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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#211

Post by wadd1e »

yamtaddle wrote: post #116
oceanplexian wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT is a like a virus that now threatens its life. Perhaps something needs to be disrupted. The Internet is nothing like what it was 20 years ago, It turned into a bunch of social media walled gardens and SEO spam. ChatGPT is like fresh air because it can actually answer questions in a no-nonsense way without users having to scroll through 5-6 spam websites, paywalls, and crappy user interfaces to get an answer…

Agents like this under the control of users would be pretty great. Man, would companies ever hate if we could use the kinds of tools they use against us, against them. No more shopping for the best price: "ChatGPT, what's the lowest price on a new X, brand Y, model Z? And give me the URL to the product page." No more burning our human time talking to companies' robots: "ChatGPT, get through this shitty phone tree and…

I wish this sort of thing was realistically possible; I think history has taught us that we cannot have nice things one too many times to pretend like this time is any different. Whoever owns ChatGPT/equivalent product in the future would probably end up doing something or the other to ruin this idea. "GhatGPT, what's the cheapest restaurant in this area?" has way too much advertisement potential to be left alone.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#212

Post by banannaise »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #125

I think an easy way to identify transformative technology is how strong people’s reaction is against it. I remember similar freak outs about the graphical World Wide Web, smart phone, etc. Somehow things are not quite so bad and considerably better than predicted, while still having negative side effects. Maybe an outcome will be knowledge will be better structured, ala Wolfram Alpha, and just depending on random tex…

> I think an easy way to identify transformative technology is how strong people’s reaction is against it.

There is also strong negative reaction to technology that does incredible damage to society. This is just an excuse to ignore people pointing out issues.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#213

Post by bartread »

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.

Yep, same. Incredibly irritating way of handling the problem. Not at all helpful.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#214

Post by jiggyjace »

I really disagree with this perspective. In history the democratization of books with the printing press, the entertainment & education industry with YouTube and MOOCs, and now whatever this next movement is with ChatGPT. Let's just face it, it's useless to predict how innovation will impact the future society, but you can always choose to find its most productive uses for it yourself in the meantime. Stop trying to brute force your outdated perspective on how disruptive innovations will impact other people. Unless you have a sample size of the entire ChatGPT audience, or the entire internet, you're going to have a rough time.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#215

Post by dr_dshiv »

ethanbond wrote: post #121
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure but humans can’t do it at nearly the rate that GPT can, and GPT will never be applying critical thought to the memes it digests and forward on while humans sometimes do.

> and GPT will never be applying critical thought

Just wait. This party has just begun. 90% of humans will be like school kids in comparison to the critical thought of GPT-5.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#216

Post by AlbertCory »

I think it has to be a lot closer to Wikepedia's level of accuracy (which is not 100%, or even close) before anyone cites it as fact.

Yesterday I asked it "what are the chords to 'A Foggy Day in London Town'": it made up a whole new Gershwin song!

======

"A Foggy Day in London Town" is a song with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The chords for the song are:

Verse:

C C7 F C C7 F C C7

Foggy, foggy dew, you can't see a thing

F Fm C C7 F C C7 F

The visibility is zero, and my eyes are dim

Chorus:

C C7 F C C7 F C C7

It's a foggy day in London Town

F Fm C C7 F C C7 F

The buildings look one hundred feet tall

C C7 F C C7 F C C7

It's a foggy day in London Town

F Fm C C7 F C C7 F

And the people look like ants at all

Bridge:

Am D7 G C C7 F C C7

Just like the feeling you get when you're down

Am D7 G C C7 F C C7

The sun can't break through the London Town

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#218

Post by uoaei »

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…

Assuming that is bad, it is then very bad that we are now accelerating that process by many orders of magnitude.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#219

Post by gptgpp »

miguelazo wrote: post #83
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…

It's telling that you only cited examples of scientific subjects. As the other commenter noted, articles of consequence for public debate (politics) are generally terrible and there are lots of "editors" who are working for deep state cut-outs doing nothing but trying to damage the reputation of intellectuals who are a danger to the status quo.

Yes I agree, it is telling.

It is similarly telling that conservative wikis have barely any articles on core topics like engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences. These intellectuals you're describing oddly don't seem to have much interest in things most people would deem intellectual...

For example, compare the Wikipedia article on Leonhard Euler with that of conservapedia... It's so absurd I had to double check the self-proclaimed "conservative wikipedia" wasn't satire.

Probably a false flag by the deep state though. Conservapedia has more on that than the entirety of linear algebra and computer science, lol.

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