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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#153
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but there are something like 700,000 books published on average each year, and almost 2 million scientific journal articles. Let's not even consider newspaper. Of course, some of those books will definitely be AI generated or garbage quality, and we all know many of those journal articles can be worth less than the paper they're printed on. Yet even if we cut it down to 100,000 books and half a million scienti…

Journal articles (and newspapers) are also plagued by bullshit. Humans are capable of producing intelligently sounding word salads just like chatgpt can.

Yep that's why I said let's not even consider newspapers. Many of those have been using AI generated/content-mill/sponsored content for years and years.

Also why I acknowledged journal articles can be worth less than the paper they're printed on. Even if you were to select for reputable, high impact journals, those also often experience scandals, retractions, potential data fabrication, etc.

But then there are textbooks and technical publications, also being published in the hundreds of thousands globally each year.

The fact is that with billions of human beings on the planet, and media increasingly being digitized by default, and AI-content detection, I don't see how we could possibly run out of new content to grow LLMs...

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#154
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.

My Firefox with residential IP got redirected to google and that's when I checked `curl -I` (-I does HEAD request but browser did the usual GET request).

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#156
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they right, though? I am pretty sure I've seen research that compared the scope and accuracy of both and wikipedia was miles ahead.

In most areas you're correct, but the political slant/bias of Wikipedia is fairly blatant and is getting worse. See for example: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/41946110

If reality has a left-wing bias, then you still have to control for that confounding effect.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Automation and scale create their own threats. Security cameras have existed for a long time, but storage cheap enough to keep years of footage and algorithms capable of processing thousands of streams in real time create massive privacy problems that didn't exist even with the richest companies paying humans to watch.

>Automation and scale create their own threats.

I don't know why such a simple fact needs to be repeated over and over again. It's either naivete or malice that makes people ignore that fact.

A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#158
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.

The same happens with any user agent.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#159
cf. xkcd/810 "Constructive" https://xkcd.com/810/

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Schimidhuber says that his task is "to create an automatic scientist, and then retire."

Not long ago it was mildly insulting for someone to suggest that your writing sounded like the output of GPT, already (for most of us) it has become mildly complementary. GPT may be hallucinating, but it writes well.

So what if you connect it to empirical feedback? Make it a scientist. I don't think it will be long before these machines think better than us (at least most of us.)

The thing is, they don't have glands. They don't have historical trauma in their flesh. What I'm getting at is that these machines won't have human hangups. They won't be neurotic. They won't be HAL. They will be sane.

The interesting thing here is that life on Earth is actually pretty straightforward. In video game terms Earth is very easy and all the walkthroughs and cheats are known and available. The only reason it seems hard is that people are kinda messed up. Once we have sane intelligent machines to make our decisions for us things should get better rapidly.

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