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Comment by brain5ide

7 days ago

Are we talking about structural things or about individual perspective things?

At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV.

At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit.

Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.

> build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner

A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.

  • You and I remember pre-AI famous works. "Hey, I'm pretty sure Odysseus took a long time to get home". Somebody goes and prints 50 different AI-generated versions of the _Odyssey_, how are future generations supposed to know which is real and which is fake?

    • > how are future generations supposed to know which is real

      Reality/truth/history has always been an expensive pursuit in the face of evolving pollutants.

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    • This is literally how the Odyssey was passed down for the 2000 years before the printing press was invented.

      Every work had multiple versions. All versions were different. Some versions were diametrically opposed to others.

      Have a look at Bible scholarship to see just _how_ divergent texts can become by nothing more than scribe errors.

      5 replies →