambiguous, or quite clear, to a reasonable observer. The context is "voting in a US election" AND the subject is "an illegal immigrant" WITH an assumption that the illegal immigrant has, in fact, illegally emigrated to the US.

judahmeek 2y ago

> We're seeing how that pans out in Australia and it's not good. How are we seeing how that pans out when Australia's misinformation bill is still just a proposal?

marcus_holmes 2y ago
Fair point. I think just that there's a general acceptance that "something must be done" and that the government are the people to do it is pretty alarming. It's a short step from here to a Ministry of Truth, and I can see Australia taking that step pretty soon.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  What is a not-alarming answer to “Who gets to decide what’s true?”
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    I don't know. We used to defer this to journalists, effectively. While individual journalists often lied and misrepresented the truth, there was some responsibility within the industry to tell the truth, and newspapers did print retractions and corrections when they got it wrong. The editorial content was strictly separate from the business of running the newspaper, so editorial decisions were (mostly) not influenced by commercial decisions and free to pursue The Truth as they saw it. That, sadly, is no longer the case. And we have no good replacement for it.
    - phatfish 2y ago
      There is no incentive to be truthful currently, among democracies the seems to be most powerful in the US with Trump able to lie and there seemingly be no counter for it. With old regulated media there was (is?) the legacy of the organisation and the idea it was "trustworthy" on the line for the journalists that work for it. So they have an incentive to be truthful, and hopefully an idea that publishing lies is not a good moral choice. With the personality driven journalism that emerges from the internet there is less incentive to be truthful, such personalities can be very successful using populism alone to play to their audience.

parpfish 2y ago

I was thinking something similar. I like the google auto-ai summary for little trivia facts and objective things (who played so and so in the movie? How heavy is a gallon of milk?) this is stuff that is verifiable and could theoretically just be queried from some sort of knowledge base. But for anything remotely subjective, context dependent, or time sensitive I need to know the source. And this isn’t just for hot button political stuff — there’s all sorts of questions like “is the weather good this weekend?”, “Are puffy jackets cool again?”, “How much should I spend on a vacation?”

ethbr1 2y ago
> could theoretically just be queried from some sort of knowledge base Google bought Freebase in 2010 [0] and scaled it [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Knowledge_Graph
admksx45v65uqpw 2y ago
[dead]

gonzobonzo 2y ago

> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer. There are many jurisdictions where some illegal immigrants (Dreamers) are allowed to vote, including New York City[1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-allows-non-citizens-vote-controversial-law https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-all...

ethbr1 2y ago
>> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" > More than 800,000 non-citizens and “Dreamers” could vote in New York City municipal elections Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections).
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  > Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections). I strongly disagree. Going by your interpretation, the question "How many people in the USA vote in local elections?" would have the answer "not a single person."
  - coldtea 2y ago
    Your version of the question has the qualifier "in local elections". The parent's version doesn't, so the answer assuming that it talks about the main USA elections, and not local or any random election that just happen to be conducted in the USA, is quite valid. In other words "in the USA elections" implicitly points to a specific kind of elections (the presidential ones), different to "USA local elections" or "any kind of election within the USA"). You might argue "in the USA elections" doesn't anywhere prevent the more generic interpretation, but I argue that that's how most people would understand and answer such a question.
    - 2y ago

panarky 2y ago

> An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer. LLMs don't uncritically "trawl" the web, ingesting and then blindly regurgitating what they find. 98% of the internet is crap, yet LLM results don't reflect this dismal figure. They're amazingly good at distilling the 2% that is non-crap.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
Sure. Probably trawling was the wrong word and conveyed a technically-inaccurate meaning. I'm not sure what the correct word would be.

lazerlapin 2y ago

> A better example might be "is dietary saturated fat a major factor for heart disease in Western countries?". The current government publications (which answer "yes") for this are probably wrong based on recent research. The government cannot be relied upon as a source of truth for this. I know it was just an example, but actually no, the role of dietary saturated fat as a factor for heart disease remains very much valid. I’m not sure which recent studies you’re referring to, but you can't undo over 50 years of research on the subject so easily. What study were you thinking about?

newsclues 2y ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794145/ Remarkable how easy it is to cling to propaganda
- themk 2y ago
  Nina Teicholz being the distributor of this propaganda right?
- dahart 2y ago
  I wasn’t aware of the new debate over saturated fats, I’m curious and will be watching this evolve with interest. That said, for me this publication has red flags right from the start. Complaining about difficulty of changing everyone’s minds is a political and non-academic persuasion tactic that does not convince me. Calling it “resistance” and “bias” is a bullshit framing that makes me less likely to trust Teicholz. Of course there is resistance to 50 years of publication and research, and there should be. There’s a lot of bias towards the earth being round, and a lot of resistance to the idea that it’s flat, right? If I repeat the claim that the earth is round, is that “propaganda”? It would indeed take time and effort to change everyone’s minds about that. Multiple times she references “>20” papers that back up her claims. Except 5 of her references in this paper are her own. And she has around 10 on this subject. So is she claiming this “new consensus” is based on what she herself and maybe one or two other people believe? If 50% of the evidence for consensus is her own papers, then I doubt there’s any consensus at all. It’s funny to claim there’s consensus at the same time she complains that it’s difficult to change the consensus. Even 20 independent scientific papers not authored by Teicholz is practically nothing in the big picture. It will take many more papers and much more time, and the evidence needs to be overwhelming, clear, obvious, and true. She might be right! But Nina Teicholz is a journalist, not a scientist. She does have a PhD, but her publications don’t appear to be scientific research, and most look like opinion pieces. Out of curiosity, if saturated fats aren’t the culprit, what is? Looks like she does have one paper questioning sugar, so is she claiming sugar is the real cause? What if it’s the combination of sugar and saturated fats? Does that make her right or wrong?

jstummbillig 2y ago

> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked I don't think this appropriately credits Google's power with regards to what you are seeing

senko 2y ago

This nails it: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? I would not agree to this however: > It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, With current search engines, Google decides for you ("helped" by SEO experts failing over themselves to rank higher because their revenue directly depends on it). In theory, you could go an read a few dozen pages and decide for yourself. In reality, non-technical users will click on a first link that seems to be related to the question, and that's it. Even with AI-based search (or q/a instead of search) I think the same will happen. There is and will be a huge reward for gaming the results, be they page links or RAG snippets that rank for a query. I've already seen many SEO shops advertising their strategies to keep the customers' business relevant in the chatbot area. As this approach becomes more prevalent, you can be sure many smart people will do many experiments to figure out how best to please the new algorithm. In other words, AI-based search is an UX optimization, but doesn't address the core problem of how do you decide what content's the best, and do that in context of each user, and do that while maximizing the benefit for the user vs profit for the company doing this. So we have two huge hurdles: 1. who will decide what the user wants[0] to see, and how are incentives for that entity aligned with the user's 2. how is that entity supposed to find the information needle in the haystack of slop that's 90%+ of current web? [0] "wants" in a rational "give me the best possible information" meaning, not in "what keeps them addicted, their heart rate up, and what will drive engagement" meaning

foobarian 2y ago
Ultimately it's an incentive problem. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

shmel 2y ago

What is truth anyway? I see it as a quicker version of browsing to web to get a summary of what people say. As you said, with search you get a bunch of websites where strangers talk about a certain topic. You read a dozen and see if they agree with each other or if they sound legit.. There is just a huge overlap between what we consider true and what (an overwhelming majority of) people agree on. A lot of things are reduced to the consensus. If you ask a non-obvious question, you usually get an answer "a lot of people you consider trustworthy dedicated some time studying this question and agreed that the answer is X". But then people can be wrong, a big group of people can be wrong, people can be bribed or perhaps you don't actually trust these people that much. The internet can't tell you the truth. LLM can't tell you the truth. But they can summarize what other people in the world say on this subject.

grobbyy 2y ago

For the record, in my local elections, we have plenty of people voting illegally. "Is it legal" is very different from "Can they." By "local," I mean municipal and below. I didn't mean "federal elections conducted in my locality." Election security kicks for state, federal, and some municipal elections. Others are intentionally fraudulent (e.g. local corruption) or unintentionally broken (e.g. using Google Forms for a school-level public body, where people not legally qualified to vote might still do it, unaware they're committing a felony). And "public body" has a specific meaning under my state law which extends the same laws as e.g. cutting for my state senate. That's bodies like local school boards, but not random school clubs. That's the level where we have massive illegal voting where I live.

adamhp 2y ago

> With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. It is very similar. Google decides what to present to you on the front page. I'm sure there are metrics on how few people get past the front page. Heck, isn't this just Google Search's business model? Determining what you see (i.e. what is "true") via ads? In much the same way that the Councils of Carthage chose to omit the acts of Paul and Thecla in the New Testament, all modern technology providers have some say in what is presented to the global information network, more or less manipulating what we all perceive to be true. Recently advancements have just made this problem much more apparent to us. But look at history and see how few women priests there are in various Christian churches and you'll notice even a small omission can have broad impacts to society.

jumping_frog 2y ago
This is true of the feeds and everything else where there are abundant choices. Amazon putting its inhouse brands before others. Anything which has to be narrowed down is an algorithmic choice, either data driven or top-down.

krageon 2y ago

The truth isn't a decision that's made, it just is. So nobody gets to decide it, it just is :)

belter 2y ago

> Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Seems particularly to be a US based phenomenon. Unlike the more transparent manipulation seen under dictatorships... Where people generally recognize propaganda for what it is, even if they can’t openly challenge it—some in USA live within entirely new realities.

chrisan 2y ago
Definitely a US based phenomenon, but sadly like other US based things it spreads to other countries. I talk with friends in CA and EU who are seeing some of the junk we saw 10 years ago with "what is fact" You would think common sense prevails...
- recursive 2y ago
  > You would think common sense prevails... Appeals to common sense seem to underlie many of the "alternative facts" in the zeitgeist. "Common sense" is how people defend their views when they can't do it empirically. That's not always bad, but "common sense" is probably part of the problem.
azangru 2y ago
I disagree with this. Strongly. Remember the covid years, when what was true kept changing rapidly, and sometimes what was said on the fringe and considered misinformation was later adopted by mainstream. Vaccines prevent transmission of the virus. Oh no they don't. Don't wear masks. Oh no, do wear masks. Oh, whatever, cloth masks are face decorations anyway. Lockdowns are good. Oh, lockdowns were a mistake. Don't treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Oh, do treat pneumonia patients with prednisone. Lab leak is a conspiracy theory. Oh, maybe lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. And so on, and so forth... Or take a look at how not just the media, but even the government in the UK or Canada liberally put labels such as "far right", "alt right", "antisemitic", etc. on their opponents, and how these labels pop up in Wikipedia. Are they true?
marcus_holmes 2y ago
I'm not in the USA and I see this a lot too. It's not just a US-based thing.

williamcotton 2y ago

"Are all bachelors married?" vs "is it raining outside?" And then Quine points out that the definitions of "bachelor" and "married" are themselves contingent on outside factors. "Can illegal immigrants vote?", while close to being an analytic proposition, still depends on an empirical approach that can never be mediated by text, video, etc. All propositions are by necessity experiential. Nullius in verba! So the truth is and has always been what happens when you get off your butt and go out and test the world. This is not to say that we don't benefit from language. It makes for a great recipe. If you follow the instructions to bake a cake and you get what you expected you know that the recipe was true. The same goes for the laws of science, search engine results, and generative AI.

the__alchemist 2y ago

Neal Stephenson's book _Fall, or; Dodge in Hell_, from 2019, dedicates many words to this concept. Briefly summarized, it explores a post-truth-world, describing the world where people could agree on the truth as a narrow time-slice in history. People have their own individual internet filters, and the USA becomes divided into Afghanistan-etc-like tribes, each an echo chamber. (Ameristan)

komali2 2y ago
Hah, I'm not the only one that brings up this book in this context. The way this is wrought, in the novel, is a savant engineer writes a bot framework that can cheaply and quickly disseminate torrents of misinformation about a provided subject, and then open sources this framework. He basically broke the internet on purpose as a sort of accelerationist move I suppose.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Not sure if that's better or worse than a developer doing basically the same thing because they could make a little money. <at_least_its_an_ethos.gif>
halfcat 2y ago
In the book, “The Big Change” (1952), Frederick Allen talks about the year 1900, and (among many differences) he notes that for nearly everyone in the year 1900, the limits of their world rarely extended beyond their own town. We have this idea today that everyone online is getting trapped in echo chambers, but that’s been the case for most of human history.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  If anything considering how vastly more complex things are nowadays (behind superficial appearances), the median adult is likely even more ignorant, in relative terms, than say the median peasant in rural 1700s France, or even in 1900s France.
- Jeff_Brown 2y ago

yonaguska 2y ago

> "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously) legally no, practically- yes. In most states, you simply must attest that you are a citizen in order to register. In many states, non-citizens have been auto-registered to vote when attaining drivers licenses. Reddit is full of panicked immigrants concerned that they found themselves registered to vote, and worried about how that would affect their status.

charlieyu1 2y ago

> Who Gets To Decide What is True? Outsourced workers in less expensive places of the world providing human feedback.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

> I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? Well, outside of matters of stark factuality (what time does the library close?, what did MSFT close at?), many things people may be "searching for" (i.e. trying to find information about) are more in the realm of informed opinion and summary where there is no right or wrong, just a bunch of viewpoints, some probably better informed than others. I think this is the value of traditional search where the result is a link to a specific page/source whose trustworthiness or degree of authority you can then judge (e.g. based on known reputation). For AI generated/summarized "search results", such as those from "ChatGPT Search" (awkward name - bit like a spork), the trustworthiness or degree of authority is only as good as the AI (not person) that generated it, and given today's state of technology where the "AI" is just an LLM (prone to hallucination, limited reasoning, etc), this is obviously a bit of an issue... Even in the future, when presumably human level AGI will have made LLMs obsolete, I think it'll still be useful to differentiate search from RAG AGI search/chat, since it'll still be useful to know the source. At that point the specific AGI might be regarded as a specific person, with it's own areas of expertise and biases. The name "ChatGPT Search" is very awkward - presumably they are trying to position this as a potential Google competitor and revenue generator (when the inevitable advertisements come), but at the end of the day it's just RAG.

wpietri 2y ago

You're right, this is a key question: > Who Gets To Decide What Is True? For any given statement, the answer up until a couple years ago was, "the speaker". Speakers get to decide what to say, but they're also responsible for what they say. But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker. I think we have a number of historical models for that. A relevant one is divination. If you bring your question to the haruspex, your answer is read out of the guts of a sacrificed animal. If the answer is wrong, who do you blame? The traditional answer is the gods, or perhaps nobody. Bu we know now that fortune tellers are just selling answers while pretending to not be responsible for them. Which points us at one solution: anybody selling or presenting LLM output as meaningful is legally responsible for the quality of the product. Unfortunately, another model is the modern corporation. Sometimes the people in a company intentionally lie. More often, statements are made by one person based on a vision or optimism or confusion or bullshit. Nobody set out to lie, but nobody really cared about the truth, at least not as much as everybody cared about making money. So I'd agree that the government doesn't have much role in deciding The Truth. Similarly, the government shouldn't have much role in controlling what you eat. But in both cases, I think there's plenty of role for the government in ensuring that companies selling good food or good information have sound production and quality control measures to ensure that they are delivering what consumers are expecting.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
> But now with LLMs we have plausible text without a speaker. Well, it's still a known source, who's competence, biases, etc one can judge just like any human source.
- wpietri 2y ago
  It's absolutely not like any human source, and there's little reason to think its competencies and biases are anything like humans.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    I didn't say it has the same competencies and biases as any human - I said we can judge it on it's individual merits, the same way we judge any human on theirs.

Forgeties79 2y ago

I don’t know who should get to decide “what is true” but I think we all agree that we won’t get anything remotely akin to truth so long as search is driven by for-profit interests trying to steer us towards their products first and our actual query (a distant) second.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

Non-citizens cannot vote in FEDERAL elections, but some states allow them to vote in LOCAL elections. There are few more restrictions here: https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
It'd make sense if paying taxes gave you the right to vote. Taxation without representation and all that.
- schnable 2y ago
  Non-citizens/residents are the juiciest targets for taxes (tourism taxes at hotels and whatnot, pumped up taxes on restaurants/alcohol)! This actually makes no sense at all.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    Sales taxes levied on visitors can be justified as different, but it seems unfair to level income taxes, or real estate taxes, without any right to vote over how those taxes are spent, especially in the case of legal non-citizen residents.

jacobr1 2y ago

I think this presents an approach: move closer to the search engine model. In both academic writing an news journalism, factual claims try to cite their sources. And you can see this is an approach that some of the chat systems have directionally gone. We don't want to always pedantically cite a reference for every question. But maybe we should? At least at an architectural level and let the UX decide if it should be displayed. > in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote According Author X in Book Y which studied this topic in depth: foo answer

stefek99 2y ago

> "Who Gets To Decide What Is True?" Independent Tribunal: https://www.independenttribunal.org/ https://www.independenttribunal.org/ (a project of mine) Even in the of law there are various schenanigans and loopholes such as "legally true" :)

webninja 2y ago

> To paraphrase a recent conversation I had with a friend: "in the USA, can illegal immigrants vote?" has a single truthful answer ("no" obviously). But there are many places around the web saying other things (which is why my friend was confused). This doesn’t have a single truthful answer. Some states don’t have voter ID laws, so the truth can depend on the state. In those no voter ID laws there’s not that much keeping someone from voting twice or more under different names, except significant moral qualms about subverting instead of preserving everyone else’s right to vote in a democratic republic. Someone can assume the name of a person from another country that could’ve plausibly come in illegally. Without a picture ID, they can’t claim you aren’t that persons. Can an illegal immigrant vote? Yes, in states without voter ID laws, technically anyone can vote, even convicted terrorists. Should an illegal immigrant vote? No, they’re not supposed to be able to vote and there may be consequences if caught. What purpose do a lack of voter ID laws serve except the obvious conclusion which is to enable cheating?

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
That isn’t true. They do have voter registration, and they match name addresses that are cross them off, a name can’t vote twice. MAGA types who wanted to prove democrats could cheat like this were caught very quickly because voting twice or voting for someone else is very very easy to detect, even without IDs. The judges gave them Darwin awards. Unregistered voters can’t vote in any state, they can only do so by pretending to be someone else (name and address matches the rolls), but they are caught when those people actually vote. Foreigners can also vote by illegally registering. But motor voter means they actually check your status at registration. The ID thing is a solution to a non-problem, like literacy tests were. But the republicans could make it easier to achieve universally if they just went with a guaranteed free national ID like other countries, except that would make the obstruction aspect of voter ID requirements much more moot, so they never go there. Foreign residents can vote in some local election in a few places, mainly very local school board elections.

afh1 2y ago

Unfortunately most people seem comfortable with the idea of a Ministry of Truth, at least here in Brazil and from what I read on the web, in many parts of the world also.