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GPT might be an information virus (2023)

nonint.com

71–80 of 110 posts

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#71
I want to suggest that the virus is even more insidious, and is an organism that feeds on VC money, and it is evolving via a substrate of human programmers to become more efficient at consuming it. And like an organism evolving towards survival, it gives no shits about the utility generated in return for the thing it eats.

And, as time goes on, it'll get more efficient at the consumption and waste less and less energy on the generation of utility. It is an organism that needs servers to feed and generates hype like a deep-sea monster glows its lure.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#72
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Web rings are a thing I've been thinking about a bit. Anyone know any good ones? There are a couple I reached out to for one of the projects I'm working on, to get my site on them, but I never got responses. There are also some webrings I've come across that have died or been retired. :(

Yeah, the dynamic (remote) web ring server I am conceiving would handle dead the links in the ring.

There's still the buy-in problem though. Convincing the owners of the sites you want in the ring to modify their HTML to dynamically fetch and display the ring links.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#73
post #5

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…

To be honest I think you and others over play it. ChatGPT and LLM's in general sound pretty corporatey. A lot of the at least English written text online is pretty homogenous in style.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#74
post #64

Alternatively stated: > The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. > Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. > The signal is an attack. ―Blindsight, by…

Is that the sci fi novel about an alien race that is annoyed and feels attacked by noise?

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#76
post #74
post #64

Alternatively stated: > The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. > Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. > The signal is an attack. ―Blindsight, by…

Is that the sci fi novel about an alien race that is annoyed and feels attacked by noise?

Nope it's the book about the concept of a true turing-machine like alien being which has no "consciousness", it's mechanistic but insanely complex, like the Borg but not even assimilating; it's like a very very sophisticated "grey goo" nanobot scenario

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#77
I'm unconvinced -- Certainly this will happen gradually, and there will be widespread public support for a solution. It's not to hard to imagine making online reviews or "high quality content" require verification tied to some per-citizen identification code (or asymmetric key). Maybe this makes it harder post anonymously on the internet, but at the very least we won't have the issue of proving identity.

Just wish we had a competent government to handle the upcoming transition. But even an incompetent one can have smart employees under it, and can give them the funding they need to accomplish this.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#78
I don't think the results of the last two decades of mass information dissemination have been all that great. People didn't trust anything on the internet before GPT, and the internet was already a cacophony of screeching voices too. Smart people were already decoupling from social media, and moving meaningful interaction to enclaves well before ChatGPT became a factor. ChatGPT did not ruin the internet, it was unleashed on a broken internet to begin with.

If, as this article predicts, the result of GPT is that we don't trust information from the internet, and everybody moves away from it, that's great. Traditional journalism was better, as it turns out. Talking mainly to your friends rather than millions of people was better, as it turns out. I'm ready to go back to that, should it come to it.

But it won't. This essay is making a catastrophic prediction that won't come to pass. Whatever the future is, it's going to be something nobody is predicting yet. It'll be better than the doomsayers predict, and worse than what the cheerleaders say. It will be nothing like a simple magnification of the present concern over epistemology.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#79
post #5

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…

It’s the latest in a series of homogenising inventions - the printing press, radio, television, the internet - that will probably result in people of the future speaking and thinking more similarly than today. First went minor languages, then dialects, now regional differences within languages. Next will probably be the difference between different English accents - I think by 2100 English speakers will all be speaking with a generically American accent no matter where they are on earth. Then next will probably be other national languages - 90% of Swedes and Dutch people already speak English.
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