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PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

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Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#71

Post by ijk »

agumonkey wrote: post #67
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #27

Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…

nobody wants to see other's ai generated images, but most people around me are drooling about generating stuff wait for the proof-of-humanity decade where you're paid to be here and slow and flawed

Most AI generated images are like most dreams: meaningful to you but not something other people have much interest it.

Once you have people sorting through them, editing them, and so on the curation adds enough additional interest...and for many people what they get out of looking at a gallery of AI images is ideas for what prompts they want to try.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#72

Post by tayo42 »

ijk wrote: post #68
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #27

Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…

The problem with "provide LLM output as a service," which is more or less the best case scenario for the ChatGPT listicles that clutter my feed, is that if I wanted an LLM result...I could have just asked the LLM. There's maybe a tiny proposition if I didn't have access to a good model, but a static page that takes ten paragraphs to badly answer one question isn't really the form factor anyone prefers; the actual cha…

Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand.

If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new information

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#73

Post by tayo42 »

Aerroon wrote: post #59
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #27

Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…

I can understand it for AI generated text, but I think there are a lot of people that like AI generated images. Image sites like get a ton of people that like AI generated images. Civitai gets a lot of engagement for AI generated images, but so do many other image sites.

Despite what people think there is a sort of art to getting interesting images out of an ai model.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#74

Post by emmelaich »

Evidlo wrote: post #7
EA-3167 wrote: post #5

I don't quite understand the issue of "back-dating" or hijacking accounts. How is this being done exactly? I came away from this article wondering if I was missing something.

The last section mentions that the PhysicsForums admins are experimenting with LLM-generated responses, so I think the site owners are responsible. > We reached out to Greg Bernhardt asking for comment on LLM usage in PhysicsForums, and he replied: > "We have many AI tests in the works to add value to the community. I sent out a 2024 feedback form to members a few weeks ago and many members don’t want AI features. We…

Looks like Greg now does SEO for Shopify. That fits I guess.

https://gregbernhardt.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbernhardt

https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/author/greg-bernhardt...

https://x.com/GregBernhardt4/status/1875287174205374533

> "The dead internet theory is coming to fruition. This is a large reason I'm starting to cut back on social media and take back my time."

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#75

Post by krapp »

tayo42 wrote: post #72
ijk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with "provide LLM output as a service," which is more or less the best case scenario for the ChatGPT listicles that clutter my feed, is that if I wanted an LLM result...I could have just asked the LLM. There's maybe a tiny proposition if I didn't have access to a good model, but a static page that takes ten paragraphs to badly answer one question isn't really the form factor anyone prefers; the actual cha…

Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand. If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new info…

>If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new information

You can literally just google that or use the appendix that's probably at the back of the manual. It's also probably stamped on the engine oil cap. It also probably doesn't matter and you can just use 10w40.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#76

Post by Gooblebrai »

emmelaich wrote: post #74
Evidlo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last section mentions that the PhysicsForums admins are experimenting with LLM-generated responses, so I think the site owners are responsible. > We reached out to Greg Bernhardt asking for comment on LLM usage in PhysicsForums, and he replied: > "We have many AI tests in the works to add value to the community. I sent out a 2024 feedback form to members a few weeks ago and many members don’t want AI features. We…

Looks like Greg now does SEO for Shopify. That fits I guess. https://gregbernhardt.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbernhardt https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/author/greg-bernhardt... https://x.com/GregBernhardt4/status/1875287174205374533 > "The dead internet theory is coming to fruition. This is a large reason I'm starting to cut back on social media and take back my time."

Oh, I thought he would be a physicist

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#77

Post by Gracana »

Sharlin wrote: post #69
Gracana wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I'm the same, and I love my LLMs. They're fun and interesting to talk to and use, but it's obvious to everyone that they're not very reliable. If I think an article is LLM-generated, then the signal I'm getting is that the author is just as clueless as I am, and there's no way I can trust that any of the information is correct.

> but it's obvious to everyone that they're not very reliable. Hopefully to everyone on HN, but definitely not to everyone on the greater Internet. There are plenty of horror stories of people who apparently 100% blindly trust whatever ChatGPT says.

Yeah that's fair, I suppose I see that sort of thing on reddit fairly regularly, especially in the "here's a story about my messed-up life" types of subreddits.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#78

Post by aleph_minus_one »

crdrost wrote: post #66
thatguy0900 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimistically, if all you want to do is prove you are, in fact, a person, and not prove that you are a specific person, there's no real reason to need to lose privacy. A service could vouch that you are a real person, verified on their end, and provide no context to the site owner as to what person you are.

I just want to semi-hijack this thread to note that you can actually peek into the future on this issue, by just looking at the present chess community. For readers who are not among the cognoscenti on the topic: in 1997 supercomputers started playing chess at around the same level as top grandmasters, and some PCs were also able to be competitive (most notably, Fritz beat Deep Blue in 1995 before the Kasparov games,…

> you will be chatting with someone who putatively has a real name and a physics pedigree, and you ask them to answer physics questions, and they appear to have a really vast physics knowledge, but then when you ask them a simple question like "and because the force is larger the accelerations will tend to be larger, right?" they take an unusually long time to say "yep, F = m a, and all that." And that's how you know this person is pasting your questions to a GPT prompt and pasting the answers back at you.

Honestly, (even) in my area of expertise, if the "abstraction/skill level" or the kind of wording (in your example: much less scientifically precise wording, "more like a 10 year old child asks"), it often takes me quite some time to adjust (it completely takes me out of my flow).

So, your criterion would yield an insane amount of false positives on me.

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#79

Post by tayo42 »

krapp wrote: post #75
tayo42 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand. If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new info…

>If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new information You can literally just google that or use the appendix that's probably at the back of the manual. It's also probably stamped on the engine oil cap. It also probably doesn't matter and you can just use 10w40.

I'm just reusing the example in the comment I responded to. Fill in something else then...

Re: PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

#80

Post by egypturnash »

Aerroon wrote: post #59
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #27

Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…

I can understand it for AI generated text, but I think there are a lot of people that like AI generated images. Image sites like get a ton of people that like AI generated images. Civitai gets a lot of engagement for AI generated images, but so do many other image sites.

People who submit blog posts here sure do love opening their blogs with AI image slop. I have taken to assuming that the text is also AI slop, and closing the tab and leaving a comment saying such.

Sometimes this comment gets a ton of upvotes. Sometimes it gets indignant replies insisting it's real writing. I need to come up with a good standard response to the latter.

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