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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#201

Post by mkmk3 »

khiner wrote: post #120

The test use case of constructing a bio for yourself, hoping it accurately summarizes all the extremely low sample size data it happens to have of you in its web crawled training data, seems like one of the worst possible use cases for ChatGPT. It’s right there on the main page that it’s not to be trusted with factual information like this. ChatGPT will hallucinate details. It’s remarkable to me actually how often it…

I feel like the 3 youre missing there is something along the lines of "people enjoy social validation and internet points, to the extent that pretty shit content thats low effort is something we enjoy generating"

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#202

Post by awb »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #188
the_snooze wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

On the other hand, why have a law if it’s not meant to be enforced universally and consistently?

When laws are applied selectively it creates an unequal experiences in the population.

No one wants the tyranny of oppressive applications of overbearing laws. So, in those instances, change the law to be fair enough and compassionate enough that it can be applied in all instances where the letter of the law is broken.

And obviously privacy is important and ubiquitous surveillance would undermine our ability to enjoy life. But in public spaces, consistently applying fairly written compassionate laws wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#205

Post by foruhar »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #21
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. 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…

There is a world in which AI will be the best source of knowledge (most powerful knowledge generator). There will be many LLMs & AIs, open and branded, and we'll pick our oracle. ChatGPT is an infant of an AI and it will mutate, and evolve beyond transformers. Some (many?) branches will be amazing at serving up "enshittened knowledge" but there will be branches that take different approaches and philosophies. There will likely be AI curators of knowledge bases that weed out AI-generated crap, and disinformation. There will be non-hallucinatory AIs, certainty scores, explanation-based systems, first principles machines, and super focused additive AIs that will layer onto a base LLM (or whatever is next). We'll choose (and probably pay for) our blends of knowledge, humour, bias, filtering, and conviviality. The "internet" of tomorrow may run on TCP/IP but it very unlikely to work like this web that we are using now.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#207

Post by bcjordan »

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.

@dang title/link feels a bit misleading now, worth changing to the Google Cache/archive or something?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#208

Post by ROTMetro »

hutzlibu wrote: post #112
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…

"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." I am not sure, if the situation is that dramatic, but just wait, until advertisers finds a way to get their "data" into ChatGPT results (or alike). Then things will get really ugly. So yes, this is what we will have to do: "All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authe…

I just envisioned a sci-fi movie like terminator. Everyone in the world has great AIs. But at some point when injecting the advertising code for Rad Cola it goes wrong. Dudes AI keeps reminding him he should drink a 'Rad Cola' with lunch. It let's him know all the celebrities he follows all drink Rad Cola. Slowly it gets more insistent. Eventually the AIs take over the world, but in the name of benevolence, they only want to spread the gift that is Rad Cola and ensure that all humans are drinking it.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#209

Post by Valgrim »

pphysch wrote: post #204

ChatGPT doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of bullshit and misinformation. The average person already consumes a low-signal, high-noise info diet, since the advent of modern propaganda in the 1920s.

Are you really suggesting that the average person had access to better information before the 1920s? For real?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#210

Post by alphazard »

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…

Knowledge has never been a single global thing. It's always been individualized, and in the context of groups, the important question is "how long does it take someone to find information which is useful to them?". With regards to search engines we've been in decline for a few years now. It's not just you, the results are worse.

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

This is the solution. Knowledge is a web of trust. The only root authority is you the individual. "Experts" and "authorities" are just heuristics. The widespread error that many are making is this: If there is a single objective reality, then curation can happen globally/objectively, not individually/subjectively.

What we need are more mechanisms for individual curation. A user should be able to inspect and understand the chain of believability, from one of their own highly vetted one hop experts, to a distant influencer, public official, or other source of (mis)information.

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