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GPT might be an information virus (2023)

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Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#101

Post by interstice »

d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #99

Intelligence itself may be a virus, literally. The chemical activity in your brain is not that unlike viral activity. The reason humans can do math may be that some kind of salamander-like creature millions of years ago contracted a brain virus, that virus happened to produce behavioral effects that helped it spread and ultimately become symbiotic. We may be little more than a pitched battle between what we would cal…

This triggered two main thoughts for me. First - this virus centric take is not so different to the one taken in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari in which he claims that we didn’t so much domesticate crops as become domesticated _by_ crops. While I think it’s healthy to consider less human centric views of what we are, there as here I think the value of questioning the intent of entities that don’t have end goals may not lead to very profound answers. The second thought is that I once read that the activity of our brain is dancing on the edge of chaos, and that either direction causes it to cease functioning. Similarly our immune systems are dialled close to the limit, to the point where it can take itself and its owner out by accident. All this to say our existence is already at or near the crossover between so many gradients, which most likely are in essence the pitched battles you’re referring to.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#102

Post by audinobs »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
andy99 wrote: post #5

I think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus…

What's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator". Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was. I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habi…

I don't know or really care what other people are doing with LLMs.

I have learned so much the past 2.5 years it is almost hard to believe.

To say I am getting dumber is just completely preposterous.

Maybe this would be leading me astray if I had the intelligence of Paul Dirac and I wasn't fully applying my intelligence. The problem is I don't have anything like the intelligence of Paul Dirac.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#103

Post by iszomer »

lazide wrote: post #89
Hupriene wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's some real obsessive stalker logic there.

other side. co-dependent.

Broadly speaking, this would be how I view the widening diplomatic gap between the CCP and Taiwan. Not the DPP, not the KMT, Taiwan.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#104

Post by nunez »

johnisgood wrote: post #98
nunez wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who make that retort forget that the calculator was immensely helpful but _also_ antiquated the need for mental math, which in my opinion is a bad thing. (Everyone should be able to calculate 5% and 10% of numbers, given how easy it is to do)

Well, I suppose many people do not know of these "mental math tricks". To get 10% of a number, just move the decimal left: 10% of 40 -> 4.0. To get 5% of this number, get 10% first, then halve it. It is the half of 10%, which in this case would be 2.0. If you want to do this on a computer / calculator, you simply do: 40 * 0.10 for 10% or 0.05 for 5%. I was a very young kid when I learned to do this on a calculator, a…

Exactly, but when you learn math by calculator, you don't learn these tricks, which brings us to today, where tipping calculators rank pretty well on app stores.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#105

Post by colejohnson66 »

nunez wrote: post #104
johnisgood wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I suppose many people do not know of these "mental math tricks". To get 10% of a number, just move the decimal left: 10% of 40 -> 4.0. To get 5% of this number, get 10% first, then halve it. It is the half of 10%, which in this case would be 2.0. If you want to do this on a computer / calculator, you simply do: 40 * 0.10 for 10% or 0.05 for 5%. I was a very young kid when I learned to do this on a calculator, a…

Exactly, but when you learn math by calculator, you don't learn these tricks, which brings us to today, where tipping calculators rank pretty well on app stores.

What makes tipping calculators even crazier is that your phone already has a calculator.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#106

Post by DaveZale »

ceejayoz wrote: post #42
DaveZale wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries. Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?

> Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.

Nextdoor is terrible, agreed.

No, we want real news! With some editorial oversight.

Local reddits were good for a while, but the bots and human moderators make their own rules. It's not consistent.

A nice place to start could be with old-school weather reports, where we can learn something again. It's all so superficial these days.

Local events, local political issues with objectivity, history and future outlook, the list goes on and on. Maybe muzzle the negative talk with strict categories and guard rails to avoid another Nextdoor?

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#107

Post by Henchman21 »

dns_snek wrote: post #92
karaterobot wrote: post #78

I don't think the results of the last two decades of mass information dissemination have been all that great. People didn't trust anything on the internet before GPT, and the internet was already a cacophony of screeching voices too. Smart people were already decoupling from social media, and moving meaningful interaction to enclaves well before ChatGPT became a factor. ChatGPT did not ruin the internet, it was unlea…

You're confusing social media with the internet at large. "Traditional journalism" isn't a replacement for a niche blog writing about highly specific, highly detailed technical topics. What the blog post is describing isn't some bold prediction, it's already happening. Today it's far more difficult (and personally quite frustrating) to find information written by actual people with actual experience on any given topi…

Do you think this is also true of bookstores and libraries today?

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#108

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

interstice wrote: post #101
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #99

Intelligence itself may be a virus, literally. The chemical activity in your brain is not that unlike viral activity. The reason humans can do math may be that some kind of salamander-like creature millions of years ago contracted a brain virus, that virus happened to produce behavioral effects that helped it spread and ultimately become symbiotic. We may be little more than a pitched battle between what we would cal…

This triggered two main thoughts for me. First - this virus centric take is not so different to the one taken in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari in which he claims that we didn’t so much domesticate crops as become domesticated _by_ crops. While I think it’s healthy to consider less human centric views of what we are, there as here I think the value of questioning the intent of entities that don’t have end goals may not…

Its a view of life as unstable equilibria.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#109

Post by momento »

kordlessagain wrote: post #35
andy99 wrote: post #5

I think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus…

People have always tended toward taking shortcuts. It's human nature. So saying "this technology makes people dumber or lazier" is tricky, because you first need a baseline: exactly how dumb or lazy were people before? To quantify it, you'd need measurable changes. For example, if you showed that after widespread LLM adoption, standardized test scores dropped, people's vocabulary shrank significantly, or critical thi…

"The style complaint? Also overstated: L[...]"

This is how I know this comment was written by an AI.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#110

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

sho_hn wrote: post #60
kldg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've definitely been surprised by how it's being used; it's replacing people in places I don't think (even as a closet AI/LLM enthusiast) AI should ever be used: elder care, customer support (even on phone lines), for homework grading. -But I shouldn't have been so surprised, because some were already using robots for these tasks (or maybe not robots explicitly, but making CSRs/similar stick to scripts); my daughter…

I think to me the weirdest and most unexpected (not so much in retrospect) AI use is that people will use it all day long to navigate chat conversations with their boyfriends/girlfriends, having it suggest romantic replies, etc. I expect people to be lazy, but that we'd outsource feelings was surprising.

They aren't outsourcing feelings, they are outsourcing how to express them. As someone who is not good at expressing, I get this.
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