Comment by intended
8 days ago
This keeps me up at night too. I’d like to stake the position that LLMs are antagonistic to the (beleaguered) idea of an internet.
LLMs increase the burden of effort on users to successfully share information with other humans.
LLMs are already close to indistinguishable from humans in chat; Bots are already better at persuading humans[1]. Suggesting that users who feel ineffective at conveying their ideas online, are better served by having a bot do it for them.
All of this, is effectively putting a fitness function on online interactions, increasing the cognitive effort required for humans to interact or be heard. I dont see this playing out in a healthy manner. The only steady state I can envision is where we assume that we ONLY talk to bots online.
Free speech and the market place of ideas, sees us bouncing ideas off of each other. Our way of refining our thoughts and forcing ourselves to test our ideas. This is the conversation that is meant to be the bedrock of democratic societies.
It does not envisage an environment where the exchange of ideas is into a bot.
Yes yes, this is a sky is falling view - not everyone is going to fall off the deep end, and not everyone is going to use a bot.
In a funny way, LLMs will outcompete average forum critters and trolls for their ecological niches.
> increasing the cognitive effort required for humans to interact or be heard. I dont see this playing out in a healthy manner
We are at the stage where it’s still mostly online but the first ways this will leak into the real world in big ways are easy to guess. Job applications, college applications, loan applications, litigation. The small percentage of people who are savvy and naturally inclined towards being spammy and can afford any relevant fees will soon be responsible for over 80 percent of all traffic, not only drowning out others but also overwhelming services completely.
Fees will increase, then the institutions involved will use more AI to combat AI submissions, etc. Schools/banks/employers will also attempt to respond by networking, so that no one looks at applicants directly any more, they just reject if some other rejected. Other publishing from calls for scientific papers to poetry submissions kind of progresses the same way under the same pressures, but the problem of “flooded with junk” isn’t such a new problem there and the stakes are also a bit lower.