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GPT might be an information virus (2023)

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Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#91

Post by melagonster »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #15
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…

Like most progress, it made some things easier ( and some things worse as a result ). What I do find particularly fascinating is that it is doing that even in professions that should know better ( lawyers, doctors ). That my boss uses it is no surprise me though. I always suspected he never really read my emails.

Their way is similar to programmers. The proficient user can distinguish whether the output is correct at first look.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#92

Post by dns_snek »

karaterobot wrote: post #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 unlea…

You're confusing social media with the internet at large. "Traditional journalism" isn't a replacement for a niche blog writing about highly specific, highly detailed technical topics. What the blog post is describing isn't some bold prediction, it's already happening.

Today it's far more difficult (and personally quite frustrating) to find information written by actual people with actual experience on any given topic than it was 5 years ago, because for every one of those articles there are now 20 more written by LLMs, often outranking them. This frustration is only going to grow as the LLM proliferation continues.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#93

Post by saghm »

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…

It seems like a stretch to argue that we have any clue what the evolutionary consequences would be for something that's been around only a couple of years. Human-level intelligence took millions of years to evolve even when the lifespans of our ancestors were shorter than they are now, so trying to predict how something so new will affect the biology of future generations seems like it would be pretty much impossible to reason about. Even trying to predict how technology will affect society in a single generation is hard enough, and that's hardly long enough for any noticeable evolutionary changes to our intelligence as a species to become noticeable.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#94

Post by echo7394 »

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…

The movie Idiocracy comes to mind almost every day for me as of late.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#95

Post by cal_dent »

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…

I think there is some truth this. But there is also another plausible scenario, where styles now change far quicker than we probably expect. We as a society get bored after an x amount of time. That time has potentially shortened now as the pace of new output generated has increased so much. What probably would typically have taken lets say a decade and a half for people to get bored of (think about how all coffee shops started to copy Friends, and then the instagram minmial cafe aesthetic became a thing) is probably shorter because LLM means that it'll be oversaturated very quickly.

The current style & cadence of LLM output is already getting tiring for many so I'd expect a different style to take hold soon enough. And given LLM can mimic any style that is easy enough to do at scale and quickly. Then the cycle commences again until someone comes up with a novel style of writing, that people like, that the LLM dont know yet and then the cycle starts again....

Edit:

I also vaguely remember an article around the cultural impact of one of the image creation ai early on, maybe Dall-E if memory serves me well. I remember very little of the article now except a comment an artist made which was along the lines that in a few years the image generation would be so good & realistic, that inevitably a counter culture will emerge around nostalgia for the weird hallucinatory creations it used to make at the start simply because at least it'll be more interesting. In a similar way you get the nolstagia for things like vinyl & handcrafted toys etc. I think about that aspect of it broadly a lot.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#96

Post by johnisgood »

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.

Hmm, LLMs have helped me understand the perspective of my girlfriend better, and taught me to be a better listener and how to not act in various scenarios. I do not really use LLMs to write replies to my girlfriend, however. I have used it before to make some corrections, but the essence remained, and it came from me.

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#97

Post by johnisgood »

Nevermark wrote: post #81
sho_hn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As Rust (from True Detective) have said: let us walk hand in hand into extinction. Or something along these lines. :)

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#98

Post by johnisgood »

nunez wrote: post #86
sho_hn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Well, I suppose many people do not know of these "mental math tricks".

To get 10% of a number, just move the decimal left: 10% of 40 -> 4.0.

To get 5% of this number, get 10% first, then halve it. It is the half of 10%, which in this case would be 2.0.

If you want to do this on a computer / calculator, you simply do: 40 * 0.10 for 10% or 0.05 for 5%. I was a very young kid when I learned to do this on a calculator, and I absolutely loved it!

Re: GPT might be an information virus (2023)

#99

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

Intelligence itself may be a virus, literally. The chemical activity in your brain is not that unlike viral activity. The reason humans can do math may be that some kind of salamander-like creature millions of years ago contracted a brain virus, that virus happened to produce behavioral effects that helped it spread and ultimately become symbiotic. We may be little more than a pitched battle between what we would call bacteria, viral load, and the cells that we would like to think of as our own but which are really combinations of earlier forms of life that joined together for practical reasons.

On this view, we are not exquisitely designed machines but rather accidental pitched battles occurring in nature. The question is does this ontological view produce new predictive capacity? Can you see yourself as a being entirely driven by microscopic life, rationalizing everything after the fact so that you are the master of your destiny? Is intelligence something that you partake in rather than possess? What is technology and what does it want from us?

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