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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

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Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#241

Post by everdrive »

intended wrote: post #166
MichaelZuo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a critical difference, most of the issues are sidestepped because everyone knows nobody can force a custom frontpage tailored for a specific reader. So there’s no reason to try a lot of the tricks and schemes that scoundrels might have elsewhere, even if those same scoundrels also have HN accounts.

The front page is managed extensively on HN, so is this an argument for stronger moderation?

I think there's an important distinction between strict moderation and curation, but in general yes I'd agree.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#242

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mentalgear wrote: post #128
IMTDb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the sh…

It's really not that complicated: - Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and proliferates polarisation. - To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting) features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense). - Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly transparent and open to the public and r…

That only treats the symptoms, not the cause. The purpose of algorithmic optimization farming engagement is to increase ad impressions for money. It is advertising that has to be regulated in such a way that maximizing ad impressions is not profitable or you will find that social media companies will still have every incentive to find other ways to do it that will probably be just as harmful.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#243

Post by randycupertino »

mtlynch wrote: post #217
randycupertino wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a work enterprise GPT account across the company.

How does that explain what you observed? The only way I can understand that as an explanation is if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that what you're saying?

How else would she have been able to parrot the exact same GPT response without reading it directly? You think she just thought of it word for word exactly the same off the top of her head?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#244

Post by carlosjobim »

ricardo81 wrote: post #6

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

Your facebook feed is now at this URL: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#245

Post by O_H_E »

ori_b wrote: post #235
coffeecoders wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment. You can type something "by hand" and still have almost no voice in it if the incentives push you to flatten it out. A lot of us spent years optimizing for clarity, SEO, professionalism etc. But that did shape how we wrote, maybe even more than our natural cadence. The result wasn’t voice, it was everyone converging on the safe and optimized template.

If you chose to trade your soul to 'incentives', and replace incisive thought with bland SEO and professionalism -- you chose this. Your voice has become the bland language of business.

So in that case, would someone willing to publish LLM-speak under their name be similarly adopting that "voice".

Does that entail that LLMs are not in fact erasing our societal voices, only making it easier to adopt bland-corporate en-mass?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#247

Post by onraglanroad »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #134
tucnak wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a statement on Americ…

> Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer. So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box that is even more limited than the space we…

> So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box that is even more limited than the space we live in?

Sshh! If they know we've figured it out, we'll all be restarted again.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#248

Post by khannn »

mtlynch wrote: post #217
randycupertino wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a work enterprise GPT account across the company.

How does that explain what you observed? The only way I can understand that as an explanation is if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that what you're saying?

They're saying that the shared account is enough for OpenAI to provide the same result. Very interesting, I'd like to know more like was it a generic IUD or a specific one in the query. Also, the Doc is a cardiologist, they don't specialize in Gyno stuff and their training/schooling is enough for them to evaluate sources.

Just for reference before AI it was typical for employers of doctors to pay for a service/app called UpToDate which provided vetted info for docs like google.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#249

Post by macintux »

jfindper wrote: post #188
Aurornis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually I’m not exactly old yet, but I agree. I don’t know how so many people became convinced that online interactions were pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda prior to Facebook. A lot of the old internet spaces were toxic cesspools. Most of my favorite forums eventually…

> pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda Most people are putting forth an argument of pervasiveness and scale , not existence.

I suppose more than a few of us olds remember Serdar Argic's attempts to redefine the Armenian genocide on IRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

But Serdar was relatively easy to ignore, because it was just one account, and it wasn't pushed on everyone via an algorithm designed to leverage outrage to make more money for one of the world's billionaires. You're right: pervasiveness and scale make a significant difference.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#250

Post by gordonhart »

coffeecoders wrote: post #99

I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.

My theory is that LLMs are accelerating [online] radicalization by commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse the easiest way is to say something that would make Anthropic’s safety team have a heart attack.
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