Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GPT might be an information virus (2023)

nonint.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 110 posts

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#81

Post by Nevermark »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
andy99 wrote: 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…

What's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator". Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was. I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habi…

Our thumbs, ..., our intellect, and especially language, gave us an ecological/economic niche.

We became a technological species.

We observed, standardized and mechanized our environments to work for us. That is our niche.

But then things snowballed in the last couple of centuries. A threshold was crossed. Our technology became our environment, and we began adapting the environment for our technologies direct benefit, for own indirect benefit.

Simple roads for us at first, then paved for mechanized contraptions. Wires for talking at first, then optimized for computers. We are now almost completely building out a technological world for the convenience and efficiency of the technology.

And once our technology frees us from dependence on others, a second threshold will be crossed. Then neither others or the technology, will need us.

I don't see a species of devolving humans, no longer needed by their creations, in a world now convenient for those creations, finding a happy niche.

If there is a happy landing, it will need to take a different route than that.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#82

Post by ajmurmann »

ceejayoz wrote: post #42
DaveZale wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.

Does Nextdoor actually have the local news? The other day I kept hearing sirens outside for hours. I hoped to find on Nextdoor what was going on but I mostly got lost-cat posts and people trying to sell stuff like handyman services. This is how it goes most times I check on Nextdoor. Maybe it depends on the area.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#83

Post by SamPatt »

>There’s a related problem that will occur: as AI-generated information drowns out human-generated information, humans will simply stop producing content.

Stopped reading here.

No, humans won't stop generating content. There's no reason to believe this is inevitable.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#84

Post by quesera »

sho_hn wrote: post #60
kldg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think to me the weirdest and most unexpected (not so much in retrospect) AI use is that people will use it all day long to navigate chat conversations with their boyfriends/girlfriends, having it suggest romantic replies, etc. I expect people to be lazy, but that we'd outsource feelings was surprising.

I have a family member who worked in a Hallmark store when they launched a custom card printing service (in-store, select the cover art and write your own message, printed on a card).

She says that about 75% of the custom card customers would ask her what they should write for a message.

She wrote messages of friendship, love, birthdays, graduations, congratulations, sympathy, etc. To support her coworkers on other shifts, she filled an index card box with several dozen canned "custom" messages for Hallmark customers to choose from.

Somewhat separately, she reports that working at Hallmark is a good way to make a misanthrope out of an intelligent teenager. To which I reply that most of the intelligent teenagers I knew were already misanthropes! But the stories she tells, particularly of Christmas ornament hysteria, are hysterical.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#85

Post by nunez »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #43
kldg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It made me chuckle, because I absolutely buy the anecdotal anti-AI friend. On the other hand, if he applied himself, maybe he could figure it out. I honestly can't say I am not intruiged by the possibility.

Wait til he finds /r/LocalLLaMA

Sexbots are the raison d'etre for that sub

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#86

Post by nunez »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
andy99 wrote: 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…

What's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator". Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was. I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habi…

People who make that retort forget that the calculator was immensely helpful but _also_ antiquated the need for mental math, which in my opinion is a bad thing. (Everyone should be able to calculate 5% and 10% of numbers, given how easy it is to do)

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#87

Post by nunez »

toofy wrote: post #58
crimsoneer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how the church felt about the printing press.

this would be the opposite. the llm situation may be heading back towards something similar the church age. the church did all of the reading and understanding for us. owners of the church gobbled up as much information as it could (encouraging confessions) and then the church owners decided when, how, where and which of that information flowed to us.

This exactly is the terminal state of big AI: models that only four companies can train (on datasets only they can obtain) who also happen to own all of the ancillary services for accessing those models (because most businesses are really chatgpt in a trenchcoat). Yet the world is begging and kicking down the doors for this, just like they did for social media.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#88

Post by nunez »

ajmurmann wrote: post #82
ceejayoz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.

Does Nextdoor actually have the local news? The other day I kept hearing sirens outside for hours. I hoped to find on Nextdoor what was going on but I mostly got lost-cat posts and people trying to sell stuff like handyman services. This is how it goes most times I check on Nextdoor. Maybe it depends on the area.

It's not bad for hyper-local news in the absence of town newspapers (mostly gone) though this greatly depends on the communities that you subscribe to

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#89

Post by lazide »

Hupriene wrote: post #48
3willows wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's some real obsessive stalker logic there.

other side. co-dependent.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#90

Post by monkaiju »

joegibbs wrote: post #79
andy99 wrote: 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 speaki…

The printing press (and the others listed) aren't homogenizing, they're if anything tools of diversification. They allowed far more novel ideas to be presented and distributed than before, AI on the other hand "distils" and "reduced" large heterogeneous information into a much more homogenous slop.
Post reply on HN