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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#181

Post by datavirtue »

miguelazo wrote: post #85
tablespoon wrote: post #62

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 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…

THIS: "people with weird personalities" Seen it way too many times for it to be a coincidence.

I think I know what you mean but "weird" is subjective.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#182

Post by markus_zhang »

ornornor wrote: post #69
markus_zhang wrote: post #61

From my experiments, ChatGPT is at least valuable by generating boilerplate code for scripting languages. I believe once connected to enterprise codebase its quality and completion can dramatically increase.

> enterprise codebase > quality increase We must have seen very different enterprise code.

I think it's going to be mostly more complete code which does improve its quality. For example I generated a piece of code to query API but without authentication or other information the code is not complete.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#183

Post by x86x87 »

pawelduda wrote: post #80

Internet often feels it's getting rotten with SEO spam with very little substance already. Now the flood gates are open to generate more shit in a much better wrapping. And it's going to take more effort to check its quality than to produce it. Unless we get better tools to do that - but text has more dimensions to process/understand as opposed to for example AI generated images which (for now) can be told apart by g…

What was the saying? It takes 10x more effort to refute BS than it takes to produce it? So if we make generating BS easier and that BS is fed for generating more BS we're going to get to a point where everything is BS. I call this the BS singularity!

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#184

Post by PKop »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #75
lubujackson wrote: post #17

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…

> ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke Wikipedia relies on "published" facts as an authority, but ChatGPT output is going to wind up as a source one way or another. And worse, then ChatGPT will digest its own excrement, worsening its own results further. This is what people do collectively, long before any GPTs were in sight. Lots of strong convictio…

Quantity has a quality all it's own.

But also, this is an "AI", not human thought. Why conflate the two as if they are equivalent? We are not at the point where machine learning is smarter or produces better quality content than humans.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#185

Post by markus_zhang »

ptx wrote: post #131
markus_zhang wrote: post #61

From my experiments, ChatGPT is at least valuable by generating boilerplate code for scripting languages. I believe once connected to enterprise codebase its quality and completion can dramatically increase.

Aren't scripting languages meant to reduce boilerplate code? Maybe you just need a better API and not an AI?

You still need boilerplate for scripting language though. Like querying an endpoint in Python with a rationing limit in mind. Things like that, not exactly difficult but still need some lines of code.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#187

Post by jdwithit »

voytec wrote: post #106

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.

The IP resolves to Digital Ocean. So I doubt it's on their level. The author themself probably saw the server melting down and/or hosting bill going up and threw up a really silly "solution".

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#188

Post by FartyMcFarter »

the_snooze wrote: post #157
Arainach wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation and scale create their own threats. Security cameras have existed for a long time, but storage cheap enough to keep years of footage and algorithms capable of processing thousands of streams in real time create massive privacy problems that didn't exist even with the richest companies paying humans to watch.

>Automation and scale create their own threats. I don't know why such a simple fact needs to be repeated over and over again. It's either naivete or malice that makes people ignore that fact. A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications.

Another example is the police. Most people agree the existence of a police force to enforce laws is a good thing (society would function very differently otherwise). But if there was a policeman for each other person on the planet following them 24x7 and enforcing every possible law on them, not so much anymore.

Quantity is a quality all of its own.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#189

Post by dns_snek »

djcannabiz wrote: post #150
MichaelBurge wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT has a hidden steganographic watermark in its output, so the arms race should be one-sided.

Do you know how that works? I am unfortunately pretty ignorant about this topic but that seems like such a cool and difficult thing to create.

Comment from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34504545

> So then to watermark, instead of selecting the next token randomly, the idea will be to select it pseudorandomly, using a cryptographic pseudorandom function, whose key is known only to OpenAI. That won’t make any detectable difference to the end user, assuming the end user can’t distinguish the pseudorandom numbers from truly random ones. But now you can choose a pseudorandom function that secretly biases a certain score—a sum over a certain function g evaluated at each n-gram (sequence of n consecutive tokens), for some small n—which score you can also compute if you know the key for this pseudorandom function.

I remain skeptical that this method is resistant against lossy transformations such as changing punctuation, grammar, synonym replacements, 2-way translations and a bunch of other existing tools that are capable of rewording written text.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#190

Post by eternalban »

lubujackson wrote: post #17

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…

> All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authenticated sources.

Prediction: this is going to end up like CocaCola taking public water (wiki and LLM) and bottling it ("selected sourced") at a couple bucks a pop! "But there will be premium brands!"

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