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ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

castlebridge.ie

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Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#51

Post by xnx »

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 a risk for sure, but Google long-ago developed trust/reputation factors for pages (e.g. PageRank). I imagine they have something much more advanced now, and are hard at work trying to figure out how to measure reputation in the LLM space.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#52

Post by ticviking »

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…

I'm so glad I have a copy of 2008 wikipedia stored on an old OLPC I don't care connect to the internet at this point.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#53

Post by CuriouslyC »

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…

AI content spam will drive AI content analysis and filtering. The arms race between the two is like a meta-version of the GAN model, which means eventually spam will become indistinguishable from real content.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#54

Post by xdennis »

tablespoon wrote: post #31
mountainb wrote: post #28

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.

> 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.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#55

Post by waselighis »

waselighis wrote: post #45

I agree with this article, but I feel the author is only scratching the surface of all the harm ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are going to cause. We just have to look at the current state of the internet today, with things like SEO spam, misinformation, social media bots, fake reviews, and so forth. The people responsible for these are already taking advantage of generative AI and it's going to exacerbate t…

To elaborate a little more, multiple attempts to separate real people from bots have either failed or are soon to be defeated. Captchas worked for a while, but AI systems will likely be able to easily defeat Captchas within the next 5 years. Some websites require a phone number, but it's not difficult to get a fake or temporary phone number, if you know how. Deepfakes mean you can't even trust a real-time stream from a person you can see and hear. Eventually, we're going to have to completely sacrifice our privacy and anonymity online in order to prove we're not a bot.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#56

Post by visarga »

discreteevent wrote: post #15

> When we turn the job of creating the first draft of the thing over to ChatGPT we risk removing the “figuring shit out” part of everyone’s career-path. And we get away with that while we still have people who have figured shit out. That's the main problem from my point of view.

No, we got to keep up with the shiny toys. Junior is riding on chatGPT like everyone else.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#57

Post by commandlinefan »

waselighis wrote: post #45

I agree with this article, but I feel the author is only scratching the surface of all the harm ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are going to cause. We just have to look at the current state of the internet today, with things like SEO spam, misinformation, social media bots, fake reviews, and so forth. The people responsible for these are already taking advantage of generative AI and it's going to exacerbate t…

> we simply lose all trust in the vast majority of information sources

Did you ever have it though? I'm old enough to remember newspapers, and I always took everything I read in them with a grain of salt and I'm absolutely positive they were written by a human being. (disclaimer: didn't read the article because it's down right now).

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#59

Post by labrador »

liveoneggs wrote: post #42
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…

If ChatGPT just consumes itself will the end result of all queries just eventually recurse down to a single answer? - for example "42"

OpenAI sells a pro subscription. I thought it was clever that they priced it at 42 dollars a month.

Re: ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge

#60

Post by tempodox »

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…

And there are perverse incentives at play. Another article that made it to the front page today [1] reports how BuzzFeed's stock surged after they announced they would be “enshittening” their content.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34544744

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