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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#281

Post by skissane »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #279
skissane wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical design of the store makes it clear in most cases. The checkouts form a physical barrier between the “haven’t paid yet” area and the “have paid“ area. It is difficult to assume an attempt to steal in the former, much easier once one passes to the later with unpaid goods. The legal definition of theft - at least where I live - is all about intention. It involves an intention to deprive another of their pro…

“I forgot it was in my pocket.” And yes, I do realize that intention is part of the law. That wasn’t what I was saying really. I am saying that because we have that, we are implicitly accepting that a lot of this stuff cannot be ironclad. There has to be room for interpretation and enforcement.

This is where the law ends up discriminating in practice. The law professor who claims “I forgot it was in my pocket” is far more likely to be believed than the homeless person who makes the same claim. If it makes it as far as the prosecutors - and it probably won’t - they’ll see the homeless person as an easy win (gotta make that quota, keep up those KPIs), the law professor’s case will be put in the “too hard” basket.

Unless they have the law professor on video “forgetting it was in their pocket” again and again and again. With enough repetition, claims that it was an accident cease to be believable. Although then the law professor will probably have three esteemed psychiatrists willing to testify to kleptomania, and the case will go back in the too-hard basket again

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#282

Post by Forgeties79 »

Scea91 wrote: post #258
awb wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, why have a law if it’s not meant to be enforced universally and consistently? When laws are applied selectively it creates an unequal experiences in the population. No one wants the tyranny of oppressive applications of overbearing laws. So, in those instances, change the law to be fair enough and compassionate enough that it can be applied in all instances where the letter of the law is broken. An…

I think the main problem is not in universal law enforcement but in constant surveillance which is a bit orthogonal. Why should people be under constant surveillance even at times when they are not breaking any laws? Why should someone else have access to every moment of your life?

This is a fantastic question for the NSA!

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#283

Post by CodeMage »

oceanplexian wrote: post #88
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 a like a virus that now threatens its life. Perhaps something needs to be disrupted. The Internet is nothing like what it was 20 years ago, It turned into a bunch of social media walled gardens and SEO spam. ChatGPT is like fresh air because it can actually answer questions in a no-nonsense way without users having to scroll through 5-6 spam websites, paywalls, and crappy user interfaces to get an answer…

> ChatGPT is like fresh air because it can actually answer questions

Can it, though? The whole point of the article is that ChatGPT "makes shit up".

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#284

Post by Sparyjerry »

tarsinge wrote: post #276
dr_dshiv wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and GPT will never be applying critical thought Just wait. This party has just begun. 90% of humans will be like school kids in comparison to the critical thought of GPT-5.

We are talking about a model that at its core is about making statistics of what the next word will be in a sentence based on an existing corpus. It gives that model the ability to find and summarize all of the existing content in relation to a prompt beyond what humans could do, but I still see no critical thinking there.

This isn't exactly accurate. It's not creating one word at a time, that's the illusion given by the way it illustrates the text on the screen. Doing that would be impossible to create code that compiles for example.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#285

Post by Sparyjerry »

narrator wrote: post #84
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…

This is why the ChatGPT lawyer thing is far away. When you make an argument in a court filing as a lawyer, you as a person put your reputation on the line that that filing is not an argument that uses fake case law, or makes an argument that is nonsense. If that argument is nonsense and has nothing to do with the law or case law, you can lose your license to practice law. It happens with some regularity. People think…

The amount of mistakes is what matters. I've seen videos where lawyer's go crazy because the judges supposedly doesn't understand basic law. Either he judge or the lawyer is way wrong in those cases - and I suspect sometimes both are very wrong and even agree on the wrong opinion. It's like self-driving - it just has to make less mistakes than humans. I think a ChatGPT lawyer is actually very close and could be created even today if that is where it's engineers put the focus. ChatGPT is trained on a wide variety of data and right now, is essentially acting like Google so it can answer nearly any question imaginable - but it doesn't need to have such a vague set of data to draw from. All it takes is training it on a very specific set of cleaned, accurate, and up to date data to make it an expert on a single specific topic.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#286

Post by berniedurfee »

ericd wrote: post #82
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #75

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…

Yep, not sure what the panic here is, ChatGPT is probably churning out better quality stuff than the average SEO spammer. The internet has been mostly garbage for a very long time at this point.

I think this is an interesting take actually. Content on the internet is in a steep downward spiral.

Masses of spammers and SEO hackers are filling the tubes with garbage. There are still some safe-ish havens, but those bastions can only survive the onslaught for so long.

We need a new internet at some point relatively soon. Maybe ChatGPT will accelerate the demise of this one to force the creation of some new paradigm of communication and dissemination of knowledge.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#287

Post by sedev »

mountainb wrote: post #274
gptgpp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... There are lots of ways to browse Wikipedia offline without having your IP recorded, absent using something simpler like a VPN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download I can understand if this is just too much effort to put into an online discussion though, I probably wouldn't bother myself. And yeah there have been lots of scandals with Wikipedia. This one was pretty infamous: https://www.…

If we look at the Vulture Bee article, it cites a couple semi-relevant journal articles (which do exist but are not exactly on point for a general citation), but then it inflates the number of citations pointlessly by citing multiple pop news articles that all cite one of the previously cited research papers, and some of which just blogspam link to the other useless popular science magazine citations. https://en.wiki…

The link rot problem is real but Wikipedia editors have _diligently_ institutionalized automated use of the Internet Archive and other snapshotting sites (but the IA is the best one & deserves donation support). So compared to the average among other sites, Wikipedia has much less of a link rot problem.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#288

Post by sedev »

xdennis wrote: post #54
tablespoon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I wouldn't say it's garbage, just that the quality varies a lot. Uncontroversial stuff is quite accurate. A simple metric I use is: how long the talk page is. If a talk page has 15 archives then the article page is probably politically biased hot trash.

Unfortunately this heuristic, while often good, can sometimes lead you wildly astray — for examples see the article on Beyoncé and the article about the plant _Zea mays._ Good articles, but you want a hazmat suit for the talk pages.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#289

Post by l0b0 »

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…

This is the only semi-plausible positive take I've seen on ChatGPT. If we actually manage to move the world towards storing, presenting, and consuming facts in well-defined formats rather than long-form prose, that could possibly be an improvement on the current situation.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#290

Post by nojvek »

ChatGPT, StableDiffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E, VALL-E and all child models of Transformers are great at generative capabilites.

Awful at precise recall and facts, but amazing as artists, poets and making things that roughly look right.

For generating ideas, they are absolutely wonderful tools. I spend at-least an hour interacting with a combination of ChatGPT and MidJourney.

Wolfram Alpha is different, but it's a great tool I consult for any mathematics/finance questions.

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