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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#31

Post by tablespoon »

mountainb wrote: post #28
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authenticated sources. This is what they said about Wikipedia viz. Britannica… alas, it’s a brave new world out there… nowhere to run to nowhere to hide, see that Wiezenbaum post also on the homepage now, as another commenter quotes[0]: > Writing of the enthusiastic embrace of a fully computerized world, Weizenbaum grumbled, “These people see the techn…

It's true though, Wikipedia really is terrible and full of fake citations that lead nowhere. It's an anti-knowledge base that sometimes has good information.

> It's true though, Wikipedia really is terrible and full of fake citations that lead nowhere. It's an anti-knowledge base that sometimes has good information.

Yeah, Wikipedia is garbage puffed up beyond all belief. I literally just today saw something just like you describe.

It should be viewed very skeptically on anything anyone disagrees over (because then it's just snapshots of an agenda-pushing battle).

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#32

Post by patapong »

It seems like a lot of effort will be spent to ensure that content is not generated by an AI system. This seems very tricky to enforce - a stopgap measure could be to require any person to upload a video where they say their comment before being able to post it to a website. Of course, along with the regression of user experience, such a thing could be tricked by reading an AI generated text, and eventually with deepfakes.

Is it viable to constrain conversation to human voices this way or is the cat out of the bag? Is it desirable? Should we just go back to in-person conversations?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#36

Post by clbrmbr »

GPT is a language model, not an oracle.

So my first take is that people querying it for research are doing it wrong.

Then again, if there’s a large economic incentive to use it in that way, we are very well may end up with the kind of feedback loop that the author describes.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#38

Post by visarga »

lsy wrote: post #25

The TLDR of the article is essentially that any time a ChatGPT conversation strays to the factual (in this case a list of data ethics books), the quality of the data (whether those books exist and are written by the stated authors) is extremely low. Ultimately this is where ChatGPT and similar projects seem most likely to hit a wall. Text generators are statistical machines, but the relationship between statistics an…

One approach to fixing factual errors is to use two rounds of LLM interaction. I forgot the name of the paper.

Say you ask "What is the height of Everest?"

1. generate an answer in closed-book model, with the LLM: "The height of Everest is 8723m" = candidate_answer

2. search your references with candidate_answer, find: "At 8,849 meters (29,032 feet), Everest is considered the tallest point on Earth" = search_snippet

3. do a second pass to rewrite the answer with the LLM using search_snippet in the prompt

Basically, the incorrect phrase candidate_answer is very good at matching the correct answer in search engines. It is like a template tuned to extract the desired facts. A search engine check could also verify when the searched fact has no references.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#39

Post by yellow_postit »

tablespoon wrote: post #26
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authenticated sources. This is what they said about Wikipedia viz. Britannica… alas, it’s a brave new world out there… nowhere to run to nowhere to hide, see that Wiezenbaum post also on the homepage now, as another commenter quotes[0]: > Writing of the enthusiastic embrace of a fully computerized world, Weizenbaum grumbled, “These people see the techn…

>> All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authenticated sources. > This is what they said about Wikipedia viz. Britannica... And they were right. If "they" were wrong about anything, it was the assumption that the masses would prioritize quality over cost, but it turns out that cheap wins every time. When it comes to information, it's like most people's taste buds don't work, so they'll pick…

Extending this — it seems to me there will be growing skillset need to identify quality/accuracy.

Under formed thought: The proverbial haystack just got a lot larger, the needle stayed the same size, what tools will needle hunters need to develop both to find the needles and to prove to others they are in fact needles.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#40

Post by fabianhjr »

patapong wrote: post #32

It seems like a lot of effort will be spent to ensure that content is not generated by an AI system. This seems very tricky to enforce - a stopgap measure could be to require any person to upload a video where they say their comment before being able to post it to a website. Of course, along with the regression of user experience, such a thing could be tricked by reading an AI generated text, and eventually with deep…

Web of Trust will be back, your network will depend on your criteria for trust.

Monoliths / Centralized services are the ones that can't adapt to the coming technology.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...

Great implementation example: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-gr...

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