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It is impossible to solve this problem because we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be. People live in different and dynamic truths. What we

• GardenLetter27 1y ago
  > What we consider enemy propaganda today might be an official statement tomorrow. Remember when worrying about COVID was sinophobia? Or when the lab leak was a far-right conspiracy theory? When masks were deemed unnecessary except for healthcare professionals, but then mandated for everyone?
  • nailer 1y ago
    People seem to be voting this down as it seems like political advocacy, but the point seems to be that the commonly accepted truth does indeed change.
    • cwillu 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • nailer 1y ago
        Really? I thought it was obvious and that people were just being reactive to the topics discussed by the OP. Do you think that the commonly accepted truth on these matters did not change?
        • cwillu 1y ago
          You're projecting your views on the comment. You may even be correct, but it's still a projection: that view is not explicit in the text; combined with the specific wording, I feel down-voting rather than engaging was precisely the correct response. This whole interaction is a classic motte-and-bailey: someone says something vague that can be interpreted several ways (and reading their comment history makes it clear what their intended emotional valence was); people respond to the subtext, and then someone jumps “woah woah, they never actually said that”. Either way, nothing of value was lost, as the same point you say he was trying to make was made in several other comments which were not downvoted.
          • nailer 1y ago
            You think people that liked OP’s comment are projecting a meaning… what other possible meanings are there?
            • cwillu 1y ago
              Now you're just putting words in my mouth; good day.
    • Nursie 1y ago
      It’s very US-centric for a start. In other countries we went from “that looks bad in China” to “shit, it spread to Italy now, we really need to worry” And with masks we went from “we don’t think they’re necessary, handwashing seems more important” to “Ok shit it is airborne, mask up”. Public messaging adapted as more was known. But the US seems to have to turn everything into a partisan fight, and we could watch, sadly, in real time as people picked matters of public health and scientific knowledge to get behind or to hate. God forbid anyone change their advice as they become better informed over time. Seeing everything through this partisan, pugnacious prism seems to be a sickness US society is suffering from, and one it is trying (with some success) to spread.
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        I don't see why you are being downvoted. In the U.S., if you ignored the politicians and listened instead to the medical professionals it went down more or less the way you described.
    • autoexec 1y ago
      > the point seems to be that the commonly accepted truth does indeed change. As it should when new evidence comes to light to justify it. Ideally, the tools we use would keep up along with those changes while transparently preserving the history and causes of them.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        Perhaps that's the tragedy though. At least in the U.S. plenty of people seem unwilling to change their "truth" when new evidence comes to light. When there are actors that seek to make everything political it also makes everything then "tribal". I think people are more willing to adjust their views as new evidence suggests as long as they never dug their heels in in the first place.
• charcircuit 1y ago
  There are personalized social media feeds, so why not have personalized LLMs that align with how people want their LLM to act.
  • sofixa 1y ago
    Because that would only reinforce the already problematic bubbles where people only see what feeds their opinions, often to disastrous results (cf. the various epidemics and deaths due to anti-vaxxers or even worse, downright genocides).
    • jahsome 1y ago
      People have done this on their own behalf since the dawn of time, so it's not really clear to me why it's so often framed as an AI issue.
      • qu4z-2 1y ago
        Quantity has a quality all its own.
      • fc417fc802 1y ago
        The core underlying issue isn't due to LLMs but they greatly exacerbate it. So does the current form of social media. People used to live in bubbles, sure, but when that bubble was the entire local community, required human interaction, and radio had yet to be invented the implications were vastly different. I'm optimistic that carefully crafted algorithms could send things back in the other direction but that isn't how you make money so seemingly no one is making a serious effort.
        • jahsome 1y ago
          My point is: the exact same was said of every form of mass communication. Every new form was said to be a herald of the end times, and yet here we are, in many ways stronger than ever. Im not arguing one way or another, I'm just pointing out a potential fatigue. It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.
• perihelions 1y ago
  There's a more basic problem: it's two very different questions to ask "can the machine reason about the plausibility of things/sources?", and "how does it score on an evaluation on a list of authoritative truths and proven lies?" A machine that thinks critically will perform poorly on the latter, since, if you're able to doubt a bad-actor's falsehood, you're just as capable of doubting an authoritative source (often wrongly/overeagerly; maybe sometimes not). Because you're always reasoning with incomplete information: many wrong things are plausible given limited knowledge, and many true things aren't easy to support. The system that would score best tested against a list of known-truths and known-lies, isn't the perceptive one that excels at critical thinking: it's the ideological sycophant. It's the one that begins its research by doing a from:elonmusk search, or whomever it's supposed to agree with—whatever "obvious truths" it's "expected to understand".
  • ClumsyPilot 1y ago
    > The system that would score best tested against a list of known-truths and known-lies, isn't the perceptive one that excels at critical thinking: it's the ideological sycophant This is an excellent point
• d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  "different and dynamic truths" = fictions We can not play the game.
  • falcor84 1y ago
    But the social sphere is made of fictions, the most influential of which probably been the value of different currencies and commodities. I don't think there's any way for an individual to live in the modern world without such fictions.
    • d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
      Agreed but we can call them as we see them.
• barrkel 1y ago
  This is in fact the goal of Russian style propaganda. You have successfully been targeted. The idea is to spread so much confusion that you just throw up your hands and say, I'm not going to try and figure out what's going on any more. That saps your will to be political, to morally judge actions and support efforts to punish wrongdoers. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/propaganda-political-apathy-and-authoritarianism-in-russia https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/propaganda-political-apa... https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/inside-putins-propaganda-machine https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/insi...
  • serial_dev 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • scrollop 1y ago
      Now, why are you spending misinformation? The russian military doctrine of spreading a "firehouse of falsehood" is well documented. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation And yet, you switch it around and blame the west - exactly as per russian misinformation doctrine. Odd, eh?
      • zer00eyz 1y ago
        > Now, why are you spending misinformation? Are you going to claim that US politicians don't do the exact same thing? This is my favorite example of it, where one literally tells you what the play is while it's getting made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I Feelings not facts.
        • wiseowise 1y ago
          He posted a YouTube video! West is in shambles! They’re onto us!
• saubeidl 1y ago
  There is no objective truth because humans are inherently ideological beings and what we consider objective is just a reflection of our ideology. Consider markets - a capitalist's "objective truth" might be that they are the most efficient mechanism of allocating resources, a marxists "objective truth" might be that they are a mechanism for exploiting the working class and making the capitalist class even richer. Here's Zizek, famous ideology expert, describing this mechanism via film analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k
• anal_reactor 1y ago
  The real problem is that most people just want answers, they're unwilling to follow the logical chain of thought. When I talk to LLMs I keep asking "but why are you telling me this" until I have a cohesive, logical picture in my mind. Quite often the picture fundamentally disagrees with the LLM. But most people don't want that, they just ask "tell me what to do". This is a reflection of how social dynamics often work. People tend to follow the leader and social norms without questioning them, so why not apply the same attitude to LLMs. BTW, the phenomenon isn't new, I think one of the first moments when we realized that people are stupid and just do whatever the computer tells them to do was the wave of people crashing their cars because the GPS system lied to them.
  • goopypoop 1y ago
    Why have a robodog and beep yourself?
• its-summertime 1y ago
  I remember when people gave up on digital navigation because the traveling salesman issue makes it too expensive. Not everything needs to result in a single perfect answer to be useful. Aiming for ~90%, even 70% of a right answer still gets you something very reasonable in a lot of open ended tasks.
• yorwba 1y ago
  Yes, it's difficult to detect whether something is enemy propaganda if you only look at the content. During WWII, sometimes propagandists would take an official statement (e.g. the government claiming that food production was sufficient and there were no shortages) and redirect it unchanged to a different audience (e.g. soldiers on a part of the front with strained logistics). Then the official statement and enemy propaganda would be exactly the same! The propaganda effect coming from the selection of content, not its truth or falsity. But it's very easy to detect whether something is enemy propaganda without looking at the content: if it comes from an enemy source, it's enemy propaganda. If it also comes from a friendly source, at least the enemy isn't lying, though. A company that doesn't wish to pick a side can still sidestep the issue of one source publishing a completely made-up story by filtering for information covered by a wide spectrum of sources at least one of which most of their users trust. That wouldn't completely eliminate falsehoods, but make deliberate manipulation more difficult. It might be playing the game, but better than letting the game play you. Of course such a process would in practice be a bit more involved to implement than just feeding the top search results into an LLM and having it generate a summary.
  • cwillu 1y ago
    > Then the official statement and enemy propaganda would be exactly the same! The propaganda effect coming from the selection of content, not its truth or falsity. Exactly. Redistributing information out of context is such a basic technique that children routinely reinvent it when they play one parent off of the other to get what they want.
• falcor84 1y ago
  I would actually be very interested in a system where there's nothing stored just as a "fact", but rather every piece of information is connected to its sources and the evidence provided.
• eviks 1y ago
  > we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be How many of "us" believe that the desired behavior is lies??