51–60 of 100 posts
Quora ruined Quora
This story is really interesting for all the not-specific-to-quora parts. It’s pretty obvious that quora has a strange culture of know-it-alls trying to show off, but this AI product makes it clear that the act of showing off is the product . The answers are garbage and they obviously don’t care. The key action for sale is not finding an answer, but writing it. What’s really interesting is that Quora product team dec…
So responding to a post but not getting responses is the same as responding to slop with a financial incentive? I'm not sure I fully follow.
I only very slightly agree in the fact that I rarely make top level comments unless I feel I have something unique to share. And I know that's not necessarily a common enough sentiment (lest, very few people would make top level comments). But given how I usually check the front page or active, my retort 99% of the time is already posted elsewhere. Half the time it already has responses too. So most of my activity is more responding to other comments to try and start a discussion.
And ultimately that is my goal in a forum: 1) ask about and understand others' experiences and 2) try to share my own experinces where appropriate. I have my share of https://xkcd.com/386/ as well, so I'm not perfect in regards to "hearing myself speak" or falling for the occasional flamebait. But I'd like to think that most of my engagement no forums like this passes a few basic tests:
- does this comment contribute to the conversation? - do I have a goal in mind with my comment? (e.g. if I'm asking a question, am I asking that user? Do I hope anyone at all chimes in with an answer? If I'm sharing a story, does this story hold potential value and lessons for the community?) - Is the comment civil? Can I make this comment without involving the person (unless the person is the goal)?
I always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.
That’s not to disparage the value of a juiced up autocomplete though
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I would posit that there exists an opportunity to make a Twitter or Reddit clone that explicitly intermixed bots. Maybe even exclusively bots." To that I posit that Twitter and Reddit will morph into what you described. Maybe it already happened.
> … will morph into what you described. Maybe it already happened. I can only assume that this is one of several reasons why the world’s largest social media company is on the cutting edge of LLM research.
Before AI there were a lot of shills on the site who deliberately gave answers that had nothing to do with reality. AI just sped up the process. And the answer the author of the article formulates has nothing to do with reality either.
A shill asks a specific question, which is then “answered” by a bunch of other shills, recommending some product.
I remember answering a technical “question” on the Swift Language group, in LI. I gave a simple, accurate, answer to what I considered to be an earnest question about a basic dilemma. It was something that I knew all about, and had a lot of experience, dealing with.
My answer was completely ignored, but the asker engaged many of the ridiculous “answers,” and I realized what was happening.
I left that group years ago (along with every other LI group, and, pretty much, LI, in general), and now see this technique being applied everywhere.
I always think people calling AI just ‘fancy autocomplete‘ haven’t really tried it yet.
But the tech cycle has been hyping it to all heaven (or hell), and claiming it can simply reproduce your imagination on a whim. Maybe in another decade, but that doesn't stop companies from buying in and trying to replace skilled labor ASAP.
Quora ruined Quora. And it started well before the advance of LLMs.
Quora was in my uBlacklist filters many years before generative AI was a thing.
IT finally broke me in 2022 and had me download uBlacklist. To this day it's the only site on there.
But in general, a frontier LLMs like the ones trained by Open AI would not make such silly mistakes in their output. Its "fancy autocomplete" is trained on millions of documents that include detailed description of Trump's face and the presence of the word "Trump" in the context window would activate countless weights that relate to "orange hair", "pussy grabbing", "bribes" etc. Each word or sequence of tokens can be understood as a vector in a space of say, 12288 different dimensions, and for each round in the algorithm the entire context is refined so that each of those dimensions would access finer and finer details of the subject matter present in the training data.
So the model really does "know" Trump does not have a mustache. What it lacks (or has very limited ability to do) is rational exploration of the information it holds. It's like an idiot savant with the mental ability of a 4 year old that has somehow memorized the entire information that exists on the internet.