[frozenwind]

For now, this is just funny, I laughed. But with the advent of all these new open-source LLMs, it will get worse. If you thought people were gullible for falling for fake comments from bots, just wait for the near future. Post-factual/Post-Truth era truly begins. The internet that used to be a source of information is no more, only islands of truth will remain (like, hopefully, Wikipedia, but even that is questionable). The rest will be a cesspool of meaningless information. Just as sailors of the sea are experts at navigating the waters, so we'll have to learn to surf the web once again.

The funniest thing for me is how stupidly lazy are these jerks that employ GPT for such things. The printed book example really made me lol.

The simplest thing they could've done is use a service like quillbot to rephrase, just as I used here to rephrase my comment:

-----------------------

I chuckled. For now, this is just hilarious. However, it will grow worse when more new open-source LLMs emerge. Just wait till the near future if you thought people were naive enough to believe counterfeit comments from bots. The post-factual/post-truth age has arrived. Only isolated truths will remain when the internet ceases to be a reliable source of knowledge (like, ideally, Wikipedia, but even that is debatable). The remaining material will be an ocean of useless data. We'll have to relearn how to navigate the web, just as seafarers are specialists at navigating the seas.

The most amusing thing to me is how exceptionally sloppy these idiots are that use GPT for such things.

[gpderetta]

The thing is, the internet is already a cesspool of meaningless, misleading and outright malicious information. I guess the earlier we all collectively realize it the best it is.

[Uehreka]

The internet is currently quite useful, it could stand to be a lot less so. Don’t let your cynicism blind you to the fact that we do have a lot to lose.

[rchaud]

> The thing is, the internet is already a cesspool of meaningless, misleading and outright malicious information.

Let me just throw this trash overboard. What's the harm? It's not going to make the pacific garbage patch any bigger!

[coffeebeqn]

Exactly. The more people that realize that the internet(and other media) is filled to the brim with various kinds of BS, the better

[grumbel]

I am more optimistic here. While LLMs allow you to produce tons of garbage, they also provide the tools to filter through that garbage, something we didn't have before. LLMs allow us to view content in a way that we decided, not the content creator. That's extremely powerful and lets us sidesteps a lot of the old methods used to manipulate us.

The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world.

[frozenwind]

> The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world.

You've underlined the major risk these LLMs are for humanity. For a brief time in the history of human race, after information was democratized, most of us (at least educated people) had to use our own critical faculties to understand the world we live in. Now, that capacity will be outsourced to custom LLMs, most of them derived from other pre-trained with some ideological biases built-in. The informational Dark Ages of the technological era.

If they provide the tools to filter through the garbage, it'll probably be standardized in some way as an interface to the web. So just as HTML and its satellite technologies limit and standardize the representational aspect of information on the web, I think this AI-interface will severely limit the knowledge/wisdom aspect you can derive from information on the web. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, I hope you can understand what I'm saying.

[levesque]

Predicting whether a text was written by a LLM or not is not trivial. What was the latest number by OpenAI? 30%? As LLMs get better, it seems like we won't be able to distinguish real text from fake text. Your LLM will be able to summarize it, but it will still be 99% spam.

[pmoriarty]

> overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world

There's going to be a progressive de-skilling and dumbing down of humans, as AI's and robots do and think more and more for them.

[AnimalMuppet]

LLMs check the answers? How do they check the answers? By what appears most frequently in the training corpus - that's the "answer".

So, how well curated are the texts that make up the training corpus? Is it just what's generally available on the internet? How much do you think that text accurately reflects reality? "Truth is determined by the most frequent posters" seems like really bad epistemology.

[coffeebeqn]

Nothing new under the sun. The king, the church, the state, the media, etc. there has always been gatekeepers who decide what the populace sees.

Just look at the second largest economy in the world where truth hasn’t existed for decades

[mensetmanusman]

LLMs don’t know what garbage is or is not, depends on what they are trained on.

[capableweb]

> For now, this is just funny, I laughed. But with the advent of all these new open-source LLMs, it will get worse. If you thought people were gullible for falling for fake comments from bots, just wait for the near future. Post-factual/Post-Truth era truly begins. The internet that used to be a source of information is no more, only islands of truth will remain (like, hopefully, Wikipedia, but even that is questionable). The rest will be a cesspool of meaningless information. Just as sailors of the sea are experts at navigating the waters, so we'll have to learn to surf the web once again.

I'm not sure what rock you've been living under, but this has been the internet for probably longer than a decade by now, the only difference is the volume. Even back before LLMs, or before Facebook, you couldn't take any "fact" at face value when found via the internet. And before that, the same people who fall for it now on the internet, fell for it when watching TV, or reading newspapers. People who are not interested in truth because it doesn't fit their world-view, will never be interested in the truth, no matter what medium it comes via.

[frozenwind]

I am aware of that. I like to think that millenials/gen-z at least knew a little how to sift through the fake information, and the gullible people were the elders. But now with such obscene amounts of fake info at every corner, I think the internet and all source of information (even printed! - because printed at least would require significant effort) will loose credibility. Science will be the last bastion, and even that can easily be influenced by money.

[mistermann]

> People who are not interested in truth because it doesn't fit their world-view, will never be interested in the truth, no matter what medium it comes via.

Interestingly, this claim is self-referential.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

The thing about gippie is it will never shut up, it lists in bullet point fashion, and it uses alot of filler words: like, 'however', additionally, 'currently', 'also', 'that', etc.

i feel i can start to read when someone uses gippie, because i use it alot. I imagine a future where i use gippie to write an email and the receiver uses gippie to summarize and respond. There's also a future evolution of 'typo', where gippie hellucinates some non sensical answer. "Oh my bad, my bots trippin' LOL'

[naveen99]

There will be self verifiable truths like provable theorems in axiomatic mathematics. There will be enforceable contracts like Elon musk’s purchase of twitter. There will be quarterly investor reports and earnings calls from public companies that avoid lying at risk of shareholder and sec lawsuits. There will be documents time stamped with hashes and bitcoin. the bots will need karma points as well.

[russian-troll]

As others stated the Web is like that for quite some time. Also I wouldn't say that Wikipedia is an island of truth, quite the opposite.

But there is a countermeasure: everything has a source.

[flangola7]

How do you know the source is accurate?

[btbuildem]

The rephrased comment reads better than the original.

[frozenwind]

I also like the rephrased paragraph. There's a certain flow to it, I never learned or improved my skill in that area.