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> ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke Wikipedia relies on "published" facts as an authority

> ChatGPT is more of an existential threat because it will propagate to infect other knowledge bases. Luke Wikipedia relies on "published" facts as an authority, but ChatGPT output is going to wind up as a source one way or another. And worse, then ChatGPT will digest its own excrement, worsening its own results further. This is what people do collectively, long before any GPTs were in sight. Lots of strong convictions people hold today and publish all over the place, are re-processed excrements of long-gone mental viruses of past civilizations.

Method-X 4y ago
This is so on point. While everyone was arguing that LaMDA couldn't possibly be conscious a few months back, I was asking: what if we're not conscious?
ericd 4y ago
Yep, not sure what the panic here is, ChatGPT is probably churning out better quality stuff than the average SEO spammer. The internet has been mostly garbage for a very long time at this point.
- nationalRailway 4y ago
  [dead]
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  I think this is an interesting take actually. Content on the internet is in a steep downward spiral. Masses of spammers and SEO hackers are filling the tubes with garbage. There are still some safe-ish havens, but those bastions can only survive the onslaught for so long. We need a new internet at some point relatively soon. Maybe ChatGPT will accelerate the demise of this one to force the creation of some new paradigm of communication and dissemination of knowledge.
Arainach 4y ago
Automation and scale create their own threats. Security cameras have existed for a long time, but storage cheap enough to keep years of footage and algorithms capable of processing thousands of streams in real time create massive privacy problems that didn't exist even with the richest companies paying humans to watch.
- the_snooze 4y ago
  >Automation and scale create their own threats. I don't know why such a simple fact needs to be repeated over and over again. It's either naivete or malice that makes people ignore that fact. A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    >A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications. What a fantastic example. Borrowing this for sure.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    Another example is the police. Most people agree the existence of a police force to enforce laws is a good thing (society would function very differently otherwise). But if there was a policeman for each other person on the planet following them 24x7 and enforcing every possible law on them, not so much anymore. Quantity is a quality all of its own.
    - awb 4y ago
      On the other hand, why have a law if it’s not meant to be enforced universally and consistently? When laws are applied selectively it creates an unequal experiences in the population. No one wants the tyranny of oppressive applications of overbearing laws. So, in those instances, change the law to be fair enough and compassionate enough that it can be applied in all instances where the letter of the law is broken. And obviously privacy is important and ubiquitous surveillance would undermine our ability to enjoy life. But in public spaces, consistently applying fairly written compassionate laws wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
ethanbond 4y ago
Sure but humans can’t do it at nearly the rate that GPT can, and GPT will never be applying critical thought to the memes it digests and forward on while humans sometimes do.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  > and GPT will never be applying critical thought Just wait. This party has just begun. 90% of humans will be like school kids in comparison to the critical thought of GPT-5.
  - tarsinge 4y ago
    We are talking about a model that at its core is about making statistics of what the next word will be in a sentence based on an existing corpus. It gives that model the ability to find and summarize all of the existing content in relation to a prompt beyond what humans could do, but I still see no critical thinking there.
    - Sparyjerry 4y ago
      This isn't exactly accurate. It's not creating one word at a time, that's the illusion given by the way it illustrates the text on the screen. Doing that would be impossible to create code that compiles for example.
munificent 4y ago
It's not the same. This is something I've observed many times but have never quite been able to put a name to it. When you lower the friction of an action sufficiently, it causes a qualitative change in the emergent behavior of the whole system. It's like how a little damping means the difference between a bridge you can safely drive over versus a galloping Gertie that resonates until it collapses. When a human has to choose and put some effort into regurgitating a piece of information, there is a natural decay factor in the system where people will sometimes not bother to repeat something if it doesn't seem valuable enough to them. Sure, things like urban legends and old wive's tales exploit bugs in our information prioritization. But, overall, it has the effect of slowly winnowing out nonsense, misinformation, and other low value stuff. Meanwhile, information that continues to be useful continues to be worth the effort of repeating. Compared to the print and in-person worlds before, things got much worse just with social media where a human was still in the loop but the effort to rebroadcast was nil. This is exactly why we saw a massive rise in misinformation in the past couple of decades. With ChatGPT and humans completely out of the loop, we will turn our information systems into galloping Gertie and they will resonate with nonsense and lies until the whole system falls apart. We are witnessing the first cracks now. Look at George Santos, a candidate who absolutely should have never won a single election but managed to because information pipelines about candidates are so polluted with junk and nonsense that voters didn't even realize he was a con man. Not even a sophisticated one, just a huckster able to hide within the sea of information noise.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Humans still have to choose to transcribe ChatGPT noise into Wikipedia, because automated attempts to do so will be too easy to identify and squash. Wikipedia already does organization- and source-level IP blocking for input sources that have proven sufficiently malicious.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    The question is, then, is the human-borne friction enough to slow the diffusion of GPT-derived "knowledge" back onto Wikipedia through human inputs? It is very easy to imagine that GPT-likes could apply misinformation to a population and change social/cultural/economic understandings of how reality works. That would then slowly seep back into "knowledge bases" as the new modes of reasoning become "common sense".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PKop 4y ago
Quantity has a quality all it's own. But also, this is an "AI", not human thought. Why conflate the two as if they are equivalent? We are not at the point where machine learning is smarter or produces better quality content than humans.
uoaei 4y ago
Assuming that is bad, it is then very bad that we are now accelerating that process by many orders of magnitude.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>This is what people do collectively, long before any GPTs were in sight. Very insightful of you to say that. (Though I must say that it is not a recipe for happiness, AKA ignorance is bliss and all that... )
trilbyglens 4y ago
And it's a bad thing, so automating that process can only be a worse thing?

Method-X 4y ago

This is so on point. While everyone was arguing that LaMDA couldn't possibly be conscious a few months back, I was asking: what if we're not conscious?

ericd 4y ago

Yep, not sure what the panic here is, ChatGPT is probably churning out better quality stuff than the average SEO spammer. The internet has been mostly garbage for a very long time at this point.

nationalRailway 4y ago
[dead]
berniedurfee 4y ago
I think this is an interesting take actually. Content on the internet is in a steep downward spiral. Masses of spammers and SEO hackers are filling the tubes with garbage. There are still some safe-ish havens, but those bastions can only survive the onslaught for so long. We need a new internet at some point relatively soon. Maybe ChatGPT will accelerate the demise of this one to force the creation of some new paradigm of communication and dissemination of knowledge.

Arainach 4y ago

Automation and scale create their own threats. Security cameras have existed for a long time, but storage cheap enough to keep years of footage and algorithms capable of processing thousands of streams in real time create massive privacy problems that didn't exist even with the richest companies paying humans to watch.

the_snooze 4y ago
>Automation and scale create their own threats. I don't know why such a simple fact needs to be repeated over and over again. It's either naivete or malice that makes people ignore that fact. A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  >A change in scale can easily lead to a change in kind. A party popper and a flashbang are functionally the same thing, but their scale makes them have wildly different implications. What a fantastic example. Borrowing this for sure.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  Another example is the police. Most people agree the existence of a police force to enforce laws is a good thing (society would function very differently otherwise). But if there was a policeman for each other person on the planet following them 24x7 and enforcing every possible law on them, not so much anymore. Quantity is a quality all of its own.
  - awb 4y ago
    On the other hand, why have a law if it’s not meant to be enforced universally and consistently? When laws are applied selectively it creates an unequal experiences in the population. No one wants the tyranny of oppressive applications of overbearing laws. So, in those instances, change the law to be fair enough and compassionate enough that it can be applied in all instances where the letter of the law is broken. And obviously privacy is important and ubiquitous surveillance would undermine our ability to enjoy life. But in public spaces, consistently applying fairly written compassionate laws wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

ethanbond 4y ago

Sure but humans can’t do it at nearly the rate that GPT can, and GPT will never be applying critical thought to the memes it digests and forward on while humans sometimes do.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
> and GPT will never be applying critical thought Just wait. This party has just begun. 90% of humans will be like school kids in comparison to the critical thought of GPT-5.
- tarsinge 4y ago
  We are talking about a model that at its core is about making statistics of what the next word will be in a sentence based on an existing corpus. It gives that model the ability to find and summarize all of the existing content in relation to a prompt beyond what humans could do, but I still see no critical thinking there.
  - Sparyjerry 4y ago
    This isn't exactly accurate. It's not creating one word at a time, that's the illusion given by the way it illustrates the text on the screen. Doing that would be impossible to create code that compiles for example.

munificent 4y ago

It's not the same. This is something I've observed many times but have never quite been able to put a name to it. When you lower the friction of an action sufficiently, it causes a qualitative change in the emergent behavior of the whole system. It's like how a little damping means the difference between a bridge you can safely drive over versus a galloping Gertie that resonates until it collapses. When a human has to choose and put some effort into regurgitating a piece of information, there is a natural decay factor in the system where people will sometimes not bother to repeat something if it doesn't seem valuable enough to them. Sure, things like urban legends and old wive's tales exploit bugs in our information prioritization. But, overall, it has the effect of slowly winnowing out nonsense, misinformation, and other low value stuff. Meanwhile, information that continues to be useful continues to be worth the effort of repeating. Compared to the print and in-person worlds before, things got much worse just with social media where a human was still in the loop but the effort to rebroadcast was nil. This is exactly why we saw a massive rise in misinformation in the past couple of decades. With ChatGPT and humans completely out of the loop, we will turn our information systems into galloping Gertie and they will resonate with nonsense and lies until the whole system falls apart. We are witnessing the first cracks now. Look at George Santos, a candidate who absolutely should have never won a single election but managed to because information pipelines about candidates are so polluted with junk and nonsense that voters didn't even realize he was a con man. Not even a sophisticated one, just a huckster able to hide within the sea of information noise.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Humans still have to choose to transcribe ChatGPT noise into Wikipedia, because automated attempts to do so will be too easy to identify and squash. Wikipedia already does organization- and source-level IP blocking for input sources that have proven sufficiently malicious.
- uoaei 4y ago
  The question is, then, is the human-borne friction enough to slow the diffusion of GPT-derived "knowledge" back onto Wikipedia through human inputs? It is very easy to imagine that GPT-likes could apply misinformation to a population and change social/cultural/economic understandings of how reality works. That would then slowly seep back into "knowledge bases" as the new modes of reasoning become "common sense".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PKop 4y ago

Quantity has a quality all it's own. But also, this is an "AI", not human thought. Why conflate the two as if they are equivalent? We are not at the point where machine learning is smarter or produces better quality content than humans.

uoaei 4y ago

Assuming that is bad, it is then very bad that we are now accelerating that process by many orders of magnitude.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

>This is what people do collectively, long before any GPTs were in sight. Very insightful of you to say that. (Though I must say that it is not a recipe for happiness, AKA ignorance is bliss and all that... )

trilbyglens 4y ago

And it's a bad thing, so automating that process can only be a worse thing?