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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

131–140 of 301 posts

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#131

From my experiments, ChatGPT is at least valuable by generating boilerplate code for scripting languages. I believe once connected to enterprise codebase its quality and completion can dramatically increase.

Aren't scripting languages meant to reduce boilerplate code? Maybe you just need a better API and not an AI?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#132
post #119

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…

I don't really understand this hypothesis as it assumes that information quality of AI generated content on the internet will drop as a result of ChatGPT, not increase. The way I see it is that ChatGPT isn't the only tool out there that can create spam and junk content. The only difference is that ChatGPT produces something that's of a high enough quality that it's not as easy for a human to easily classify it as spa…

"I don't really understand this hypothesis as it assumes that information quality of AI generated content on the internet will drop as a result of ChatGPT, not increase."

It has to drop. ChatGPT can not source new truths except by rare accident.

I bet a lot of you are choking on that. So, I'd say this: Can you just "source" new truths? If you just sit and type plausible things, will some of them be right? Yes, but not very many. Truth is exponentially exclusive. That's not a metaphor; it's information theory. It's why we measure statements in bits, an exponential measure, and not some linear measure. ChatGPT's ability to spin truth is not exponentially good.

A confabulation engine becoming a major contributor to the "facts" on the internet can not help but drop the average quality of facts on the internet on its own terms.

When it starts consuming its own facts, it will iteratively "fuzz" the "facts" it puts out even more. ChatGPT is no more immune to "garbage in garbage out" than any other process.

"Finally, I think what you'll see happen in future iterations of ChatGPT to improve quality and accuracy is that content will be fed in weighted by how authoritative the source is"

Even if authority is perfect, that just slows the process. And personally I see no particularly strong correlation between "authority" and "truth". If you do, expand your vision; there are other "authorities" in the world than the ones you are thinking of.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#133
The internet has been groaning under the load of bots, automation and distrust for a while now anyway: in my mind what is needed is a system for proving constituent parts of your identity which is also privacy preserving. I'm thinking of the work around DID re: rebooting the web of trust, and the W3C working group

If you can wield an ephemeral and verifiable token which asserts your humanness, hierarchically derived from a certificate privately issued to you by one of hopefully a healthy number of well known authorities, you can participate within circles of the human web without revealing anything else about your identity (name, a/s/l, etc)

But, outside of this enclave you can also interact with AI without revealing whether in fact you too are AI.

In this way the internet can develop a more sensitive immune system where it is difficult for human systems to be perverted by Sybil attacks.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#134

ChatGPT is the bell announcing the death of anonymity on the web. Anonymous content will be generated content, real discussion will shift to gated communities with either paywalls or proofs of identity.

I see most replies are missing the point. The text that ChatGPT generates is very human like, so companies will be forced to adopt a mitigation strategy by tying users to a government ID. Such moves would also be bolstered by the government of various nations, which have already been asking for something like this.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#135

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…

>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

Considering there are "GPT plagiarism" checkers, I don't think this will become an issue. I wonder at which point an extension will come out that will check a page's text if it was written by a human.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#136

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…

> There's no way that OpenAI isn't fully aware of all the harms their AI is going to cause.

You’d be shocked at how good people can be at deluding themselves when their livelihood is on the line. Execs at Facebook still think their product is good for society.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#137
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…

> Could you elaborate on this? If it is full of garbage a couple examples should be very easy to find. I could give examples but I won't, because that would link my HN and Wikipedia accounts. > So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh. People unironically describe it as the "sum of all human knowledge," so it's definitely puff…

I could give examples but I won't, because that would link my HN and Wikipedia accounts.

How?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#139
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.

Try setting your user agent to something that looks like a browser.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The funny thing about ChatGPT is it will write code that uses non-existent confabulated APIs. You have to then call it out and it will say, oh sorry, of course you're right, here's another confabulated API, etc. The amount of convincing B.S it can spew is enormous! Worse, when you stray into topics that are controversial it will often use informal fallacies. When you call it out, it will say, yes, you're right, I use…

I don’t know why more people don’t notice this? I feel like nearly everyone talking about ChatGPT hasn’t really pushed it very far or read what it says very closely. It’s actually pretty terrible
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