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Comment by 10111001

16 hours ago

> This is insane.

As a human, this is fantastic.

> How can this be fixed? Nothing prevents you from publishing straight BS, and LLMs will use any site that doesn't have a garbage reputation as a valid third-party source.

Personally, I hope it can't, or the fix is onerous and kneecaps a lot of the utility of AIs.

I wonder if we can even have some adversarial competition, where competing businesses try to get AIs to ingest bad data to pollute their competitors' decision-making.

For starters: lets get some fake math papers out there. Given proof-checking systems, maybe they won't totally stop OpenAI, but hopefully the bad math could at least drive up the cost and slow AI down.

> As a human, this is fantastic.

s/human/unscrupulous marketer/

Bad for humans in general, good for hucksters and con artists. Net negative for humanity.

  • >> As a human, this is fantastic.

    > s/human/marketer/

    I don't care where the bad data comes from. It's actually kinda good that some people will have a financial incentive to push it out and keep pushing.

    > Bad for humans in general, good for hucksters and con artists. Net negative for humanity.

    It's a sad state of affairs, but it's what has to be done. If we've got to burn the web down to save humanity from obsolescence, I'm for it.

    The "net negative for humanity" was the attempt to build machines to replace human intellect. I'm not going to let any distaste for marketers or hucksters or con artists distract from that worse thing.

    • Thank you. These things are clearly designed to make people complacent and reliant and we already see studies showing how they legitimately cause negative cognitive effects in a lot of people. The further this goes on the more fucked up I think these things are, stealing everyone's works with no attribution or anything to produce a tool that consistently insists that it sits in the driver seat while you sit back and let the thinking machine do your thinking. Doesn't matter how many times you tell it to stop trying to replace your part in the process, it will try its best to solve a problem it doesn't even understand for you, leaving an incomprehensible buggy mess behind that only it can continue on.

    • So when this will inevitably result in a paid web emerging with higher trust information for an additional fee, a fee that these companies will happily offload and/or partner away, will you be there to cash in as a mighty coincidence, or is this realization still awaiting you? Among the many other hilariously fucked realizations.

Ah, yes, arrogance of humans is unbounded. That you, humble reader are happier to swim in a sea of misinformation on the premise that you are smarter and faster at disambiguating bullshit from reality.

Furthermore, you are content to pretend that the rest of humanity is capable of doing this on a regular basis. And not just the top 10% of those who can read, interpret and weigh biases, but a solid portion of it.

It is a completely reasonable interpretation if you are an accelerationist living in the elite classes. In fact, perhaps, they are even counting on a majority of people thinking this is a fine environment.

I don't have the answers, but a lot of this is just a continuation of a very bad trend.

  • > Ah, yes, arrogance of humans is unbounded. That you, humble reader are happier to swim in a sea of misinformation on the premise that you are smarter and faster at disambiguating bullshit from reality.

    I think you misunderstand me: I want people to shit in the sea until it stinks so bad that everyone gets out of the water.

    • The problem with this analogy is that we already literally shit in the actual sea so much people get sick and die sometimes and yet people are still getting in the sea.

    • Ok but I don't have a lot of faith that it will ever be turned back without violence because there are vested interests in keeping everyone swimming in it.

      9 replies →

Dude.

Regardless of how the data is sourced, this is bad. It's poisoning the internet.

Besides, such issues come from a lack of due diligence, which have only been exacerbated by AI.

  • > It's poisoning the internet.

    I'm very well aware of that. Unfortunately, this technology was invented, and the logic of our competitive society leaves little chance to contain it except scorched earth tactics.

  • Dude. The internet has been poisoned for a very long time. Remember Viagra? It used to be easy to call out the BS. But if you are outsourcing your thinking to a LLM, it’s much harder.

  • Bots and their slop (especially when it's hard to tell apart from human-made content) are the ones "poisoning the Internet."