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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
251–260 of 301 posts
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. An…
Because the real world has nuance and is not black and white. Humanity relies on people using their judgment; trying to make absolute laws with zero tolerance has been a failure everywhere it's tried. It is impossible to numerate all reasonable exceptions, and impossible to specify exceptions precisely enough that bad actors can't exploit them.
If you make the rules overly strict and enforce them universally, you end up with people in jail for offenses no one cares about.
If you make the rules at all loose, bad actors instantly seize on any loopholes and ruin the commons for anyone.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. An…
Because the real world has nuance and is not black and white. Humanity relies on people using their judgment; trying to make absolute laws with zero tolerance has been a failure everywhere it's tried. It is impossible to numerate all reasonable exceptions, and impossible to specify exceptions precisely enough that bad actors can't exploit them. If you make the rules overly strict and enforce them universally, you end…
Yeah, but that’s why you have a “human in the loop”, to handle the infinite number of edge cases. You’d never want end-to-end AI for anything mission critical like justice.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#254The combination of using an "authoritative" voice and being completely and utterly full of shit makes for some truly ridiculous results. Users need to be extremely careful with these tools. And no, expecting everyone to be knowledgeable to independently fact check some BS published based on a generative model is not a reasonable position. That burden needs to be held by the publisher.
Unfortunately with the current state of machine generated content and SEO spam on the internet, that is not likely to happen as there is no real incentive to do so.
And it's not just being confidently wrong about a single person like this author noted, it's being confidently wrong about anything and everything.
The other day I asked ChatGPT about the reasons behind the connection between Italian filmmakers and Western movies. It gave a few reasons that were semi-plausible if not easily verifiable, and then made the bold claim that Italy and the United States were great allies in World War 2. It said this confidently and with a tone of authority.
And while we may all go "ha ha that's wrong" now, WW2 was nearly 80 years ago and not everyone has a strong history background. There aren't that many people left with direct experience and that number shrinks every day. With growing distrust in actual authorities on matters and rejection of observable fact--based at least in part on massive piles of internet BS--this is pretty concerning to me.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the real world has nuance and is not black and white. Humanity relies on people using their judgment; trying to make absolute laws with zero tolerance has been a failure everywhere it's tried. It is impossible to numerate all reasonable exceptions, and impossible to specify exceptions precisely enough that bad actors can't exploit them. If you make the rules overly strict and enforce them universally, you end…
Yeah, but that’s why you have a “human in the loop”, to handle the infinite number of edge cases. You’d never want end-to-end AI for anything mission critical like justice.
You have a human in the loop explicitly to, in your words, not "enforce universally and consistently".
* Most people agree that stealing from a store is wrong.
* Most people agree that opening food/medicine and consuming it in the store before paying is stealing
* Most people believe that helping those in a medical emergency is important
If I was in a store and saw someone going into hypoglycemia and grabbed a candy bar and handed it to them, or if they were having a heart attack and I grabbed a bottle of aspirin and opened it to give them one, I am committing a crime. Most reasonable people would say that even if a police officer was standing in front of me watching me do it that I should not be charged.
That's why we don't want universal enforcement.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#256Earlier 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…
While claims of Wikipedia's awfulness may be overstated, I do see a lot of problems. And while I am picking on Wikipedia I don't think it's useless, but it does require caution. The last Wikipedia page I visited ( Elder_Mother ) someone had, years ago, removed all of the citations for the article. These were websites that contained much more and higher quality content than the Wiki page itself, and had been cited wit…
> Stemming from the lack of expertise, Wikipedia itself becomes out of date without curation. The problem is while it claims to be more up-to-date than printed media, there's no easy way to identify how significant the information on a page is.
That's an interesting point. A lot of Wikipedia articles seem to be stuck in the late 2000s (2005-2010). When it was new, a lot of people had fun banging out new articles, but then those got more-or-less abandoned. It doesn't help that their population of dedicated "editors" has really dropped off from those highs and is in long-term decline.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you take a moment to improve the article you had an issue with? That's kind of the point...
Wikipedia problems with political articles are caused by people actively biasing the articles. You cannot just modify the article; it'd get reverted for, at best, going against consensus. Someone gave an example above where a person calling herself a trained Marxist was not accepted as evidence that she is a Marxist. Do you seriously think that editing the article to include the reference would be allowed? Furthermor…
No, I suppose you're right. I guess I had never considered going to wikipedia for content of that sort before.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. An…
I think the main problem is not in universal law enforcement but in constant surveillance which is a bit orthogonal.
Why should people be under constant surveillance even at times when they are not breaking any laws? Why should someone else have access to every moment of your life?
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#259Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but I think going forward critical thinking as well as an understanding of what to value is going to be important for future generations. Something that computers will never be good at doing is 'understanding' what is valuable in life since many times this cannot be measured. In essence, a healthy understanding of the three transcendentals the Good the True, and the Beautiful will be essential to keep our humanity. ChatGPT can perform many amazing skills but lacks the ability to accurately judge the value of what is it reporting. I think passing on a love for the transcendentals to our children is the only way to inoculate them from the firehose of 'junk' information ChatGP et al is about to unleash on the world.
Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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
Pre-ChatGPT datasets will become prized commodities, this sort of AI will be trapped in a stasis of pre-2023 pop culture as subsequent AIs will need to use datasets that hadn't yet been contaminated by pervasive ChatGPT spam. It will be like low-background steel, steel that has somehow been isolated from atomic fallout form the mid XX century onwards, and must be used for radiation-sensitive equipment: https://en.wik…
Sounds very plausible, along with intensive research on how to decontaminate latter samples.