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Comment by crucialfelix

4 years ago

I think I should plan to retire from the internet at some point. When I'm old there will be endless deep fake autonomous agents scamming everyone.

Or worse, consensus reality will be impossible to define due to generated fake news.

I'm afraid people with schizoid disorder will literally be in danger when exposed to these 'agents'. Also, to a lesser extent, old people.

  • Last year around the same time I figured that most of the content we read on social networks could be generated by advanced langage models. I then proceeded to research these models and gathered data on the agents in the various networks.

    I stopped sleeping altogether, bought a ton of hardware and became delirious. I have now been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Some psychiatrists have classified my intuitions about langage models usages as "delirious mania". Some think I'm right - but manic nonetheless.

    Terribly shitty situation.

  • At least with chat-gpt, it seems it could bring people out of their paranoid mindset.

    I tried to talk to it about conspiracies, deep state, denialism etc, and the bot kept telling me that those things are not real, explaining why, and so on.

    It had way more patience than me, and explained things better than I do when talking to tinfoilers :)

I think we are really close to a situation Neil Stephenson described in his book "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" where the internet/social media is swarmed with APEs. Bots that spread so much misinformation in various directions about a topic so it becomes impossible to trust anything posted online.