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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#121

Post by ethanbond »

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…

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.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#122

Post by jhbadger »

gptgpp wrote: post #46
tablespoon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's true though, Wikipedia really is terrible and full of fake citations that lead nowhere. It's an anti-knowledge base that sometimes has good information. Yeah, Wikipedia is garbage puffed up beyond all belief. I literally just today saw something just like you describe. It should be viewed very skeptically on anything anyone disagrees over (because then it's just snapshots of an agenda-pushing battle).

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…

Wikipedia is generally excellent on established scientific and technical topics in science and math and things. Where people seem to have issue with it are topics with more controversy -- a history of nation X can be seen as wrong or biased to people of country Y because it may refer to borders, causes of wars with its neighbors, etc. Even citations don't really help because critics will claim the citations are biased. Obviously printed encyclopedias also had this issue but typically people just accepted that Britannica would support the US/UK view of the world.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#124

Post by epistemer »

commandlinefan wrote: post #57
waselighis wrote: post #45

I agree with this article, but I feel the author is only scratching the surface of all the harm ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are going to cause. We just have to look at the current state of the internet today, with things like SEO spam, misinformation, social media bots, fake reviews, and so forth. The people responsible for these are already taking advantage of generative AI and it's going to exacerbate t…

> we simply lose all trust in the vast majority of information sources Did you ever have it though? I'm old enough to remember newspapers, and I always took everything I read in them with a grain of salt and I'm absolutely positive they were written by a human being. (disclaimer: didn't read the article because it's down right now).

Or what about just being old enough to remember when "I read it on the internet" was a pejorative and laughable statement in regards to the truth.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#125

Post by fnordpiglet »

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 text documents to encode knowledge won’t be as much a thing - similar to how we no longer use oral traditions to encode and disseminate knowledge. Who knows. But I doubt AI will fundamentally destroy society or knowledge or the internet or whatever. We will adapt, not just to preserve the way we did things, but to use the new things in a way that controls its side effects. It’ll of course be imperfect and some side effects can’t be controlled for. Some things just will cease to be a thing, like phone booths. While you can never have a bill and teds with a smartphone, it’s actually not the end of things. It’s just different. That’s how it works my friend. Life is impermanent, everything changes at all times, you can never recreate the past, and our suffering stems from our inability to let go of the way things are.

Edit: I hate to bring it up, but maybe this is what the semantic web was waiting for.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#128

Post by cookingrobot »

yellow_postit wrote: post #39
tablespoon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authenticated sources. > This is what they said about Wikipedia viz. Britannica... And they were right. If "they" were wrong about anything, it was the assumption that the masses would prioritize quality over cost, but it turns out that cheap wins every time. When it comes to information, it's like most people's taste buds don't work, so they'll pick…

Extending this — it seems to me there will be growing skillset need to identify quality/accuracy. Under formed thought: The proverbial haystack just got a lot larger, the needle stayed the same size, what tools will needle hunters need to develop both to find the needles and to prove to others they are in fact needles.

Running with the analogy.. We’re used to using tools that help us find needles in the haystack. A rake, a bright light, a metal detector. Now someone sold us a machine that turns hay into needles. They’re not quite as good, but they’re definitely needles. So now as you say the haystack is going to get covered in these. Do we ban use of this machine? Build new machines to separate these synthetic needles from real ones? Or improve the machine so that the needles it makes are good enough for what we need?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#129

Post by roughly »

clbrmbr wrote: post #36

GPT is a language model, not an oracle. So my first take is that people querying it for research are doing it wrong. Then again, if there’s a large economic incentive to use it in that way, we are very well may end up with the kind of feedback loop that the author describes.

You’re absolutely right on all counts, and yet, people Are doing it wrong, and will increasingly do so, because there Are large economic incentives for using it that way.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#130

Post by Xeophon »

gtirloni wrote: post #18
williamcotton wrote: post #16

> Therefore, our safeguard is constrained by time, knowledge, and resources. The problem then is that if that safeguard fails and A-Grade Bullshit is taken by an author using the AI as a research assistant, put into a research paper, book chapter, or online article, and is then cited. That becomes potential training data for the AI if it is released into the world or has the window of its training data set extended.…

> knowledge databases like Wolfram Alpha Isn't that where ChatGPT would actually be worse overall? It's been shown to give semi-accurate data very often while sounding very confident about it. When people require precise answers and it gives almost correct answer, it seems the general feeling is of amazement. I don't share that feeling. I hope nobody is using it for serious work without a human vetting the output.

OP mentions GPT in concert with WolframAlpha, which has already been implemented[0], showing a symbiosis between generation of text with proven knowledge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422122

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