41–50 of 110 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is "the Church" in this analogy?
refers to the gutenberg press, and mass production of printed works, threatening the siloed, ivory towers of knowledge at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_p... if everyone has a bible, then who needs the church to tell you what it says.
We'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.
A few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries. Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?
That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is "the Church" in this analogy?
refers to the gutenberg press, and mass production of printed works, threatening the siloed, ivory towers of knowledge at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_p... if everyone has a bible, then who needs the church to tell you what it says.
Clearly, all the protestants who burned more witches than the catholics ever did, and kept at it for centuries after the inquisition had stopped. But that's just my opinion here.
I'm all for it. Let big tech destroy their cash cow, then maybe we can rebuild it in OUR interest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps that is the real danger. Everyone except a small elite who (rightly) feel they understand how LLMs work would simply give up serious thinking and accept whatever "majority" opinion is in their little social media bubble. We wouldn't have the patience to really engage with genuinely different viewpoints any more. I recall some Chinese language discussion about the experience of studying abroad in the Anglophon…
The point being: when you find someone who is tailoring all his/her/its attention to you and you alone, why bother talking to anyone else.
I 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 thi…
You say it's human nature to take shortcuts, so the danger of things that provide easy homogenizing shortcuts should be obvious. It reduces the chance of future innovation by making it more easy for more people have their perspectives silently narrowed.
Personally I don't need to see more anecdotal examples matching that study to have a pretty strong "this is becoming a problem" leaning. If you learn and expand your mind by doing the work, and now you aren't doing the work, what happens? It's not just "the AI told me this, it can't be wrong" for the uneducated, it's the equivalent of "google maps told me to drive into the pond" for the white-collar crowd that always had those lazy impulses but overcame them through their desire to make a comfortable living.