221–230 of 301 posts
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…
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It's not the same. This is something I've observed many times but have never quite been able to put a name to it. When you lower the friction of an action sufficiently, it causes a qualitative change in the emergent behavior of the whole system. It's like how a little damping means the difference between a bridge you can safely drive over versus a galloping Gertie that resonates until it collapses. When a human has t…
Humans still have to choose to transcribe ChatGPT noise into Wikipedia, because automated attempts to do so will be too easy to identify and squash. Wikipedia already does organization- and source-level IP blocking for input sources that have proven sufficiently malicious.
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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.
Not only that, but it suffers from a persistent yet subtle liberal bias.
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…
If the preponderance of human writing/creation/art says the sun revolves around the earth, then AI not only nails that down as infallible, but INFERS from it and comes up with new justification for stuff that it made up.
Mandela Effect is all about what 'should' be the truth. Some of the most interesting parts of reality are where bits of reality don't neatly fit into the narrative.
AI exploiting its own inferences and magnifying the Mandela Effect means it steamrollers inconvenient realities on the grounds that 'most people' wouldn't think so. But we don't even think of AI as 'most people', we imagine it as some kind of super-set of humanity, the ultimately wise and skilled overseer.
Boy, is that a mistake.
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…
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> I think the only way you're correct is if ChatGPT were to greatly increase the incentive to publish spam.
Arguably it still is spam, and consider the incentive to hide advertising (or generally to push any agenda), when using a program is orders of magnitude cheaper than paying people to do it, but now is hard enough to recognize, I cannot say any more whether your average hn comment has been written by ChatGPT or not as long as I am not specifically looking out for it.
My worry was it would completly destroy the SEO industry and indeed, SEO itself.
The kind of things I do (building thousands of content sites to feed a master money site) are super niche and require millions to get into the game, all it will take is a handfull of non droped high authority domains from auction and a decent server to churn out crap, scale that on a few hundred domains and it is game over.
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"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." I am not sure, if the situation is that dramatic, but just wait, until advertisers finds a way to get their "data" into ChatGPT results (or alike). Then things will get really ugly. So yes, this is what we will have to do: "All signs point to this strengthening the value of curation and authe…
I just envisioned a sci-fi movie like terminator. Everyone in the world has great AIs. But at some point when injecting the advertising code for Rad Cola it goes wrong. Dudes AI keeps reminding him he should drink a 'Rad Cola' with lunch. It let's him know all the celebrities he follows all drink Rad Cola. Slowly it gets more insistent. Eventually the AIs take over the world, but in the name of benevolence, they only…
ChatGPT doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of bullshit and misinformation. The average person already consumes a low-signal, high-noise info diet, since the advent of modern propaganda in the 1920s.
Are you really suggesting that the average person had access to better information before the 1920s? For real?
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> 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…