Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

This is different. There's obvious bias here. Many people don't want to believe the election is legit because of team and group mentality. People tend to believe what they want. Additionally, people can't "see" the results. It can't fully be proven because there is always a layer of indirection here where you need to trust a potential compromised source. From the perspective of the public what happened during the election can only be ascertained through a network of indirect sources so it's convenient for people to assume any one of those sources is compromised in a way such that the conclusion is closer to the one they desire.

For chatGPT seeing is believing. You can see the thing hallucinates right in front of your freaking eyes. There is no layer of indirection. There is no room for someone to lie to themselves. Additionally, the bias for chatGPT is actually in the other direction. Nobody wants to believe that an AI can trivialize their skill set. People would rather believe chatGPT is garbage because that is what they prefer to believe.

In fact I would argue this exact bias is the thing effecting many people right now. The same type of biases that make people believe the trump votes are rigged are the same type of biases that prevent people from even considering the fact that an LLM is more than just a stochastic parrot. They don't want to believe it... So they don't.

Bing search and customer service chatbots, for example, give a layer of indirection. Spam emails, LLM-generated legal briefs and term papers have indirection when the recipients (judge, professor) don't interact directly with the LLM. Since interacting directly with ChatGPT takes some skill and doesn't seem immediately useful most people will interact with it through things like search engines and friendly chat widgets and word processor plugins, just like programmers already interact with an LLM indirectly with Github Copilot.

> Nobody wants to believe that an AI can trivialize their skill set. People would rather believe chatGPT is garbage because that is what they prefer to believe.

They may not want to believe it, but you must have seen the numerous articles -- many of them posted on HN -- about exactly that happening. Not a day goes by that HN doesn't get multiple posts expressing fear and worry about "AI" taking over their job soon, or making the job redundant. And people may simultaneously believe "ChatGPT is garbage" and worry that they will lose their job, or get killed by a robot drone.

I argue that too many people already have a bias towards believing ChatGPT/LLMs equals AGI, because the media has primed them to believe that. The term "artificial intelligence" itself gives it away. If no one used "AI" to refer to ChatGPT et al. and instead called them large language models that might help people realistically evaluate LLMs as tools rather than as a true artificial intelligence. The term AI has been applied to so many ideas, fantasies, experiments, and now products that it means everything and nothing, and every individual can and will interpret that according to their own biases and knowledge. Of course "AI" sells a lot better than "LLMs" and we're seeing the self-serving hype in full-swing already, as numerous companies and VCs try to capitalize and recoup their losses from the last hype cycles that people got wise to (crypto) or never got interested in to begin with (Web3 and metaverse).

I'm old enough to remember when scientists successfully cloned a sheep, and immediately the media, popular and specialized, cranked out story after story about how cloning would reshape humanity in just a few years. We were told that human clones were just around the corner, with all the attendant hand-wringing. Of course that never happened, but I wouldn't find it all surprising to poll random people and find that they believe human cloning happens all the time, because the hype didn't get followed by a correction or apology.

But our main applicable experience is as finance journalists writing up crypto grifters. And it's not only the same grift, but literally a lot of the same grifters.

It's never about the technology, it's always about the money.