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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#261

Post by tablespoon »

gptgpp wrote: post #219
miguelazo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that you only cited examples of scientific subjects. As the other commenter noted, articles of consequence for public debate (politics) are generally terrible and there are lots of "editors" who are working for deep state cut-outs doing nothing but trying to damage the reputation of intellectuals who are a danger to the status quo.

Yes I agree, it is telling. It is similarly telling that conservative wikis have barely any articles on core topics like engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences. These intellectuals you're describing oddly don't seem to have much interest in things most people would deem intellectual... For example, compare the Wikipedia article on Leonhard Euler with that of conservapedia... It's so absurd I had to do…

> It is similarly telling that conservative wikis have barely any articles on core topics like engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences. These intellectuals you're describing oddly don't seem to have much interest in things most people would deem intellectual...

It's not really telling, it's just a path-dependent artifact about how those projects are positioned in the "ecosystem." When you have a "mainstream" site that's a little biased against some ideology, it monopolizes the general-interest/popular users. A competitor that sets itself to answer that bias will only be able to attract a user base that's highly skewed towards very ideological users who found that bias intolerable, because the general interest users aren't motivated to leave for it.

If Wikipedia had a subtle conservative bias, a hypothetical "Leftopedia" would be similarly full of liberal axe-grinding and weak on general-interest topics.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#262

Post by vixen99 »

dsabanin wrote: post #143
krona wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about political biases of those who publish traditional encyclopedias?

So it's it's six of one and half a dozen on the other side? Not much evidence of that.

Mediabiasfactcheck.com says 'These sources (Britannica) consist of legitimate science or are evidence-based through the use of credible scientific sourcing. Legitimate science follows the scientific method, is unbiased, and does not use emotional words. These sources also respect the consensus of experts in the given scientific field and strive to publish peer-reviewed science. Some sources in this category may have a slight political bias but adhere to scientific principles'

On the other hand, https://www.newsmax.com/us/wikipedia-liberal-activist-websit... outlines some serious problems with Wikipedia. Here's one.

'Established leftist outlets The New York Times and BBC News are the most cited sources, around 200,000 stories. The Guardian, an equally left-wing outlet, is cited third at almost 100,000 citations'. Among the top 10 most-cited, only one was right-leaning.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#263

Post by sorokod »

I believe that we humans will need to fundamentally change our attitude to information. Information without an acceptable provenance, should be treated like contaminated food and thus avoided.

Unfortunately this implies that free information will be largely unfit for consumption.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#264

Post by wongarsu »

krona wrote: post #100
idiotsecant wrote: post #71

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

Though it is worth noting that they conclude

> The bias on a per word basis hardly differs between the sources because Wikipedia articles tend to be longer than Britannica articles.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#265

Post by khiner »

mkmk3 wrote: post #201
khiner wrote: post #120

The test use case of constructing a bio for yourself, hoping it accurately summarizes all the extremely low sample size data it happens to have of you in its web crawled training data, seems like one of the worst possible use cases for ChatGPT. It’s right there on the main page that it’s not to be trusted with factual information like this. ChatGPT will hallucinate details. It’s remarkable to me actually how often it…

I feel like the 3 youre missing there is something along the lines of "people enjoy social validation and internet points, to the extent that pretty shit content thats low effort is something we enjoy generating"

That is true, 3 would help steel my strawman. I agree that we’ll increasingly have capabilities to generate and publish garbage that’s _just_ good enough to generate clicks, and incentives to do this. In addition, I think we’ll increasingly have tools to produce content that is much more rich, imaginative, insightful, and factually correct in our future. Some more interesting questions to me are then: What will the ratio be? How will that ratio compare with what we see today? How easily will I be able to identify misinformation when I care about factual accuracy (again, compared with today)? How easily will I be able to avoid the garbage, vs find the good stuff?

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#266

Post by AlphaOne1 »

carapace wrote: post #159

cf. xkcd/810 "Constructive" https://xkcd.com/810/ - - - - 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…

Your comment reminded me about a discussion G.K Chesterton has in "Orthodoxy" on madness. My take is that when facts and information is divorced from experience we risk being unmoored from reality:

> If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst for it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

[0] https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodo...

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#267

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

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…

>This is what people do collectively, long before any GPTs were in sight.

Very insightful of you to say that. (Though I must say that it is not a recipe for happiness, AKA ignorance is bliss and all that... )

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#268

Post by shadowgovt »

uoaei wrote: post #222
shadowgovt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is, then, is the human-borne friction enough to slow the diffusion of GPT-derived "knowledge" back onto Wikipedia through human inputs? It is very easy to imagine that GPT-likes could apply misinformation to a population and change social/cultural/economic understandings of how reality works. That would then slowly seep back into "knowledge bases" as the new modes of reasoning become "common sense".

Wikipedia content requires citation.

I think the worst-case scenario is that some citable sources get fooled by ChatGPT and Wikipedians will have to update their priors on what a "reliable source" looks like.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#269

Post by mkmk3 »

khiner wrote: post #265
mkmk3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the 3 youre missing there is something along the lines of "people enjoy social validation and internet points, to the extent that pretty shit content thats low effort is something we enjoy generating"

That is true, 3 would help steel my strawman. I agree that we’ll increasingly have capabilities to generate and publish garbage that’s _just_ good enough to generate clicks, and incentives to do this. In addition, I think we’ll increasingly have tools to produce content that is much more rich, imaginative, insightful, and factually correct in our future. Some more interesting questions to me are then: What will the r…

How can fact checking be better facilitated as tech develops? It seems like a distinct social issue to me, one that I imagine requires verification from people with reputation (which could be aided by improved social networks probably). Id be very interested to hear if you have other ideas, as you seem optimistic on this front and would like to share in that :)

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#270

Post by Method-X »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #125

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 tex…

I think this will push society toward better solutions to human verification. Probably through governments or their corporate proxies. Will that end up good or bad? I have no idea, but we'll find out soon.
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