The same thing could have been said about the computer in general and masses adopting the personal computer. That's how I view LLM's now. They are what follows computers in the evolution of information technology.
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GPT might be an information virus (2023)
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#32We're going to have to go in the opposite direction and rely on directories or lists of verified human-made/accurate content. It will be like the old days of yahoo and web-indexes all over again.
I had the thought the other day that one of the most valuable things a human-driven website could offer would be a webring linking to other human-driven websites
I'm a fan of bringing back Web Rings.
Perhaps a site could kick off where people proposed sites for Web Rings, edited them. The sites in question could somehow adopt them — perhaps by directly pulling from the Web Ring site.
And while we're at it, no reason for the Web "Ring" not to occasionally branch, bifurcate, and even rejoin threads from time to time. It need not be a simple linked list who's tail points back to it's head.
Happy to mock something up if someone smarter than me can fill in the details.
Pick a topic: Risograph printers? 6502 Assembly? What are some sites that would be in the loop? Would a 6502 Assembly ring have "orthogonal branches" to the KIM-1 computer (ring)? How about a "roulette" button that jumps you to somewhere at random in the ring? (So not linear.) Is it a tree or a ring? If a tree, can you traverse in reverse?
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is "the Church" in this analogy?
People who consider themselves exceptionally smart, who are well educated and write well, who only ever need to communicate in their native tongue ye, and who have the luxury of investing time in developing a personal writing style. It is a good analogy. There is great concern that the unwashed masses won’t know how to handle this tool and will produce information today’s curators would not approve of.
It's an extremely poor analogy, the original point is its an information virus telling people what to think (or thinking for them). It's the exact opposite of the allowing people to think for themselves that came with the enlightenment, it's back to the days of the "church" (someone else) telling people how to think and literally writing their words for them.
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#34i heard from an artist that Pinterest is full of AI-generated stuff now so artists looking for references have to go back to physical books for art references
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#35I think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus…
People have always tended toward taking shortcuts. It's human nature. So saying "this technology makes people dumber or lazier" is tricky, because you first need a baseline: exactly how dumb or lazy were people before?
To quantify it, you'd need measurable changes. For example, if you showed that after widespread LLM adoption, standardized test scores dropped, people's vocabulary shrank significantly, or critical thinking abilities (measured through controlled tests) degraded, you'd have concrete evidence of increased "dumbness."
But here's the thing: tools, even the simplest ones, like college research papers, always have value depending on context. A student rewriting existing knowledge into clearer language has utility because they improve comprehension or provide easier access. It's still useful work.
Yes, by default, many LLM outputs sound similar because they're trained to optimize broad consensus of human writing. But it's trivially easy to give an LLM a distinct personality or style. You can have it write like Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson. You can make it sound academic, folksy, sarcastic, or anything else you like. These traits demonstrably alter output style, information handling, and even the kind of logic or emotional nuance applied.
Thus, the argument that all LLM writing is homogeneous doesn't hold up. Rather, what's happening is people tend to use default or generic prompts, and therefore receive default or generic results. That's user choice, not a technological constraint.
In short: people were never uniformly smart or hardworking, so blaming LLMs entirely for declining intellectual rigor is oversimplified. The style complaint? Also overstated: LLMs can easily provide rich diversity if prompted correctly. It's all about how they're used, just like any other powerful tool in history, and just like my comment here.
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#36I think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus…
This is how the church felt about the printing press.
While the church feared people interpreting information on their own, with LLMs it's the opposite: we fear that most interpretation of information will be done through a singular bland AI extruder. Tech companies running LLMs become the pre-press churches, with individuals depending on them to analyze and interpret information on their behalf.
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#37It’ll certainly get more noisy but I don’t quite buy the total communication collapse implied here.
Humans still have an inherent need to be heard and hear others. Even in a pretty extreme scenario I think bubbles of organic discussion will continue
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#38We're going to have to go in the opposite direction and rely on directories or lists of verified human-made/accurate content. It will be like the old days of yahoo and web-indexes all over again.
I feel like SEO trash has made this a must have for me for the past few years already. If it’s not stack overflow, Reddit, or stack exchange, I’m wasting my time
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#39I think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus…
Like most progress, it made some things easier ( and some things worse as a result ). What I do find particularly fascinating is that it is doing that even in professions that should know better ( lawyers, doctors ). That my boss uses it is no surprise me though. I always suspected he never really read my emails.
I've definitely been surprised by how it's being used; it's replacing people in places I don't think (even as a closet AI/LLM enthusiast) AI should ever be used: elder care, customer support (even on phone lines), for homework grading. -But I shouldn't have been so surprised, because some were already using robots for these tasks (or maybe not robots explicitly, but making CSRs/similar stick to scripts); my daughter was taking college placement tests recently -- even the essay questions were graded by software, and she's watched by software as she writes it. These things still seem to me like jobs which fundamentally require a human touch -- it's been especially amazing to me teachers are using AI to detect AI; you can't determine whether or not a robot wrote it, but you can assign a grade to it? Huh??
I have a very vocally anti-AI friend, but there is one thing he always goes on about that confuses me to no end: hates AI, strongly wants an AI sexbot, is constantly linking things trying to figure out how to get one, and asking me and the other nerds in our group about how the tech would work. No compromises anywhere except for one of the most human experiences possible. :shrug:
Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It hasn't homogenized everything. It's further exposed humans for who they are. Humans are the virus.
Agent Smith had it right when he was interviewing Morpheus in the Matrix.
And then ironically Smith became a virus threatening both humans and machines. However, Agent Smith was the Oracle's tool to force a treaty between the machines and humans. As the Architect said at the end of Revolutions, she played a dangerous game.
But it was the only way forward to a new equilibrium.