7 ms·
GPT might be an information virus (2023)
- henriquegodoy 1y agoIMO AI as a whole is just the catalyst
- hayden_dev 1y ago"might"
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- andy99 1y agoI think it is an information virus, but differently - it's homogenized everything, and made people dumber and lazier. It's poisoned public and professional discourse by reducing writing and thinking from the richness of humanity to one narrow style with a tiny latent space, and simultaneously convinced people that this is what good writing looks like. And it's erased thought from board classes of endeavor. This virus is much worse than the relatively benign symptoms described in the article.
- computerex 1y agoTo be honest I think you and others over play it. ChatGPT and LLM's in general sound pretty corporatey. A lot of the at least English written text online is pretty homogenous in style.
- crimsoneer 1y agoThis is how the church felt about the printing press.
- XorNot 1y agoWho is "the Church" in this analogy?
- rolph 1y agorefers to the gutenberg press, and mass production of printed works, threatening the siloed, ivory towers of knowledge at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_p... if everyone has a bible, then who needs the church to tell you what it says.
- ceejayoz 1y agoRelying on an AI oracle to think for you is just as bad as relying on a priestly one.
- LtWorf 1y ago> if everyone has a bible, then who needs the church to tell you what it says. Clearly, all the protestants who burned more witches than the catholics ever did, and kept at it for centuries after the inquisition had stopped. But that's just my opinion here.
- brookst 1y agoPeople who consider themselves exceptionally smart, who are well educated and write well, who only ever need to communicate in their native tongue ye, and who have the luxury of investing time in developing a personal writing style. It is a good analogy. There is great concern that the unwashed masses won’t know how to handle this tool and will produce information today’s curators would not approve of.
- andy99 1y ago
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoLike most progress, it made some things easier ( and some things worse as a result ). What I do find particularly fascinating is that it is doing that even in professions that should know better ( lawyers, doctors ). That my boss uses it is no surprise me though. I always suspected he never really read my emails.
- kldg 1y agoI've definitely been surprised by how it's being used; it's replacing people in places I don't think (even as a closet AI/LLM enthusiast) AI should ever be used: elder care, customer support (even on phone lines), for homework grading. -But I shouldn't have been so surprised, because some were already using robots for these tasks (or maybe not robots explicitly, but making CSRs/similar stick to scripts); my daughter was taking college placement tests recently -- even the essay questions were graded by software, and she's watched by software as she writes it. These things still seem to me like jobs which fundamentally require a human touch -- it's been especially amazing to me teachers are using AI to detect AI; you can't determine whether or not a robot wrote it, but you can assign a grade to it? Huh?? I have a very vocally anti-AI friend, but there is one thing he always goes on about that confuses me to no end: hates AI, strongly wants an AI sexbot, is constantly linking things trying to figure out how to get one, and asking me and the other nerds in our group about how the tech would work. No compromises anywhere except for one of the most human experiences possible. :shrug:
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoIt made me chuckle, because I absolutely buy the anecdotal anti-AI friend. On the other hand, if he applied himself, maybe he could figure it out. I honestly can't say I am not intruiged by the possibility.
- nunez 1y agoWait til he finds /r/LocalLLaMA Sexbots are the raison d'etre for that sub
- 1y ago
- 3willows 1y agoPerhaps that is the real danger. Everyone except a small elite who (rightly) feel they understand how LLMs work would simply give up serious thinking and accept whatever "majority" opinion is in their little social media bubble. We wouldn't have the patience to really engage with genuinely different viewpoints any more. I recall some Chinese language discussion about the experience of studying abroad in the Anglophone world in the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Paradoxically, even if you are a university student, it may now be harder to break out of the bubble and make friends with non-Chinese/East Asians than before. In the early 20th century, you'd probably be one of the few non-White students and had to break out of your comfort zone. Now if you are Chinese, there'd be people from a similar background virtually anywhere you study in the West, and it is almost unnatural to make a deliberate effort to break out of that.
- 3willows 1y agoThe point being: when you find someone who is tailoring all his/her/its attention to you and you alone, why bother talking to anyone else.
- makk 1y agoIt hasn't homogenized everything. It's further exposed humans for who they are. Humans are the virus.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago(1999)
- jvm___ 1y agoAgent Smith had it right when he was interviewing Morpheus in the Matrix.
- goatlover 1y agoAnd then ironically Smith became a virus threatening both humans and machines. However, Agent Smith was the Oracle's tool to force a treaty between the machines and humans. As the Architect said at the end of Revolutions, she played a dangerous game. But it was the only way forward to a new equilibrium.
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- kordlessagain 1y agoPeople have always tended toward taking shortcuts. It's human nature. So saying "this technology makes people dumber or lazier" is tricky, because you first need a baseline: exactly how dumb or lazy were people before? To quantify it, you'd need measurable changes. For example, if you showed that after widespread LLM adoption, standardized test scores dropped, people's vocabulary shrank significantly, or critical thinking abilities (measured through controlled tests) degraded, you'd have concrete evidence of increased "dumbness." But here's the thing: tools, even the simplest ones, like college research papers, always have value depending on context. A student rewriting existing knowledge into clearer language has utility because they improve comprehension or provide easier access. It's still useful work. Yes, by default, many LLM outputs sound similar because they're trained to optimize broad consensus of human writing. But it's trivially easy to give an LLM a distinct personality or style. You can have it write like Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson. You can make it sound academic, folksy, sarcastic, or anything else you like. These traits demonstrably alter output style, information handling, and even the kind of logic or emotional nuance applied. Thus, the argument that all LLM writing is homogeneous doesn't hold up. Rather, what's happening is people tend to use default or generic prompts, and therefore receive default or generic results. That's user choice, not a technological constraint. In short: people were never uniformly smart or hardworking, so blaming LLMs entirely for declining intellectual rigor is oversimplified. The style complaint? Also overstated: LLMs can easily provide rich diversity if prompted correctly. It's all about how they're used, just like any other powerful tool in history, and just like my comment here.
- majormajor 1y agoWe could wait for further studies, but some already exist: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt... You say it's human nature to take shortcuts, so the danger of things that provide easy homogenizing shortcuts should be obvious. It reduces the chance of future innovation by making it more easy for more people have their perspectives silently narrowed. Personally I don't need to see more anecdotal examples matching that study to have a pretty strong "this is becoming a problem" leaning. If you learn and expand your mind by doing the work, and now you aren't doing the work, what happens? It's not just "the AI told me this, it can't be wrong" for the uneducated, it's the equivalent of "google maps told me to drive into the pond" for the white-collar crowd that always had those lazy impulses but overcame them through their desire to make a comfortable living.
- majormajor 1y agohttps://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt... This seems relevant here in a "the results agree" way.
- sho_hn 1y agoWhat's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator". Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was. I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habituate and eventually breed outselves dumber and subsist fine (perhaps in different numbers), never realizing what we willingly gave up.
- Nevermark 1y agoOur thumbs, ..., our intellect, and especially language, gave us an ecological/economic niche. We became a technological species. We observed, standardized and mechanized our environments to work for us. That is our niche. But then things snowballed in the last couple of centuries. A threshold was crossed. Our technology became our environment, and we began adapting the environment for our technologies direct benefit, for own indirect benefit. Simple roads for us at first, then paved for mechanized contraptions. Wires for talking at first, then optimized for computers. We are now almost completely building out a technological world for the convenience and efficiency of the technology. And once our technology frees us from dependence on others, a second threshold will be crossed. Then neither others or the technology, will need us. I don't see a species of devolving humans, no longer needed by their creations, in a world now convenient for those creations, finding a happy niche. If there is a happy landing, it will need to take a different route than that.
- johnisgood 1y agoAs Rust (from True Detective) have said: let us walk hand in hand into extinction. Or something along these lines. :)
- nunez 1y agoPeople who make that retort forget that the calculator was immensely helpful but _also_ antiquated the need for mental math, which in my opinion is a bad thing. (Everyone should be able to calculate 5% and 10% of numbers, given how easy it is to do)
- joegibbs 1y agoIt’s the latest in a series of homogenising inventions - the printing press, radio, television, the internet - that will probably result in people of the future speaking and thinking more similarly than today. First went minor languages, then dialects, now regional differences within languages. Next will probably be the difference between different English accents - I think by 2100 English speakers will all be speaking with a generically American accent no matter where they are on earth. Then next will probably be other national languages - 90% of Swedes and Dutch people already speak English.
- monkaiju 1y agoThe printing press (and the others listed) aren't homogenizing, they're if anything tools of diversification. They allowed far more novel ideas to be presented and distributed than before, AI on the other hand "distils" and "reduced" large heterogeneous information into a much more homogenous slop.
- echo7394 1y agoThe movie Idiocracy comes to mind almost every day for me as of late.
- cal_dent 1y agoI think there is some truth this. But there is also another plausible scenario, where styles now change far quicker than we probably expect. We as a society get bored after an x amount of time. That time has potentially shortened now as the pace of new output generated has increased so much. What probably would typically have taken lets say a decade and a half for people to get bored of (think about how all coffee shops started to copy Friends, and then the instagram minmial cafe aesthetic became a thing) is probably shorter because LLM means that it'll be oversaturated very quickly. The current style & cadence of LLM output is already getting tiring for many so I'd expect a different style to take hold soon enough. And given LLM can mimic any style that is easy enough to do at scale and quickly. Then the cycle commences again until someone comes up with a novel style of writing, that people like, that the LLM dont know yet and then the cycle starts again.... Edit: I also vaguely remember an article around the cultural impact of one of the image creation ai early on, maybe Dall-E if memory serves me well. I remember very little of the article now except a comment an artist made which was along the lines that in a few years the image generation would be so good & realistic, that inevitably a counter culture will emerge around nostalgia for the weird hallucinatory creations it used to make at the start simply because at least it'll be more interesting. In a similar way you get the nolstagia for things like vinyl & handcrafted toys etc. I think about that aspect of it broadly a lot.
- anthk 1y agoThere are public sources of information such as a curated WIkipedia, open content from Kiwix, Gutenberg Math books and OpenStreetMap for maps. Better, you can download offline and curated version of these so anyone can have a working snapshot anytime. That's good to avoid future AI tamperings. As long as these as AI free, we are potentialy in the right direction.
- boredatoms 1y agoWe can only trust a snapshot from pre AI years, eventually everything will be contaminated
- brookst 1y agos/AI/internet
- ayaros 1y agoWe're going to have to go in the opposite direction and rely on directories or lists of verified human-made/accurate content. It will be like the old days of yahoo and web-indexes all over again.
- DaveZale 1y agoA few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries. Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?
- ayaros 1y agoThis doesn't seem to be structured differently than a standard-fare social media app. All the same issues with human verification on those apps would apply to this too. Unless you mean a platform only for vetted local journalists...
- righthand 1y agoTie the account to the Library Card and then you can open it up to anyone.
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans? That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.
- ajmurmann 1y agoDoes Nextdoor actually have the local news? The other day I kept hearing sirens outside for hours. I hoped to find on Nextdoor what was going on but I mostly got lost-cat posts and people trying to sell stuff like handyman services. This is how it goes most times I check on Nextdoor. Maybe it depends on the area.
- 4b11b4 1y agovirus is a good way to think about the effect radius
- resters 1y agoIt’s a method of storing information that makes it far more useful than previous methods. Sure we can idealize feats of the human brain such as memorizing digits of pi. LLMs put more human behavior into the same category as memorizing digits of pi, and make the previously scarce “idea clay” available to the masses. It’s not the same as a human brain or human knowledge but it is still a very useful tool just like the tools that let us do maths without memorizing hundreds of digits of pi.
- aspenmayer 1y agoCurious Yellow, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) > "Curious Yellow is a design study for a really scary worm: one that uses algorithms developed for peer-to-peer file sharing networks to intelligently distribute countermeasures and resist attempts to decontaminate the infected network". Hat tip to HN user cstross (as I discovered the idea via Charlie’s blog): http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-archive/October_2002.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-archive/October_2002.ht... These topics were first brought to my attention through his amazing novel Glasshouse. I’ve had the pleasure of having my first edition copy of the book signed by the author, and I then promptly loaned it indefinitely to a friend, who then misplaced it. The man himself is a friendly curmudgeon who I am happy to have met, and I have enjoyed reading about the future through his insights into the past and present. Also I must acknowledge Brandon Wiley, who wrote the inspiration for Curious Yellow as far as I can tell. https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
- hnpolicestate 1y agoThe same thing could have been said about the computer in general and masses adopting the personal computer. That's how I view LLM's now. They are what follows computers in the evolution of information technology.
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- androng 1y agoi heard from an artist that Pinterest is full of AI-generated stuff now so artists looking for references have to go back to physical books for art references
- Havoc 1y agoIt’ll certainly get more noisy but I don’t quite buy the total communication collapse implied here. Humans still have an inherent need to be heard and hear others. Even in a pretty extreme scenario I think bubbles of organic discussion will continue
- mwkaufma 1y ago"Outside of the fate of the web, I see GPT as a monumental force of good." [Citation Needed]
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- thomashop 1y agoThe rest was fine without citations, but the part you disagree with needs them?
- jaimsam 1y ago[dead]
- johnnienaked 1y agoIt gives me recollection back to the Simpsons episode where Itchy and Scratchy writers go on strike. What follows was a beautiful scene of children rubbing their eyes in unfamiliar sunlight as they're forced to go outside, making up games, playing on playgrounds, all while Beethovens Pastorale hums in the background. I'm all for it. Let big tech destroy their cash cow, then maybe we can rebuild it in OUR interest.
- t1234s 1y agoIs there any way these LLM tools watermark their output in a way that keeps them from re-training on output generated from the same LLM?
- StarlaAtNight 1y agoNice try, AI!
- konfusinomicon 1y agostrategic em-dash placement is my guess but only the machine knows the code
- gfody 1y agoI think we should prefer content-farm content to be replaced w/generated content. ultimately it'll compress back to the prompt that generated it and that'll be easier to filter out.
- jcalx 1y agoAlternatively stated: > The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. > Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. > The signal is an attack. ―Blindsight, by Peter Watts
- TZubiri 1y agoIs that the sci fi novel about an alien race that is annoyed and feels attacked by noise?
- lelandbatey 1y agoNope it's the book about the concept of a true turing-machine like alien being which has no "consciousness", it's mechanistic but insanely complex, like the Borg but not even assimilating; it's like a very very sophisticated "grey goo" nanobot scenario
- iluvlawyering 1y agoAnd what if intelligence as measured by computation complexity reaches a natural limit inevitably marked by a detached compassionate disposition? Does the cure then become the virus?
- dang 1y agoDiscussed (a bit) at the time: GPT Might Be an Information Virus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36675335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36675335 - July 2023 (31 comments) GPT might be an information virus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218078 - March 2023 (1 comment)
- tomlockwood 1y agoI want to suggest that the virus is even more insidious, and is an organism that feeds on VC money, and it is evolving via a substrate of human programmers to become more efficient at consuming it. And like an organism evolving towards survival, it gives no shits about the utility generated in return for the thing it eats. And, as time goes on, it'll get more efficient at the consumption and waste less and less energy on the generation of utility. It is an organism that needs servers to feed and generates hype like a deep-sea monster glows its lure.
- SrslyJosh 1y ago> * For what it’s worth – I am personally happy that a company that is committed to “doing it right” is spear-heading this change. Seems to be working out great so far. (=
- frahs 1y agoI'm unconvinced -- Certainly this will happen gradually, and there will be widespread public support for a solution. It's not to hard to imagine making online reviews or "high quality content" require verification tied to some per-citizen identification code (or asymmetric key). Maybe this makes it harder post anonymously on the internet, but at the very least we won't have the issue of proving identity. Just wish we had a competent government to handle the upcoming transition. But even an incompetent one can have smart employees under it, and can give them the funding they need to accomplish this.
- karaterobot 1y agoI don't think the results of the last two decades of mass information dissemination have been all that great. People didn't trust anything on the internet before GPT, and the internet was already a cacophony of screeching voices too. Smart people were already decoupling from social media, and moving meaningful interaction to enclaves well before ChatGPT became a factor. ChatGPT did not ruin the internet, it was unleashed on a broken internet to begin with. If, as this article predicts, the result of GPT is that we don't trust information from the internet, and everybody moves away from it, that's great. Traditional journalism was better, as it turns out. Talking mainly to your friends rather than millions of people was better, as it turns out. I'm ready to go back to that, should it come to it. But it won't. This essay is making a catastrophic prediction that won't come to pass. Whatever the future is, it's going to be something nobody is predicting yet. It'll be better than the doomsayers predict, and worse than what the cheerleaders say. It will be nothing like a simple magnification of the present concern over epistemology.
- dns_snek 1y agoYou're confusing social media with the internet at large. "Traditional journalism" isn't a replacement for a niche blog writing about highly specific, highly detailed technical topics. What the blog post is describing isn't some bold prediction, it's already happening. Today it's far more difficult (and personally quite frustrating) to find information written by actual people with actual experience on any given topic than it was 5 years ago, because for every one of those articles there are now 20 more written by LLMs, often outranking them. This frustration is only going to grow as the LLM proliferation continues.
- Henchman21 1y agoDo you think this is also true of bookstores and libraries today?
- SamPatt 1y ago>There’s a related problem that will occur: as AI-generated information drowns out human-generated information, humans will simply stop producing content. Stopped reading here. No, humans won't stop generating content. There's no reason to believe this is inevitable.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoIntelligence itself may be a virus, literally. The chemical activity in your brain is not that unlike viral activity. The reason humans can do math may be that some kind of salamander-like creature millions of years ago contracted a brain virus, that virus happened to produce behavioral effects that helped it spread and ultimately become symbiotic. We may be little more than a pitched battle between what we would call bacteria, viral load, and the cells that we would like to think of as our own but which are really combinations of earlier forms of life that joined together for practical reasons. On this view, we are not exquisitely designed machines but rather accidental pitched battles occurring in nature. The question is does this ontological view produce new predictive capacity? Can you see yourself as a being entirely driven by microscopic life, rationalizing everything after the fact so that you are the master of your destiny? Is intelligence something that you partake in rather than possess? What is technology and what does it want from us?
- interstice 1y agoThis triggered two main thoughts for me. First - this virus centric take is not so different to the one taken in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari in which he claims that we didn’t so much domesticate crops as become domesticated _by_ crops. While I think it’s healthy to consider less human centric views of what we are, there as here I think the value of questioning the intent of entities that don’t have end goals may not lead to very profound answers. The second thought is that I once read that the activity of our brain is dancing on the edge of chaos, and that either direction causes it to cease functioning. Similarly our immune systems are dialled close to the limit, to the point where it can take itself and its owner out by accident. All this to say our existence is already at or near the crossover between so many gradients, which most likely are in essence the pitched battles you’re referring to.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoIts a view of life as unstable equilibria.
- cainxinth 1y agoBooks were also an information virus. They spread everywhere, took root, reduced the need for memorization and oral traditions, and changed the way we think forever.