Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 301 posts

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#101

Post by alangibson »

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.

Wikipedia is somewhere between useless and actively bad on anything controversial. I remember checking the discussion on a famous-ish human trafficking case. The moderator straight up refused to consider new reporting because he considered the whole thing settled by the courts.

That kind of thing has ironically been made much worse by Qanon-style wackos. Anything not widely accepted is now treated as a conspiracy theory psi op.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#102

Post by gptgpp »

tablespoon wrote: post #62
gptgpp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wh…

> Could you elaborate on this? If it is full of garbage a couple examples should be very easy to find. I could give examples but I won't, because that would link my HN and Wikipedia accounts. > So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh. People unironically describe it as the "sum of all human knowledge," so it's definitely puff…

I mean... There are lots of ways to browse Wikipedia offline without having your IP recorded, absent using something simpler like a VPN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

I can understand if this is just too much effort to put into an online discussion though, I probably wouldn't bother myself.

And yeah there have been lots of scandals with Wikipedia. This one was pretty infamous:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

Ironically I think your attitude probably protects Wikipedia quite a bit, and from that perspective I'd like to see more of it. The less people see it as a good source of information, the less incentive there is for all of the agenda-pushing you've described (which also definitely happens).

I still think the bulk of it is pretty decent though, on non/less-polarizing subjects, which describes most of IMO.

My main issue is that most articles are an inch deep. I find myself using textbooks and journal articles more often these days, while sailing the open seas as this would otherwise be cost prohibitive.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#103

Post by fnfontana »

There's a famous quotes from Bill Gates that is "My children will have computers, yes, but before they will have books. Without books, without reading, our children will be unable to write, including their own story."

On my personal experience, ChatGPT is a precious tool to refine knowledge and thinking, but it depends on how it's used.

The same painting brush can be used to paint Monalisa or a meaningless blurred thing. It depends on how it's used.

To use ChatGPT and other AI tools properly, we need to build a solid foundation of knowledge and critical thinking skills at first. Then triangulate the answers given by the AI with other sources, our own previous knowledge along with new evidences through experimentation.

Since the brain urges for cognitive relief, most people will be lazy, while just a few will extract the true potential of ChatGPT.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#105

Post by phphphphp »

userabchn wrote: post #76

A friend is a member of quite a few Facebook groups. She doubts my belief that these groups already contain ChatGPT-like influence operation chatbots, but was recently surprised when in one of the groups several participants discussed a photograph of a typical large chest of drawers while referring to it as a "locker". Maybe some people do refer to such furniture as a locker, or maybe the first person did for some re…

this is a long-standing meme: any behaviour you don’t understand on the internet must be some sort of sophisticated operation by a nefarious third-party network.

The question you should always start with is why and if you can’t come up with a why then you should start from a more neutral position on the behaviour.

Spam isn’t free to engage in, especially on platforms like Facebook, and spam is rarely an irrational money-losing act, it’s just profit generation on the wrong side of our view of what is ethical. Why would someone spend money to unleash chat-bots on a Facebook group to discuss a piece of furniture?

If you can’t explain why, your theory is probably wrong. I would be absolutely shocked if it’s anything more than just some real people who love furniture and use a localised phrase that you don’t recognise.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#106

Post by voytec »

This post is unavailable in a... peculiar way:

    $ curl -I https://castlebridge.ie/insights/chatgpt-and-the-enshittening-of-knowledge/
    HTTP/2 302 
    server: nginx
    date: Fri, 27 Jan 2023 16:53:41 GMT
    content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
    content-length: 282
    location: http://google.com
If this is hosting provider's response to HN death hug, it's very poorly executed.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#107

Post by kerpotgh »

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…

[dead]

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#109

Post by hasmanean »

Pseudo intellectual knowledge. It’s a problem that has been with humans ever since we began communicating.

When there is a conflict Mountain goats just knock heads against each other (presumably so that both goats suffer concussions … until the one with the weaker knowledge graph suffers a loss of memory).

No such process in AI.

Post reply on HN