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If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full s

If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full support. The entire space is just bad actors complaining about other bad actors while they're collectively ruining the web for everyone, each in their own way.

7bit 1y ago
Thats naive. Look at all the tabloids thriving. The kind of people that bad actors target will continue to believe everything it says. They won't lose trust, or magazines like New York Post, the Sun or BILD would already have crossed to exist with their lies and deception. And Russia would not have so many cult members believing the lies they spread.
imiric 1y ago
Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable, there will be many stories like this one, and a lot of people will be scammed, manipulated, and harmed. It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. All while the wealthy and powerful continue to reap the benefits, while those on slightly lower rungs fight to take their place. And even if the public perception shifts, the power might be so concentrated that it could be impossible to dislodge it without violent means. What a glorious future we've built.
- LilBytes 1y ago
  The tragic part of fraud is it's not too different to operational health and safety. The rules and standards we take for granted were built with blood, for fraud? It's built on the path of lost livelihoods and manipulated gold intent.
  - pyman 1y ago
    How do you know this is fraud and not the actions of former employees in Kenya [1] who were exploited [2] to train the models? [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-work-kenya-exploitation-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-work-kenya-exploitation-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
- autoexec 1y ago
  > It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. The only thing I'm seeing offline are people who already think AI is trash, untrustworthy, and harmful, while also occasionally being convenient when the stakes are extremely low (random search results mostly) or as a fun toy ("Look I'm a ghibli character!") I don't think it'll take long for the masses to sour to AI and the more aggressively it's pushed on them by companies, or the more it negatively impacts their life when someone they depend on and should know better uses it and it screws up the quicker that'll happen.
  - tokioyoyo 1y ago
    Counter data point — my surroundings use ChatGPT basically for anything and say it’s good enough.
    - glotzerhotze 1y ago
      Same here, people use it like google for searching answers. It‘s a shortcut for them to not have to screen results and reason about them.
      - amalcon 1y ago
        This is precisely the problem: users still need to screen and reason about results of LLMs. I am not sure what is generating this implied permission structure, but it does seem to exist. (I don't mean to imply that parent doesn't know this, it just seems worth saying explicitly)
        tokioyoyo 1y ago
        It’s only a problem for people who care about its precision. If it’s right about 80-90% of stuff, it’s good enough.
    - Lu2025 1y ago
      > say it’s good enough How do they know?
- k__ 1y ago
  But people were also hating about media piracy, video games, and the internet in general. The dotcom bubble popped, but the general consensus didn't become negative.
  - imiric 1y ago
    Sure. I was referring more to the general consensus about products from companies that are currently riding the AI hype train, not about machine learning in general. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and after the video game crash in 1983, most of the companies within the bubble folded, and those that didn't took a large hit and barely managed to survive. If the technology has genuine use cases then the market can recover, but it takes a while to earn back the trust from consumers, and the products after the crash are much more practical and are marketed more fairly. So I do think that machine learning has many potentially revolutionary applications, but we're currently still high around the Peak of Inflated Expectations. After the bubble pops, the Plateau of Productivity will showcase the applications with actual value and benefit to humanity. I just hope we get there sooner rather than later.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  We got the boring version of the cyberpunk future. No cool body mods, neon city scapes and space travel. Just megacorps manipulating the masses to their benefit.
  - tclancy 1y ago
    In retrospect, it should have been obvious. I guess I should have known it would all be more Repo Man than Blade Runner. I just didn’t imagine so many people cheering for the non-Wolverines side in Red Dawn. (Now I want to change the Blade Runner reference to something with Harry Dean Stanton in it just for consistency)
  - filoeleven 1y ago
    The cool body mods are coming! The work at the Levin Lab ( https://drmichaellevin.org/ https://drmichaellevin.org/ ) is making great progress in the basic science that supports this. They can make two-headed planaria, regenerate frog limbs, cure cancer in tadpoles; all via bioelectric communication with cellular networks. No gene editing. Levin believes this stuff will be very available to humans within the next 10 years, and has talked about how widespread body-modding is something we're going to have to wrestle with societally. He is of course very close to the work, but his cautious nature and the lab's astounding results give that 10-year prediction some weight. From his blog: > We were all born into physical and mental limitations that were set at arbitrary levels by chance and genetics. Even those who have “perfect” standard human health and capabilities are limited by anatomical decisions that were not made with anyone’s well-being or fulfillment in mind. I consider it to be a core right of sentient beings to (if they wish) move beyond the involuntary vagaries of their birth and alter their form and function in whatever way suits their personal goals and potential.- Copied from https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/ https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > cellular networks I often like to point out--satisfying a contrarian streak--that our original human equipment is literally the most mind-bogglingly complicated nanotechnology beyond our understanding, packed with dozens of incredible features we cannot imitate with circuits or chrome. So as much as I like the aesthetics of cyberpunk metal arms, keeping our OEM parts is better. If we need metal bodies at a construction site, let them be remote-controlled bodies that stay there for the next shift to use.
- morngn 1y ago
  The bubble won’t pop on anything that’s correlated with scammers. Exhibit A: bitcoin. The problem is not one of public knowledge or will of the people, it’s congress being irresponsible because it’s captured by the 2 parties. You can’t politicize scamming in a way that benefits either party so nothing happens. And the scammers themselves may be big donors (eg SBF’s ties to the dem party, certain ai players purchase of Trump’s favor with respect to their business interests, etc). Scammers all the way down.
  - imiric 1y ago
    Good point. I suppose that if grifters can get in positions of power, then the bubble can just keep growing. Though cryptocurrencies are slightly different because of how they work. They're inherently decentralized, so even though there have been many smaller bubble pops along the way (Mt. Gox, FTX, NFTs, every shitcoin rug pull, etc.), inevitably more will appear with different promises, attracting others interested in potential riches. I don't think the technology as a whole will ever burst, particularly because I do think there are valid and useful applications of it. Bitcoin in particular is here to stay. It will just keep attracting grifters and victims, just like any other mainstream technology.
    - morngn 1y ago
      “Bitcoin in particular is here to stay.” It’s here to stay not because it solves a legitimate problem or makes people’s lives better, but because like cancer, there is no cure. Bitcoin and other crypto are for crime, mostly. It’s not useable as actual money given volatility and other properties. Grandmothers having their life savings stolen by scammers to the tune of 10s of billions annually, that is the primary use case for bitcoin. That and churning out a handful of SBF style gamer turned politically connected billionaires. Nakamoto was smart enough to remain anonymous, lest history remember his name as the person responsible.
- thunky 1y ago
  > Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable Curious what you think a popping bubble looks like? A stock market crash and recession, where innocent bystanders lose their retirements? Or only AI speculators taking the brunt of the losses? Will Google, Meta, etc stop investing in AI because nobody uses it post-crash? Or will it be just as prevalent (or more) than today but with profits concentrated in the winning/surviving companies?
  - imiric 1y ago
    We've seen this before in 1983 and 2000. Many companies will fold, and those that don't will take a substantial hit. The public sentiment about "AI" will sour, but after that a new breed of more practical tools will emerge under different and more fairly marketed branding. I do think that the industry and this technology will survive, and we'll enjoy many good applications of it, but it will take a few more years of hype and grifting to get there. Unless, of course, I'm entirely wrong and their predicted AI 2027 timeline[1] comes to pass, and we have ASI by the end of the decade, in which case the world will be much different. But I'm firmly in the skeptical camp about this, as it seems like another product of the hype machine. [1]: I just took a closer look at ai-2027.com and here's their prediction for 2029 in the conservative scenario: > Robots become commonplace. But also fusion power, quantum computers, and cures for many diseases. Peter Thiel finally gets his flying car. Cities become clean and safe. Even in developing countries, poverty becomes a thing of the past, thanks to UBI and foreign aid. Yeah, these people are full of shit.
    - thunky 1y ago
      > We've seen this before in 1983 and 2000. Many companies will fold, and those that don't will take a substantial hit. Makes sense, but if the negative effect of the bubble popping is largely limited to AI startups and speculators, while the rest of us keep enjoying the benefits of it, then I don't see why the average person should be too concerned about a bubble. In 2000, cab drivers were recommending tech stocks. I don't see this kindof thing happening today. > Yeah, these people are full of shit. I think it's fair to keep LLMs and AGI seperate when we're talking about "AI". LLMs can make a huge impact even if AGI never happens. We're already seeing now it imo. AI 2027 says: - Early 2026: Coding Automation - Late 2026: AI Takes Some Jobs These things are already happening today without AGI.
anal_reactor 1y ago
This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.
- grishka 1y ago
  The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
  - suspended_state 1y ago
    In the early days of the web, there wasn't much we could do with it other than making silly pages with blinking texts or under construction animated GIFs. You need to give it some time before judging a new technology.
    - andrepd 1y ago
      The internet predates the Web; people were playing Muds and chatting on message boards before the first browser was made at CERN.
      - suspended_state 1y ago
        Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone? I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
        andrepd 1y ago
        As I pointed out in a different comment, the Internet at least was (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. But LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hnlmorg 1y ago
If that outcome were likely, then Fox News and The Daily Mail would have died a death a decade ago and Trump wouldn’t be serving a 2nd term. Yet here we are, in a world where it doesn’t matter if “facts” are truth or lies, just as long as your target audience agrees with the sentiment.
- dilawar 1y ago
  Tobacco, alcohol, and drugs too!
azan_ 1y ago
> at which people lose trust in these systems Most of people do not lose trust in system as long as it confirms their biases (which they could've created in the first place).
3cats-in-a-coat 1y ago
AIs can be trained to rely more on critical thinking rather than just regurgitating what it reads. The problem is just like with people, critical thinking takes more power and time. So we avoid it as much as possible. In fact, optimizing for the wrong things like that, is basically the entire world's problem right now.
- bregma 1y ago
  Regurgitating its input is the only thing it does. It does not do any thinking, let alone critical thinking. It may give the illusion of thinking because it's been trained on thoughts. That's it.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    Yes, but the regurgitation can be thought of as memory. Let it have more source information. Let it know who said the things it reads, let it know on what website it was published. Then you can say 'Hallucinate comments like those by impossibleFork on news.ycombinator.com', and when the model knows what comes from where, maybe it can learn what users are reliable by which they should imitate to answer questions well. Strengthen the role of metadata during pretraining. I have no reason to belive it'll work, I haven't tried it and usually details are incredibly important when do things with machine learning, but maybe you could even have critical phases during pretraining where you try to prune away behaviours that aren't useful for figuring out the answers to the questions you have in your high curated golden datasets. Then models could throw away a lot of lies and bullshit, except that which happens to be on particularly LLM-pedagogical maths websites.
0x0203 1y ago
It's mostly bad actors, and a smattering of optimists who believe that despite its current problems, AI will eventually and inevitably get better. I also wish the whole thing would calm down and come back to reality, but I don't think it's a bubble that will pop. It will continue to get artificially puffed up for a while because too many businesses and people have invested too much for them to just quit (sunk cost falacy) and there's a big enough market in a certain class of writer/developer/etc... for which the short term benefits will justify the continued existence of the AI products for a while. My prediction is that as the long term benefits for honest users peter out, the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon. There will still be a big enough market driven by cons, ad tech and people trying to suck up as many ad dollars as possible, and other bad actors, that the tech will persist, and continue to infest the web/world for quite a while. AI is the new crypto. Lots of promise and big ideas, lots of people with blind faith about what it will one day become, a lot of people gaming the system for quick gains at the expense of others. But it never actually becomes what it pretends/promises to be and is filled with people continuing the grift trying to make a buck off the next guy. AI just has better marketing and more corporate buy in than crypto. But neither are going anywhere.
- contrast 1y ago
  “the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon” Love it :)
- tempodox 1y ago
  > AI is the new crypto. But it's also way worse than cryptocurrencies, because all the big actors are pushing it relentlessly, with every marketing trick they know. They have to, because they invested insane amounts of money into snake oil and now they have to sell it in order to recover at least a fraction of their investments. And the amounts of energy wasted on this ultimately pointless performance are beyond staggering.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    In what parallel universe do you live where LLMs are snake oil?
moomin 1y ago
The thing is: who benefits from a loss of trust in systems? The answer, inevitably, is those for whom the system was a problem. The fewer places people can trust for accurate information, the more disinformation wins.
cyanydeez 1y ago
If you use the USA Republicans as a benchmark and fox news as the bad actors, there's perpetual faith that facts wont matter. Just keep confirming biases and foreshadow upcoming pivots to choose your own delusions.
QuantumGood 1y ago
The "accelerate the end times" argument was probably made most famously by Charles Manson. The "side" effects from supporting bad actions are not good. Presumably you are being 51% or more facetious, but probably more nuance is preferable.
EasyMark 1y ago
It seems to be greedy actors vs bad actors currently. We'll see who comes out on top I suppose.
aryehof 1y ago
It’s surely more likely that such disinformation will become the new truth, rather than people losing trust in these systems?

7bit 1y ago

Thats naive. Look at all the tabloids thriving. The kind of people that bad actors target will continue to believe everything it says. They won't lose trust, or magazines like New York Post, the Sun or BILD would already have crossed to exist with their lies and deception. And Russia would not have so many cult members believing the lies they spread.

imiric 1y ago

Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable, there will be many stories like this one, and a lot of people will be scammed, manipulated, and harmed. It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. All while the wealthy and powerful continue to reap the benefits, while those on slightly lower rungs fight to take their place. And even if the public perception shifts, the power might be so concentrated that it could be impossible to dislodge it without violent means. What a glorious future we've built.

LilBytes 1y ago
The tragic part of fraud is it's not too different to operational health and safety. The rules and standards we take for granted were built with blood, for fraud? It's built on the path of lost livelihoods and manipulated gold intent.
- pyman 1y ago
  How do you know this is fraud and not the actions of former employees in Kenya [1] who were exploited [2] to train the models? [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-work-kenya-exploitation-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-work-kenya-exploitation-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
autoexec 1y ago
> It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. The only thing I'm seeing offline are people who already think AI is trash, untrustworthy, and harmful, while also occasionally being convenient when the stakes are extremely low (random search results mostly) or as a fun toy ("Look I'm a ghibli character!") I don't think it'll take long for the masses to sour to AI and the more aggressively it's pushed on them by companies, or the more it negatively impacts their life when someone they depend on and should know better uses it and it screws up the quicker that'll happen.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Counter data point — my surroundings use ChatGPT basically for anything and say it’s good enough.
  - glotzerhotze 1y ago
    Same here, people use it like google for searching answers. It‘s a shortcut for them to not have to screen results and reason about them.
    - amalcon 1y ago
      This is precisely the problem: users still need to screen and reason about results of LLMs. I am not sure what is generating this implied permission structure, but it does seem to exist. (I don't mean to imply that parent doesn't know this, it just seems worth saying explicitly)
      - tokioyoyo 1y ago
        It’s only a problem for people who care about its precision. If it’s right about 80-90% of stuff, it’s good enough.
  - Lu2025 1y ago
    > say it’s good enough How do they know?
k__ 1y ago
But people were also hating about media piracy, video games, and the internet in general. The dotcom bubble popped, but the general consensus didn't become negative.
- imiric 1y ago
  Sure. I was referring more to the general consensus about products from companies that are currently riding the AI hype train, not about machine learning in general. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and after the video game crash in 1983, most of the companies within the bubble folded, and those that didn't took a large hit and barely managed to survive. If the technology has genuine use cases then the market can recover, but it takes a while to earn back the trust from consumers, and the products after the crash are much more practical and are marketed more fairly. So I do think that machine learning has many potentially revolutionary applications, but we're currently still high around the Peak of Inflated Expectations. After the bubble pops, the Plateau of Productivity will showcase the applications with actual value and benefit to humanity. I just hope we get there sooner rather than later.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
We got the boring version of the cyberpunk future. No cool body mods, neon city scapes and space travel. Just megacorps manipulating the masses to their benefit.
- tclancy 1y ago
  In retrospect, it should have been obvious. I guess I should have known it would all be more Repo Man than Blade Runner. I just didn’t imagine so many people cheering for the non-Wolverines side in Red Dawn. (Now I want to change the Blade Runner reference to something with Harry Dean Stanton in it just for consistency)
- filoeleven 1y ago
  The cool body mods are coming! The work at the Levin Lab ( https://drmichaellevin.org/ https://drmichaellevin.org/ ) is making great progress in the basic science that supports this. They can make two-headed planaria, regenerate frog limbs, cure cancer in tadpoles; all via bioelectric communication with cellular networks. No gene editing. Levin believes this stuff will be very available to humans within the next 10 years, and has talked about how widespread body-modding is something we're going to have to wrestle with societally. He is of course very close to the work, but his cautious nature and the lab's astounding results give that 10-year prediction some weight. From his blog: > We were all born into physical and mental limitations that were set at arbitrary levels by chance and genetics. Even those who have “perfect” standard human health and capabilities are limited by anatomical decisions that were not made with anyone’s well-being or fulfillment in mind. I consider it to be a core right of sentient beings to (if they wish) move beyond the involuntary vagaries of their birth and alter their form and function in whatever way suits their personal goals and potential.- Copied from https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/ https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > cellular networks I often like to point out--satisfying a contrarian streak--that our original human equipment is literally the most mind-bogglingly complicated nanotechnology beyond our understanding, packed with dozens of incredible features we cannot imitate with circuits or chrome. So as much as I like the aesthetics of cyberpunk metal arms, keeping our OEM parts is better. If we need metal bodies at a construction site, let them be remote-controlled bodies that stay there for the next shift to use.
morngn 1y ago
The bubble won’t pop on anything that’s correlated with scammers. Exhibit A: bitcoin. The problem is not one of public knowledge or will of the people, it’s congress being irresponsible because it’s captured by the 2 parties. You can’t politicize scamming in a way that benefits either party so nothing happens. And the scammers themselves may be big donors (eg SBF’s ties to the dem party, certain ai players purchase of Trump’s favor with respect to their business interests, etc). Scammers all the way down.
- imiric 1y ago
  Good point. I suppose that if grifters can get in positions of power, then the bubble can just keep growing. Though cryptocurrencies are slightly different because of how they work. They're inherently decentralized, so even though there have been many smaller bubble pops along the way (Mt. Gox, FTX, NFTs, every shitcoin rug pull, etc.), inevitably more will appear with different promises, attracting others interested in potential riches. I don't think the technology as a whole will ever burst, particularly because I do think there are valid and useful applications of it. Bitcoin in particular is here to stay. It will just keep attracting grifters and victims, just like any other mainstream technology.
  - morngn 1y ago
    “Bitcoin in particular is here to stay.” It’s here to stay not because it solves a legitimate problem or makes people’s lives better, but because like cancer, there is no cure. Bitcoin and other crypto are for crime, mostly. It’s not useable as actual money given volatility and other properties. Grandmothers having their life savings stolen by scammers to the tune of 10s of billions annually, that is the primary use case for bitcoin. That and churning out a handful of SBF style gamer turned politically connected billionaires. Nakamoto was smart enough to remain anonymous, lest history remember his name as the person responsible.
thunky 1y ago
> Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable Curious what you think a popping bubble looks like? A stock market crash and recession, where innocent bystanders lose their retirements? Or only AI speculators taking the brunt of the losses? Will Google, Meta, etc stop investing in AI because nobody uses it post-crash? Or will it be just as prevalent (or more) than today but with profits concentrated in the winning/surviving companies?
- imiric 1y ago
  We've seen this before in 1983 and 2000. Many companies will fold, and those that don't will take a substantial hit. The public sentiment about "AI" will sour, but after that a new breed of more practical tools will emerge under different and more fairly marketed branding. I do think that the industry and this technology will survive, and we'll enjoy many good applications of it, but it will take a few more years of hype and grifting to get there. Unless, of course, I'm entirely wrong and their predicted AI 2027 timeline[1] comes to pass, and we have ASI by the end of the decade, in which case the world will be much different. But I'm firmly in the skeptical camp about this, as it seems like another product of the hype machine. [1]: I just took a closer look at ai-2027.com and here's their prediction for 2029 in the conservative scenario: > Robots become commonplace. But also fusion power, quantum computers, and cures for many diseases. Peter Thiel finally gets his flying car. Cities become clean and safe. Even in developing countries, poverty becomes a thing of the past, thanks to UBI and foreign aid. Yeah, these people are full of shit.
  - thunky 1y ago
    > We've seen this before in 1983 and 2000. Many companies will fold, and those that don't will take a substantial hit. Makes sense, but if the negative effect of the bubble popping is largely limited to AI startups and speculators, while the rest of us keep enjoying the benefits of it, then I don't see why the average person should be too concerned about a bubble. In 2000, cab drivers were recommending tech stocks. I don't see this kindof thing happening today. > Yeah, these people are full of shit. I think it's fair to keep LLMs and AGI seperate when we're talking about "AI". LLMs can make a huge impact even if AGI never happens. We're already seeing now it imo. AI 2027 says: - Early 2026: Coding Automation - Late 2026: AI Takes Some Jobs These things are already happening today without AGI.

anal_reactor 1y ago

This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.

grishka 1y ago
The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
- suspended_state 1y ago
  In the early days of the web, there wasn't much we could do with it other than making silly pages with blinking texts or under construction animated GIFs. You need to give it some time before judging a new technology.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    The internet predates the Web; people were playing Muds and chatting on message boards before the first browser was made at CERN.
    - suspended_state 1y ago
      Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone? I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
      - andrepd 1y ago
        As I pointed out in a different comment, the Internet at least was (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media. But LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

hnlmorg 1y ago

If that outcome were likely, then Fox News and The Daily Mail would have died a death a decade ago and Trump wouldn’t be serving a 2nd term. Yet here we are, in a world where it doesn’t matter if “facts” are truth or lies, just as long as your target audience agrees with the sentiment.

dilawar 1y ago
Tobacco, alcohol, and drugs too!

azan_ 1y ago

> at which people lose trust in these systems Most of people do not lose trust in system as long as it confirms their biases (which they could've created in the first place).

3cats-in-a-coat 1y ago

AIs can be trained to rely more on critical thinking rather than just regurgitating what it reads. The problem is just like with people, critical thinking takes more power and time. So we avoid it as much as possible. In fact, optimizing for the wrong things like that, is basically the entire world's problem right now.

bregma 1y ago
Regurgitating its input is the only thing it does. It does not do any thinking, let alone critical thinking. It may give the illusion of thinking because it's been trained on thoughts. That's it.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 1y ago
  [flagged]
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  Yes, but the regurgitation can be thought of as memory. Let it have more source information. Let it know who said the things it reads, let it know on what website it was published. Then you can say 'Hallucinate comments like those by impossibleFork on news.ycombinator.com', and when the model knows what comes from where, maybe it can learn what users are reliable by which they should imitate to answer questions well. Strengthen the role of metadata during pretraining. I have no reason to belive it'll work, I haven't tried it and usually details are incredibly important when do things with machine learning, but maybe you could even have critical phases during pretraining where you try to prune away behaviours that aren't useful for figuring out the answers to the questions you have in your high curated golden datasets. Then models could throw away a lot of lies and bullshit, except that which happens to be on particularly LLM-pedagogical maths websites.

0x0203 1y ago

It's mostly bad actors, and a smattering of optimists who believe that despite its current problems, AI will eventually and inevitably get better. I also wish the whole thing would calm down and come back to reality, but I don't think it's a bubble that will pop. It will continue to get artificially puffed up for a while because too many businesses and people have invested too much for them to just quit (sunk cost falacy) and there's a big enough market in a certain class of writer/developer/etc... for which the short term benefits will justify the continued existence of the AI products for a while. My prediction is that as the long term benefits for honest users peter out, the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon. There will still be a big enough market driven by cons, ad tech and people trying to suck up as many ad dollars as possible, and other bad actors, that the tech will persist, and continue to infest the web/world for quite a while. AI is the new crypto. Lots of promise and big ideas, lots of people with blind faith about what it will one day become, a lot of people gaming the system for quick gains at the expense of others. But it never actually becomes what it pretends/promises to be and is filled with people continuing the grift trying to make a buck off the next guy. AI just has better marketing and more corporate buy in than crypto. But neither are going anywhere.

contrast 1y ago
“the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon” Love it :)
tempodox 1y ago
> AI is the new crypto. But it's also way worse than cryptocurrencies, because all the big actors are pushing it relentlessly, with every marketing trick they know. They have to, because they invested insane amounts of money into snake oil and now they have to sell it in order to recover at least a fraction of their investments. And the amounts of energy wasted on this ultimately pointless performance are beyond staggering.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  In what parallel universe do you live where LLMs are snake oil?

moomin 1y ago

The thing is: who benefits from a loss of trust in systems? The answer, inevitably, is those for whom the system was a problem. The fewer places people can trust for accurate information, the more disinformation wins.

cyanydeez 1y ago

If you use the USA Republicans as a benchmark and fox news as the bad actors, there's perpetual faith that facts wont matter. Just keep confirming biases and foreshadow upcoming pivots to choose your own delusions.

QuantumGood 1y ago

The "accelerate the end times" argument was probably made most famously by Charles Manson. The "side" effects from supporting bad actions are not good. Presumably you are being 51% or more facetious, but probably more nuance is preferable.

EasyMark 1y ago

It seems to be greedy actors vs bad actors currently. We'll see who comes out on top I suppose.

aryehof 1y ago

It’s surely more likely that such disinformation will become the new truth, rather than people losing trust in these systems?