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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

41–50 of 301 posts

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#41

If you think of the knowledge base of the internet as a living thing, ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. This is the same process SEO spam caused for search - it hampers the nature by which things function and the river needs to reroute (pagerank then usage metadata) to replace the lost signal. ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke…

Were going to have shady agencies in 5 years advertising: "get ChatGPT to respond to questions with your content for only $199"

“Detect ChatGPT responses, only $249”

It’s just a new chapter in the arms race of spam techniques vs detection. Lots of money presumably made selling both sides.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#42

If you think of the knowledge base of the internet as a living thing, ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. This is the same process SEO spam caused for search - it hampers the nature by which things function and the river needs to reroute (pagerank then usage metadata) to replace the lost signal. ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke…

If ChatGPT just consumes itself will the end result of all queries just eventually recurse down to a single answer? - for example "42"

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#43

If you think of the knowledge base of the internet as a living thing, ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. This is the same process SEO spam caused for search - it hampers the nature by which things function and the river needs to reroute (pagerank then usage metadata) to replace the lost signal. ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke…

[flagged]

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#44

If you think of the knowledge base of the internet as a living thing, ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. This is the same process SEO spam caused for search - it hampers the nature by which things function and the river needs to reroute (pagerank then usage metadata) to replace the lost signal. ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke…

>And worse, then ChatGPT will digest its own excrement, worsening its own results further

I wonder if we'll get a "dead sea effect" with AI, I've seen some stuff saying they've basically run out of high quality training data and now the training pool will get poisoned by AI generated shit. Basically garbage in, garbage out and these large language models might not be able to improve

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#45
I agree with this article, but I feel the author is only scratching the surface of all the harm ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are going to cause. We just have to look at the current state of the internet today, with things like SEO spam, misinformation, social media bots, fake reviews, and so forth. The people responsible for these are already taking advantage of generative AI and it's going to exacerbate these problems to their extremes.

OpenAI's PR likes to preach about ethical AI, but it's a total farce. There's no way that OpenAI isn't fully aware of all the harms their AI is going to cause.

I only see one of two possible ultimate outcomes. AI like OpenGPT is going to flood the internet with false or inaccurate information, that I have no doubt. The first outcome I foresee is we simply lose all trust in the vast majority of information sources. The other outcome is we're going to have to sacrifice our privacy and anonymity online in order to distinguish real information from real people and not the AI bot generated nonsense. For example, Social Media may likely require you to prove your real identity, and will only allow you to use trusted hardware devices (i.e. phone or tablet) to post things to your social media account. It'll become increasingly difficult to share information anonymously online in a way that can be trusted. Any information that can't be tied to a verifiable source (a real person) is immediately going to be deemed untrustworthy.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Could you elaborate on this? If it is full of garbage a couple examples should be very easy to find.

I completely agree that Wikipedia can have errors, but in topics that I am educated in it seems pretty decent and I can't remember the last time I came across any (comp sci for example).

The most recent example I can think of is about is an article on vulture bees, and a citation about what their honey tastes like, which turned out to be garbage and incorrect (there are no reliable sources on the qualities of honey, it's basic composition and method of production is even in dispute, when I queried journal articles on the topic).

So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#49
I see chatGPT as a first iteration, and it’s glaringly obvious what works and what doesn’t. I’m hopeful future iterations (not just from openAI) will make it overall a net improvement, things like adding real sources and better handling things it doesn’t know

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#50

If you think of the knowledge base of the internet as a living thing, ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. This is the same process SEO spam caused for search - it hampers the nature by which things function and the river needs to reroute (pagerank then usage metadata) to replace the lost signal. ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke…

I call it the ChaptGPT Centipede.
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