Not a super well thought out article. Example: lots of speculative complaints that ChatGPT will lead to an explosion of low quality and biased editorial material, without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT).
Ditto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe a Google search produced better results, but it seems like something one should check for an article like this.
IMO we’re not facing a paradigm change where the web was great before and now ChatGPT has ruined it. We may be facing a tipping point where ChatGPT pushes already-failing models to the breaking point, accelerating creation of new tools that we already needed.
Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.
Real people take longer to be wrong. The potential volume one bad actor can generate matters; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop is a dangerous enough technique when someone has to actually physically come up with the bullshit.
It's already pretty bad with Github/SO threads. Guys will scrape threads on GH/SO and repost them to their sites, usually with a ton of ads but the post ranks higher than the original thread so it will come up first when you google an error.
It's usually temporary, until Google tags the copycat site as a spammy content farm and destroys its ability to rank. I haven't seen a site sustain high ranking / lots of traffic through copying Stackoverflow in maybe a decade at this point (since Panda etc.).
It doesn't matter, though. It's a hydra. Different sites over time but the result is that google results on programming topics are reliably, and increasingly, shit. I gave up on it and pay for Kagi.
It doesn't need to sustain it, it just needs to be there when you search. I generally get SO first, but I see a LOT of copycats on the first page of DDG/Google when I search.
That's why I have Firefox bookmarks where I type `s <query>` into the address bar which enters `site:stackoverflow.com <query>` into my search engine. Likewise for `r <query>` => `site:reddit.com <query>`.
This annihilates the SEO spam and is useful for most of my searches. It's glorious finding recipe ingredients without wading through a blogger's life story or a search result page filled exclusively with ads above the fold.
Good point. I was already concerned about people's reliance on Google's zero-click answers as the deepest level of inquiry before ChatGPT hit the scene. ChatGPT feels like a multiplier of this convenience factor, being also slightly more specific and generally more consistent.
There's also just that Google's search ranking doesn't work anymore.
I searched "lowest temperatures in boston every year" and got some shit-looking MySpace-like website with a table of temperatures, hell knows where it got its data, instead of a link to the correct page on NOAA or something more authoritative.
The way that the first site works the keywords into the intro text repeatedly to juice their rank is almost impressive. Can the search engines really not see that the page is garbage?
I agree. The real "problem" in this specific case is that the authoritative source (NOAA) seemingly doesn't make the data available in a manner that's discoverable by crawlers.
The currentresults.com page seems.. fine? It has a proper source cited at the bottom of the data. I wish it didn't have display ads, but that's the nature of the web nowadays. That's not a problem solvable by a traditional search engine.
Why not? If it has headers that say it was made with FrontPage 2003 and has five thousand AdSense boxes, uses old world fonts like Arial instead of HelveticaNeue Light, uses 16-bit VGA colors like #0000ff, or has bgsound and blink tags, it should perhaps be downranked.
Because those things you listed are (potential) answers to my first question, not the one you quoted.
A search engine should not see a site written in Arial and derank it for that reason. Blink tags, sure, they're obviously wrong for accessibility reasons, but there's a huge gap between those two things - and even so, how badly should they affect ranking?
I'm saying "garbage" can be subjective, and when there are objective "garbage" indicators, it's not obvious how to deal with them. What you've listed is only a small set of indicators from a small niche of so-called "garbage" sites. And personally, I don't even want to see old or old-styled sites dismissed from the web if they have good content.
> Well, how does that compare to traditional search?
Poorly.
Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance).
GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either accept what it tells you or not. It is not going to disclose what links it scraped to provide the information, and it's not going to change its mind about how it put that info together. This is because of the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”."
AI peddlers will use every UX dark pattern possible to make it look like what you are seeing really is magic.
For sure, though it's easy to imagine a search results page that mixes current organic search results, search ads, and also some kind of AI 'answers' or 'sugestions'. Then we just have to vet those as possibly-dubious-but-maybe-helpful along with the rest.
> Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.
Definitely, and I believe the post admits as much. The point he's making is that it's going to get exponentially worse, until the web is useless (the "tipping point" you mention).
What are the "new tools that we already needed" though? I think I'm too pessimistic in my outlook on these things, and would be interested to hear your optimistic future scenarios.
Right now, my view is that as that as long as something is profitable, it'll continue. A glimmer of hope is that once the web is completely useless, people will stop using it, and we can rebuild.
The difference is we can improve the AI to be more accurate, and I suspect before long it’ll generate better content than a human would that’s verifiable with citations. There may come a time where writing is done by a machine much as a calculator does our math. But knowledge maybe shouldn’t be canonically encoded in ascii blobs randomly strewn over the web - maybe instead of accumulated knowledge needs to be structured in a semantic web sort of model. We can use the machine to describe to use the implications of the knowledge and it’s context in human language. But I get a feeling in 20 years it’ll be anachronistic to write long form.
The model needs known "good" feedback to improve. The problem is that the quality of its training data declines with the more output produced. It's rather inevitable that we'll be drowning in AI generated garbage before long. A lot of people are confusing LLMs with true intelligence.
That’s why I think knowledge needs to be better structured than blobs of text scattered everywhere. An AI can be more than an LLM, Wolfram posted recently about that. You can use the LLM to convert a question into a semantic query and a semantic validator and check and amend and provide a semantic knowledge graph explaining an answer and the LLM can convert it back to meat language. I think people confuse LLM with true intelligence, but the cynics also confuse LLM with a complete and fixed point solution.
Your point also seems to assume no curation can happen on what is ingested. Simply because that might be what’s happening now you could also simply train the LLM on known good sources and be as permissive or restrictive as is necessary. Depending on how good the classifiers are for detecting LLM output (openai released on recently) or other generated / automatically derived content you can start to be more permissive.
My point is people seem to be blinded by what is vs what may be. This is not the end of the development cycle of the tech, it’s the pre-alpha release by the first meaningful market entrant. I’d be slower to judge what the future looks like rather than assuming everything stays fixed in time as it is.
Oh definitely. There's bound to be improvements especially when you glue an LLM to a semantic engine, etc.
The issue is again, fundamentally, one of data. Without authenticating what's machine generated and what's "trusted" proliferation of AI generated content is bound to reduce data quality. This is a side effect of these models being trained to fool discriminators.
Ultimately now I think there is going to be a more serious look around the ethics of using these models and putting guard rails around what exactly is permissible. I suspect the US will remain a wild west for some time but the EU will be a test-bed.
Ultimately, I'm fairly excited about the applications of all this.
> without a single mention of what that problem looks like today (hint: it was already a huge problem before ChatGPT).
I see this counter-argument all the time and it makes no sense to me.
Yes, the web is already filled with SEO trash. How is that an argument that ChatGPT won't be bad? It's a force multiplier for garbage. The pre-existence of garbage does not at all invalidate the observation that producing more garbage more efficiently is even worse.
Yeah, exactly. It’s like saying, “What’s wrong with having a bus-sized nuclear-powered garbage cannon aimed at my head? I already have to take out my trash once a week.”
Because you already only view like 0.0001% of the web's content. Garbage is already filtered by algos. Those algos just have to keep up with chatGPT the same way they've already been keeping up with spam, the 95% of the web that is a dumpster fire, etc.
Potentially it doesn't really become more difficult.
> Those algos just have to keep up with chatGPT the same way they've already been keeping up with spam, the 95% of the web that is a dumpster fire, etc.
That "just" is an arms race so fantastically difficult that the current leading business doing it has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.
Those algos are, to date, some of the world's most sophisticated uses of AI.
This is like observing that the howitzer was just invented and saying, "Don't worry, we've got chainmail armor."
I don't think that's a keen analogy at all. We don't currently have chainmail. s/Google search/gmail spam filtering/youtube suggested algorithm is a dike holding back an ocean of shit. I'm not sure how to make an armor analogy, so let's just say it's really good armor.
Also assuming you meant 1.4T=Alphabet, I cannot go along with your pretending that the 1.4 trillion dollar cap is a function of PageRank, nor can I pretend that it's remotely related to whether they can continue providing good results post-chatGPT.
I certainly hope they can handle it. But it looks to me that generative AI is posed to give a huge new weapon to bad actors and I absolutely think that's a bad thing, regardless of whether the good actors are somehow able to defend themselves from it.
The difference is it takes me less than a second to immediately identify that content as garbage. And the places I frequent are good at stopping that garbage from getting on their website.
Between the 0.0001% we care about and the 99% percent that’s automated trash, there’s a solid 1% of content churned out by actual humans at very low quality. Think about things like recipe fluff, “news” articles for noname organizations, and all the super low effort blogs giving Birds Eye view summaries of things like Kubernetes ripped right off some other intro material.
ChatGPT produces straight up better and more informative content than those actual humans, and I am almost sure that it does so much faster and at a lower price. Actually, I think in some ways ChatGPT produces better content than most of the users on Reddit these days too
Sure, again it really only matters if the search engine can filter the stuff we don't want to see, and show the stuff we want to see. If they can do that, we don't have a problem. It's the same as it was.
If they can't do it, we have a problem.
I guess there's the additional problem of bots posting comments everywhere, but that's really just a problem for social media sites and so I'm fairly unsympathetic.
People do spend a lot of their time these days on social media, but that's a new phenomenon, and I doubt it will last, so I don't think the future web is ruined.
On the other hand, the system for finding non-garbage content is the same: read publications and writers that you (and other real people you know) already like. If there are 10 good websites and 100 garbage ones, you probably find out about 2 or 3 of the good ones by word of mouth. If there are 10 good websites and 10^32 garbage ones, you will still be able to read those 2-3 good ones.
The system for finding a needle in a sprinkling of hay is the same as finding a needle in a mountain-sized haystack but I would sure as hell prefer to be given the former task over the latter.
This analogy does not work because we search a hay stack with our eyes, but we search for information with far more selective tools. You are comparing apples and oranges.
The smart way to find a needle in a haystack is to burn the haystack and pass the ashes in front of a magnet. I'm not sure what this analogy means for AI-generated SEO spam though.
Search engines are already unusable for certain things that they used to be usable for. There's not really a such thing as "even more unusable." If I offer you an oven that doesn't get hot, that's not any better than an oven that makes things colder; you would not want either.
I agree that the article doesn't really bring up anything new or interesting.
One important implication of a ChatGPT centered web is the removal of reward/credit to content creators. Now when you Google for something you'll probably arrive at some StackOverflow, blog, or Reddit post where there's at least an author's name attached to an answer. But ChatGPT just crawls that content without citing sources, reducing any reward for contributing. Maybe this doesn't have serious implications - after all most people contribute under pseudonyms, but its worth bringing up.
One major difference is that generated content up until recently was pretty obvious. Tons of stuff like finance articles are autogenerated using templates, and SEO spam is obviously not intended for you as a human.
The rest is generally churned out en masse at the cheapest price, so in practice it contains no content and is very poorly written.
ChatGPT can produce decent quality content faster and cheaper than most humans. Despite not being fully accurate, and falling apart in certain domains like math, it has an amazing breadth of topics and things it can do at an acceptable level.
Right now, enough prompt engineering work is required that it still takes handholding to get ChatGPT to churn out content. But given where we are now it seems well within reach for the next gen of models to be able to go from “Write me an article about X that covers Y and Z” to “Write me 100 articles about varying topics in X” to “Take in the information from this corpus and distill it into 50 articles based on the most interesting parts.”
The main thing that should stay safe is detailed technical content like programming guides where you need to actually be able to reason about the material to produce good content, and can’t just paraphrase the ten thousand related sample materials in your training set. ChatGPT is decent about giving mostly-working code snippets (especially if it can use a library, although it may just make one up) but getting it to reason through things will probably require an entirely different approach to how it works. Still, because it’s already capable of producing technical content that passes a basic first glance, it could precipitate a trust crisis. I worry more about what happens when people try to get ChatGPT to generate recipes, or give medical advice, or operate in the support group/personal advice/etc. space.
Agreed, particularly given the grammar mistakes. Although, ironically, the grammar mistakes increase confidence that this is an article written by a human.
And most people are thinking on ChatGPT like it couldn't evolve. Like it was statically attached to its current state. They are not considering its astonishing potential to evolve.
It's just the beginning, just like the internet on the early 90s. Give it 30 more years and we all gonna be AI dependants, like we are on the internet. On the near decades the future generations will not be able to just imagine life before AIs.
I moderate a forum and a user recently started answer questions with links to his blog, where he made AI-generated pages of generated answers on the topics.
The posts don't offer anything novel or personal to conversation, as they only repeat the most common talking points on the topic. Ugh.
I really dont want the internet populated with meaningless garbage to give traffic to companies I dont care about. Hopefully google will create a classifier and downrank anyone who just shoots out AI generated bullshit. The process for identifying AI generated content does look fucking bonkers tho.
Google can't even successfully detect the shitty "we copied all of StackOverflow's Q&As and put ads around it" clones. I tend to doubt their ability to do something 100x as difficult.
How bad does search quality have to get before people go back to books? Until that point, it's not bad for ads. (In fact, if the ads are the highest-quality search results…)
This is a very hard problem, "who is the original author of a string of facts," "is that string of facts sound or was it altered," this is like the end of truth.
I know that truth is relative but it's like there's no point in using the word truth anymore. Everything is just becoming a collection of words.
Exactly how I feel. I'm especially worry about trust in historical facts. Renowned and trustworthy institutions, even as they may have their own biases, may not have such an easy time competing against tons of generated AI content..
I'm optimistic that this will force society to take critical thinking more seriously, treating it like a skill as fundamental as language, rather than lazily relying on shaky concepts like "renown" and "reputation." Our current society often rewards appeals to authority over well-reasoned arguments supported by strong evidence (e.g., the CDC's initial recommendation to avoid masking, despite mounting published evidence, and, later, continued insistence on the prioritization of sterilizing surfaces over mask distribution, again despite mounting published evidence). I'm hopeful that, given a higher noise floor, we'll all do our best to develop better filtering algorithms.
Not to be a grumpy old man, but I will say, my known original definition of Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web [1] but I have no idea if that definition came before the one in TFA about those selling javascript webpage controls marketing their latest spinner product spinning it as web 3.0 > web 2.0.
Why do people always bring this up? Not to be rude but who gives a shit? You and some others wanted a term to mean something, everyone else disagreed and moved on. Let it go seriously
I suppose the point was that if every new tech is termed as web3.0 in the past decade and it still is something out there in the future, the least you can do is question it.
Language models and crawling the web for semantic data is sort of the same thing. It's like, an argument could be made that ChatGPT is itself a Semantic-created Internet.
If AI becomes the way we consume data then Semantic patterns will only help it.
I've been predicting since GPT-2 that AI text generators will mean the end of the open web and open social media. It will be destroyed by a Biblical tidal wave of unfilterable spam to the point that it becomes useless.
To take a reductionist view, humans are language models too, so the better LLMs become, the closer they become to a human, and at that point differentiation is not possible.
An endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content and spitting out more content that also gets re-posted, resulting in a cesspool of BS masquerading as organic knowledge. I'm old enough to remember when Google provided meaningful search results rather than just SEO spam, the problem is about to get an order of magnitude worse.
IMO it's more vital than ever to fund projects like the Internet Archive. They're the only ones incentivized to maintain a snapshot of un-LLM-clouded training data of human knowledge, unclouded by the hubris of "who cares about the old stuff, we should focus our archiving on the web as it exists today" that inevitably will take hold (or already has) in big tech companies who will have laid off the vast majority of those voicing these concerns. We owe it to future generations to prevent ourselves from falling into the training-cycle trap.
You're right, and it has a better signal to noise ratio than the internet in general, even when you factor in the Wayback Machine! Here's to curated knowledge!
The problem with the Internet Archive, which does an amazing job, is that they do an amazing job despite the problem being fundamentally intractable. Web content expands too quickly and too massively.
I wonder if the answer is a network of topic-focused archives; like moving from a "Library of Alexandria" model to a modern nationwide system of libraries.
The curator being bandwidth-limited is not necessarily a problem if the problem you are solving is an overwhelmed audience in need of a curator. In other words, the Archive missing things may not really be a problem if the stuff is not missing is on average of value.
It raises the issue of governance of the curator, but the IA is already more transparent than Goole & co.
Okay so you build a knowledge graph on top of the internet archive. Now you are struggling to prioritize the resources necessary to capture long-tail content that doesn't mesh easily into popular corpuses. I imagine this would lead to the library equivalent of an echo chamber.
I was thinking more of a federated "webring" structure, with some content being present in more than one node, and where maintenance and curation are distributed (and gathered independently) among nodes.
The nation of, say, Japan, has limited interest in funding an american noprofit today; but they would likely have a great deal of interest in funding an equivalent focused on Japanese content, for example.
Ah so more like mastadon or ipfs, but specifically for the purposes of federated archiving.
So now you get into the issue of haves and have nots. Who is allowed to be considered an authorized archivist from a robots.txt perspective? Or what happens if an archivist becomes blacklisted for not respectfully crawling? How do national sanctions affect the Internet Archive of Russia? I imagine there would be a certification process and it would probably cost some money.
It's an interesting topic and I'm simply looking at the weak spots. I'm not against the overall concept though.
All legitimate questions, but if we only built perfect systems we would never have had TCP, let alone the pile of hacks we're now using to discuss this topic.
Distributed governance on the internet is a massive issue, and it's effectively unsolved for everything from pairing to DNS. In practice, good faith goes a long way, particularly in areas that are largely academic in scope - like archiving.
” Web content expands too quickly and too massively.”
If most of it is crap I would call not archiving it a feature.
There is a weird convoluted analogue to CERN particle detectors. They smash particles together and then image the resulting storm of particle contrails via detector that is basically a sandwhiched ccd detector (like you have in camera, but different) the size of a cathedral. Resulting in far too much data for any system to analyze or even store in the first place. Hence they need/needed to runtime filter the massive amount of particle trail signals and only pick out the critical ones.
If there is too much data you simply need to drop the parts you are fairly confident you don’t need.
There is no reason there should be only one internet archive, there might very well be parallel operations filtering a bit different things.
I guess it’s a bit odd Unesco does not already have a parallel effort.
In the back of my mind, I have a hope that it will lead to the collapse of the platform internet and a return to smaller trusted communities and boards.
I see it making a similar progression as ads on radio and tv, homogenized mass media, paid product placements in shows. These AI generated content platforms are perfect for ads and social media propaganda. Mass customization.
I share the same hope but have doubts that as a society we'll have the collective critical thinking skills to disconnect from the AI overlords. We've already had the US and US inspired Brazilian coup attempts fueld by social media placements and it's only going to get more fine tuned and effective.
What can I do as an individual?
One path is to simplify and declutter my digital life. How else to cope?
I hate being cynical, and I haven't really researched it, but my gut says there is too much invested from the non-tech world at this point in both the public and private sectors. The powers that be would probably rather force us all to asphyxiate on inane AI bullshit spewed out by our increasingly centrally-controlled technical world than cede control of electronic communication. Considering the pressure governments have freely applied to communications companies through policy, public shaming, disinformation, and secret infiltration (e.g. NSA breaking encryption to monitor gmail), and how effectively industry has skirted even the most basic privacy protections for users, I think they'll probably succeed. I don't see any reason to think that things like personal encryption or small community-run fora will change its course any more than legal guns have discouraged the creeping authoritarianism of the US Govt.
> The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online.Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
> It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.
> Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.
That would be something else, like if someone built a Chat GPT that could train itself and it starts learning at an exponential rate, and learning how to make itself unstoppable by humans.
the singularity implies reaching a point where the AI’s improvement becomes self sustaining. this is the AI choking itself to death with bad training data.
Worse, perhaps. Kessler Syndrome will eventually resolve itself as junk falls out of orbit over time, or new methods for cleaning it up are developed. Information, once buried in noise, becomes unrecoverable without a source of known truth for correlation.
Curation that tracks the provenance. If we receive a string of text by itself we can't do much about it. We need to know from where it came from, whether it was written by a human, etc
Human provenance is less important than human curation here. AI can already infrequently output content that surpasses average human-generated quality in certain categories. As long as in the end you are checking that content exceeds an average bar of quality as assessed by human aesthetics, and ensuring that you have a diverse set of content (eg. not overrepresented by content that AI is particularly good or prolific at), it should still improve outcomes.
I don't have much knowledge around AI, but from what I can tell, it's dependent on inputs from across the web right? If so, then as the use of ChatGPT grows, it'll slowly get consumed back into the model. With enough iterations, it will start to veer more and more away from recognizable human speech/thought, like a recursive game of telephone.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how ML works, which very well may be true.
Unless it only reconsumes the “good” content. In other words, the stuff that got good reactions from humans. In which case, it will get better, not worse, at least at generating clickbait. But at least it will be coherent clickbait.
Not necessarily coherent. If the first generation model starts misusing a word or phrase or adopts a common misspelling, later generations of LLMs will pick up and amplify the error. Eventually you'll get purple Monkee dishwasher begging the question maps such as.
To me this implies that things such as "sarcasm" is a pattern simple enough for an AI to match - and that should go both ways, whether it's being generated or recognized.
If you're arguing that it won't be able to detect the more subtle sarcasm, then yeah, sure. But, well, Poe's Law predates GPT.
> Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how ML works, which very well may be true.
No, you got it right. Describing it as a game of telephone is a great analogy. This is exacerbated by the confidently incorrect problem. LLM output looks sophisticated and correct and may at time actually be correct. However some unpredictable percent of the time it will be incorrect and confidently so.
ChatGPT itself is being trained on curated content, it is clearly not trained on unscreened internet sites - this is easy enough to establish if you ask it questions around hot topic issues in the conspiracy groups - it gets the correct mainstream answer.
I suspect we will see the rise of both groups of machines, curated A.I.s and A.I.s just trained on anything, which should be entertaining.
It gives you the correct mainstream answer by default. If you ask it to write, say, a hypothetical 4chan comment about such-and-such subject, and do sufficient prompt engineering to get past the filters, you'll see that it knows full well what the non-mainstream answers are:
The curation, such as it is, appears to be limited to humans downweighing the undesirable answers. Which is why there's always a way to work around it, even though it requires more and more elaborate prompts.
It may just be an arms race—the same AI that generates the nonsense also learns to identify and filter it out. Perhaps it'll also take down SEO spam with it. Feels unlikely but Google has an incentive to combat AI spam if people stop clicking on it, and presumably strong in-house AI capability…
Could tools that detect AI (like this one https://gptzero.substack.com/) be used as it consumes data and discard anything that gets flagged? I guess probably a cat and mouse game as more models get built though.
AI generated content almost certainly will kill it as we know it. I don't expect the interface to change, but I expect Google's AI will "decide" what gets placed in search results, and where.
I think search itself was always a hack for how to ask human knowledge a question. It’s a great way to find a specific page of documentation. That’s really not what people want to do 99% or the time they use google.
What is content?
Is content entertainment?
If you look at entertainment we will soon be living in world where short clips can be autogenerated and personalized based on keywords and criteria.
Stable Diffusion provides already good enough images to cover a lot of visual content online.
If you look at image shares sites for the purpose of entertainment like Imgur, you will also notice that a large portion of the viral content are screenshots from Twitter or traditional media.
Is content opinions?
Most people don't have opinions on every topic on the planet.
Is Gobekli Tepe the place of Noah's Ark?
What's going on with Hunter Biden's laptop?
How will Meta's VR strategy work out?
Will it rain tomorrow in Sydney, Australia?
Depending on your area of interest you might or might not have an opinion about it which you may or may not publish online.
That's what ChatGPT had to say about this :
Content refers to information, experiences, or resources that are created to serve a specific audience and purpose. This can include text, images, audio, video, or other forms of media. The content can be used for a variety of purposes, such as education, entertainment, marketing, or news.
Agreed. At this rate isn't it just a matter of time before AI can easily get past CAPTCHAs? At which point someone will make the decision to start creating "organic" content advertising their product by getting an AI to write it at crazy speed across many different social media. Then the trick of appending "reddit.com" to Google search will die and we will begin to wonder if we are talking to real people on HN.
The worst part about this is that if there is another set of bots that tries to generate engagement, then the training data isn't coming from humans either. You have one set of actors spamming. And another set of actors upvoting stuff, predominantly their own but maybe also other random posts. So the resulting posts don't necessarily even cater to humans. It will be real online hellscape.
The web will transition strongly to verified identities, like we have with SSL certs. Along with filtering out people who use AI to post under a verified identity and get caught, It’s the only way to help ensure you’re reading actual human content.
That is how legally admissible e-signature schemes work. When the certificate holder dies or the certificate expires, it cannot any more be used to sign further documents.
> AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content
Isn't that extrapolating the current trend a bit too much? Clearly, the text corpora[0] amassed before mass LLM content distribution are already big enough to train such models to decent general language fluency. So why would AI creators contaminate those datasets with potentially spurious content?
Sure, you want to keep your model up-to-date about the state of the world (the GPT corpus ends in mid-2021 afaik), but you can be much more careful about which texts you include. Those newer training data serve a different purpose than the original corpus, you don't need to bootstrap general language proficiency anymore. OpenAI already released a product for classifying AI-generated text, why would they not use something like that to filter future training data, for example?
Divide up the 'net into trusted and untrusted sources. Make the trust ratings public. Use search tools and corpuses such as the Google Books dataset to source "knowledge" back to pre-Internet roots, when necessary. In short: bring academic reputation back and bring it back hard.
It will make for a more elitist web, but given that even without ChatGPT we've had a problem with wildfire misinformation spread in social media networks it might be a change that's a long time coming.
Stackoverflow already has a pretty solid reputation system with pseudonymous users.
What it means is the bar for becoming a new StackOverflow contributor (or Reddit admin, or Wikipedian) might become much, much higher. "Oh, you want to contribute your first post? Show me the bicycles in this image, find the letters in this image, and provide the names of two existing Stack Overflow users with over 1000 karma who can vouch for you, and also you see a tortoise on its back, baking in the sun. You're not helping it. Why aren't you helping it?..."
The torrent of garbage may require AI based moderation solution itself.
Although I hope we may see big come back of Web 1.0 forums such where users have to gain street cred and even invite referals with realy genuine contribution into community, no way to fake with AI today.
And why will not some system arise where quality is valued. At my university, I hear a lot of colleges talk about how ChatGPT improves the quality of their work because they can find things they wouldn’t otherwise and because the writers block is partially solved.
> An endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content
Man I'm so tired of this very obvious observation. I wouldn't think a company smart enough to create an AI would also be dumb enough to fall into a pitfall that even the most casual observer can identify.
Not quite the same, that scenario was deliberately engineered by spam filter vendors to make their filters necessary.
In the Kessler Syndrome analogy, that's an ablative aerospace impact armour company deliberately launching and blowing up satellites to sell their goods to spacecraft builders.
This is most content on Youtube Shorts (reels?) now. In between Joe Rogan snippets are "Historical Photos" with voice-over descriptions and other rubbish. Very easy to imagine most of these being AI generated.
Its completely empty calories in terms of knowledge.
Why will Meta fall? Won’t people learn to unfollow accounts that post spam content? And if it is AI generated content that gets lots of engagement, wouldnt that help bring more engagement to Meta?
How so? I was curious if my memory was wrong but wikipedia seems to agree with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0, what is your definition of web 2.0?
I specifically looked at the wikipedia definition and it's not consistent with what's in the article. There was a lot of interactivity even in Web 1.0, and Web 2.0 was about a lot more than just interactivity.
emperor has no clothes but this forum is full of people who wasted their money investing it and/or get paid to work on it.
today "AI is just spicy autocomplete" gets flagged off front page.
For MONTHS, front page has been full of sub-script-kiddie level "AI" tools that are just `curl "{static_prompt} + {user_input}" http://chatgptapi`
or mediocre examples of things that would have been impressive a computer could do in 1960, but are absolutely easier to do since 2010 with google or other tools.
Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).
Unlimited AI opinions about any topics.
Unlimited AI “grassroots” campaigns.
Unlimited AI propaganda from every country and military (perfectly chosen each time).
Unlimited AI comments, “friends”, and engagements on every social media platform for your posts.
The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity and filtering the content down.
Suddenly everyone’s frustration with their AI generated newsfeed and social feeds will become necessary filter tools to communicate and digest information.
Just my opinion. Fun to think about. Will watch “Her” this weekend again.
Yeah, not much a change now, but I hope demand for real TV/film will remain. Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly. A lot of good stuff (a lot of bad stuff too, but that's beside the point) would be thrown out with the bath water imo.
I think you missed the point that he/she means AI TV and AI Twitch, not Human TV and Human Twitch, or whatever you want to call it. The point is that the content will be 24/7 AI-generated
I believe GP is referring to the multiple AI-driven vtubers on Twitch (vedal987 and motherv3 I think?). They're not yet 24/7 because they still require human supervision for reasons -- vedal987 was recently banned for holocaust denial, IIRC.
I know it's not the same, but the implication is that an influx of effectively unlimited content will change the equation for consumers. I don't think it will: even in the world of human-written books, human-made TV, human-streamed Twitch, content is already effectively infinite, and already almost entirely garbage.
Agree that it's effectively infinite. Strong disagree that is it almost entirely garbage. That opinion is your filter system working and not an objective evaluation.
For starters, you can't evaluate most of it at all because you don't have time to do any significant sampling of any significant portion of it. How many TV episodes, movies, books, YouTube videos, video games, were made in the last twenty years? Do you really think that "garbage" is an accurate description of 99% of them?
I don't thinks that objective. It _might_ be fair to say that 95% are relatively poor quality or not to your taste. But "garbage"?
The thing that's challenging is that to be fair to this content we have to separate our superficial judgement of its quality from our evaluation of it's relevance to us. For practical purposes, we have to find ways to dismiss almost all of it because we do not have a million years to consume content. But that doesn't mean that it's almost all bad content.
My concern after seeing the AI-generated Seinfeld knock-off that passed through HN today is that it'll be easier to train a model to generate addictive content than it is to create that content with a human.
I mean the AI Seinfeld was terrible, but it's an entirely software generated "show." Someone will figure out how to feed measurements of engagement into the model, and the model will continuously "improve." The net result is it will eventually generate an infinite amount of the most addictive content ever created.
And of course all this will be a profitable thing to do, because ads.
The addictive trash content on the Internet is basically going to go from heroin to fentanyl.
> an infinite amount of the most addictive content ever created
or it could go in the Stable Diffusion direction, where you can just ask for whatever you'd like to see more at any given time.
"Computer, please play a four episodes TV series about a cyborg chef killing aliens in space. Please add violence, drug use and a plot twist at the end".
> Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).
This right here is where we can make obscene money off of Hollywood. LLMs are a godsend for streaming platforms. Everything from script to sound track. Production costs will sink, and can scale to meet demand. Open Q is whether people will eat the AI dog food (think faux meat..) and history suggests the proverbial couch potato will lap up any slop if continuously delivered.
Will be interesting to see what the post-AI movement will look like. I imagine some subscription service by a company that provides "authentic human generated consumable media" which has everything you listed from songs/tv/movies/news etc created by humans. I can see the early adopters of AI will be the early adopters of this type of service as well having gotten tired of the AI golden age. Truly human made content will become a status symbol and beyond the reaches of the average joe as AI generated content screws the supply v demand equation. I can see arts and adjacent fields becoming as in-demand as STEM in around 50-60 years.
Maybe people finally adhere to the requests of those bumper stickers plastered on the side of local music venues for the last few decades... "Drum machines have no soul" "Support local music"
and the next thing will be a scandal about how said service that was supposed to be AI-free content was actually AI generated (much cheaper), it will flop and then a replacement will come up and do the exact same thing until people get used to AI-free being just a gimmick marketing term.
Just like it has happened with so many terms before it.
I wouldn't be surprised if GPT4 can write better scripts than some of the Netflix originals. But that just raises the bar for what we accept from human writers, which is fine by me.
> Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).
I never thought of that, but it's entirely possible and sounds pretty scary. Assuming that this works and then add 2 human generations to it, which would perceive our movies like we do the black and white ones.
While a "classic movie" would then mean a human-made movie, it's scary to think that the new stream of media entertainment would be unlimited. Like you'd have to decide when to stop binge-watching, because the show would always go on.
> you'd have to decide when to stop binge-watching, because the show would always go on.
I would argue that this is already the case. I'd hazard a guess that almost any concept one is interested in, that can be synthesized in a few words (e.g. "deep-ocean human habitats", or "ethics and techniques for this niche psychological framework"), has an infinite rabbithole available online: usually, starting from Wikipedia, there are countless pages and videos about and around the topic.
So the ability to stop binging, i.e. sufficient self-awareness, is already a pretty useful skill, and it will be increasingly necessary.
Yes, I fully agree. I was hesitating while pressing the submit button, but there was this thought of a never ending show in my head which felt uncanny.
It could evolve to a point where the my version of Breaking Bad would be a completely parallel universe to the one you would be offered. Suddenly one variant could become more interesting and so popular that it would become the official version. There's a lot that can be thought and discussed about such a capability.
But in essence you're right, unlimited binge-watching is already a reality.
> The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity
Go to a local open mic! We're pretty far off from having to worry if the person singing their kind-of-alright song is a robot or not. The Cactus Cafe in Austin has a fantastic open mic night and you will definitely see talented songwriters and meet plenty of authentically human musicians.
It could unlock a better web without overlapping, basic and repetitive content spread throughout millions of websites, optimised for search engine indexing. I see it as an interactive knowledge aggregator for basic fact checking on any subject. This creates an opportunity for the web to thrive with genuine, original and thought-provoking authored content.
How can it be a fact-checking machine when it can take nonsense and make a plausible sounding response from it? GPT has no understanding of what truth is (let alone any real understanding of anything)…
That's why I said "basic". It can tell me about the major philosophical schools and the corresponding philosophers if I am a newbie on the subject, but I wouldn't trust it for any deep "existential" or "metaphysical" reasoning.
It could. But that's not how you make a 10 billion valuation worth it. Much like facebook could have been a way to make us more connected to one another and less divided, but we all know how that went
I think that his diagnosis of Adtech is not quite grim enough. Knowing that advertisers can uniquely identify most users, pretty reliably, not only will the chat bots be able to produce responsive texts, they will be continually training on each individual’s unique psychology and vulnerabilities.
Really wish people would stop conflating "Web 3.0" and "Web3" they're entirely different concepts that just have similar names, and don't get me started on "Web5" (but if they are achieving anything it's killing the "Web [version]" naming convention forever)
Welcome to the social media iterated world where ignorant (or uncaring) people think they've coined a new term and don't realize, or care, that they're repurposing a term others are already using for another purpose.
It's incredibly annoying but no matter how hard you push back the online majority zeitgeist quickly overwhelms the previous meaning.
I hear you. But as someone who remains butthurt that "crypto" has been redefined to mean "cryptocurrency" rather than "cryptography", all I can say is you're farting against the wind here.
I thought the fun part was going to be that Chat GPT would condense those bloated SEO preambles into neat paragraphs.
I can picture a Chat GPT browser that transforms those pages into their essential meaning, if they have any.
I think too there should be standards and rules regarding affiliate content. For example, affiliate review sites. If the reviewer cannot prove they actually purchased the product and used it, their reviews are filtered out, SEO rankings be damned.
For now I'm mostly excited about Chat GPT going into role playing game engines and NPCs, and as a sort of dynamic encyclopedia to aid my research and learning.
Or just not play the game. If it's already this popular/hyped, it means it's too late to create a product and profit from it. Find the next big thing before it's overhyped
You are comparing 2 different things. Buying a stock is instant. Starting a startup takes years and incumbents already have the same advantage as you. Also, you can sell a stock whenever - liquidity is easy. You can't just throw your hands up and give up a startup that easily, especially if you take funding.
Age is no guarantee of wisdom, but it certainly is an indicator. In any case, I'm quite sure that I don't understand the point you're making here. You just listed a bunch of things that some people (both young and old) think and say about this tech.
What do you mean by "being old" here? What is it, concretely, that you want people to stop doing?
Myopic view, "older" folks are also excited they can leverage this new tool, you can be excited for a thing while also being apprehensive about some of its uses.
i love how you point out "write or help edit essays" and cant see how that could have potentially negative effects on society. If someone can generate an essay for class in 2 minutes that's better than their writing produced in hours, why would they ever bother to improve their writing?
Imagine a world where the only content you see is from publishers that you trust, and that your friends trust, and their friends, to maybe 4 or 5 hops or so, and the feed was weighted by how much they are trusted by your particular social graph.
If you start seeing spammy content, you downvote it, and your trust level from that part of your social graph drops, and they are less likely to be able to publish things that you see. If you discover some high quality content, and you promote it, then your trust level will improve in your part of the social graph.
I'd say that the actual web3 (they crypto kind) is largely about reclaiming identity from centralized identity providers. Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold. Once all content on the internet is signed, these trust graphs for delivering quality content and filtering out spam become trivial to build.
In this world, it doesn't matter if content is generated with ChatGPT, or content farms, or spammers. If the content is good, you'll see it, and if it's not, then you won't.
The problem is this is how social networks work - what you're describing is the classic social media bubble outcome. Everybody and their networks upvotes content from publishers they trust and downvotes content from publishers they don't but half of them trust Fox News and half trust CNN. Then of course the most active engagers/upvoters are the craziest ones, and they're furiously upvoting extreme content.
What happens if the majority of your group is trusting fake news aka people who exclusively listen to sources like NewsMax. Do you just abandon these people as trapped?
I would hope that in some cases, if their friends and loved ones start explicitly signaling their distrust of NewsMax or whatever, then their likelihood of seeing content from shitty sources would decrease, slowly extracting them from the hate bubble. Of course these systems could also cause people to isolate further, and get lost in these bubbles of negativity. These systems would help to identify people on the path to getting lost, opening the path for some IRL intervention, and should the person chose to leave the bubble, they should have an easier path towards recovery.
Either way, a lot of those networks depend heavily on inauthentic rage porn, which should have a hard time propagating in a network built on accountability.
At some point you need to stop seeking and start building, and this requires you to set down some axioms to build upon. It requires you to be ok with your “bubble” and run with it. There is nothing inherently wrong with a bubble, it’s just for a different mode of operation.
That'll filter for content that's popular or acceptable to your inner bubble. We already have that and it's becoming a more massive problem every day. "My friends trust it / like it " is not the same as"this is objectively true ". It's a fantasy of hyper democratic good-actor utopia that's not born by reality - whether extreme politics or pseudoscience or racism or intolerance religion or whatever will likely massively out vote any voices trying to determine facts.
Put it other way, today you already have an option to go to sources which are as scientific or objective or factual as possible. Most people choose otherwise.
Trust decays exponentially with distance in the social graph, but it does not immediately fall to zero. People who you second-degree trust are more likely to be trustable than a random person, and then via that process of discovery you can choose to trust that person directly.
For the limited purpose of finding interesting people to follow it can be okay, but I don't see it getting automated in a way that would work for web search or finding people with a common interest. For example, Reddit often works better because you're looking for something that can't be found by asking people you know. The people are out there but you're not connected.
I think trust is somewhat transitive, but it's not domain independent.
I have friends whose movie recommendations I trust but whose restaurant recommendations I don't, and vice versa. I have friend that I trust to be witty but not wise and others the opposite.
A system that tried to model trust would probably need to support tagging people with what kinds of things you trust them in.
This. Nobody is 100% trustworthy in every circumstance. When I say I trust someone, what I mean is that I have a good handle on what sorts of things that person can be trusted about, and what sorts of things they can't.
Exactly - you have a reasonable model of a person. So it also includes things like a recommendations giving you the _opposite_ of the purported opinion. Or trusting the details are technically true, but missing the forest for the trees. Or any other contextual interpretation of the data.
On second thought, I'm not even sure what "transitive" means here. It seems like it should mean that if you trust your friend's movie recommendations then you trust your friend's friends' movie recommendations? Or maybe something like:
trustsMovieRecs(A, B) and trustsMovieRecs(B, C) => trustsMovieRecs(A, C).
Their movie recommendations are likely some function that takes their friends' movie recommendations as input (along with watching them), but that's more like an indirect dependency than a transitive closure.
That's what I've been feeling. Web3 is the organic web. Where we add back weight to transactions and build a noise threshold that drowns the spammers and SEOs.
I always envisioned it requiring some sort of micropayments or government-issued web identity certificates.
Everyone complaining about bubbles needs to realize that echo chambers are another issue entirely. Inorganic and organic content both create bubbles. We are talking about real/notreal instead of credible/notcredible
I feel this underestimates the seriousness of the difficulties we are facing in the area of social cohesion. The conflating of real/non-real and credible/non-credible is very much at the heart of the Trump/Brexit divide
Arguably Twitter with non-algorithmic timeline and a bit of judicious blocking worked really well for this, but even that's on the way out now.
> Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold.
People could in theory have done this at any time in the PGP era, but never bothered. I'm not convinced the incentives work, especially once you bring money in.
If you're writing for the joy of writing (intrinsic motivation) and then start getting paid for it (attaching an extrinsic motivation to it) the original "for the joy of X" tends to get lost.
It isn't a "who wouldn't" but rather a "why would you".
Assuming that was a rhetorical question, but since there is a whole "homo economicus" theory of mind out there I'll answer anyway; An actor with other incentives beyond just monetary ones, like physical, social, or philosophical incentives.
This was how Epinions worked for products - you built a graph of product reviewers you trusted and you inherit a relevance score for a product based on the transitive trust amplifying product reviews. It was a brilliant model (it was a bunch of folks from Netscape including guha and the Nextdoor CEO, got acquired a few times and google shopping killed their model, eventually acquired by eBay for the product catalog taxonomy system - which I helped to build)
I would say the current model of information retrieval against a mountain of spam is already broken and LLM will just kick it over into impossible. I feel like we are already back to the world of Lycos, Excite, and Altavista where searches give you a semi relevant cluster of crap and you have to query craft to find the right document. In some ways I think the LLM chatbot isn’t a bad way to get information if it can validate itself against a semantic verification system and IR systems. I also think the semantic web might have a bigger role by structuring knowledge in a verifiable way rather than in blobs of ascii.
In practice this is how social networks already work - and it turns out that most people treat "like" and "trust" as equivalent. So you get information filter bubbles where people are basically living in separate realities.
In theory there was a time in the past where there was such a thing as a generally "trusted" expert, and it was possible for the rest of us to find and learn from such experts. But the experts are also frequently wrong, and the rise of the early internet was exciting in part because it meant that you could sample a much wider range of "dissenting" opinion and, supposing you put thought and effort in, come away better informed.
These things -- trust, expertise, and dissent -- exist in great tension. That tension is the underpinnings of the traditional classical liberal University model. But that is also gone today as the hypermedia echo chamber has caused dissent in Universities to be less tolerated than ever.
I can't imagine any practical solution to this problem.
Yes, I think a lot of work needs to be done around content labeling. Getting away from simple up/down, and labeling content that you think is funny, spammy, insightful, trusted, etc. I don't think any centralized platform has gotten the mechanics quite right on this, but I think we're getting closer. Furthermore, in a world where everyone owns their own social graph, and carries it with them on every site they visit, we don't need to rebuild our networks every time new platforms emerge.
This is another key advantage of web3 social networks vs web2. You own your identity, you own your social graph, and you can use it to automatically curate content on your own without relying on some third party to do it. A third party that might otherwise inject your feed with ads, or "high engagement" content to keep you clicking and swiping.
This sounds nice but I doubt it will ever get enough traction. The vast majority of people in power at tech companies believe that they can make more money creating a walled garden than something interoperable. Heck, it's not even just tech companies, most companies in any industry want to create lock-in wherever possible. A captive audience is easier to squeeze for money, so lots of people want to create such an audience.
This reminds me of all the talk a couple years ago about using blockchains to make video game items work across different game worlds. Sounds great for the players, but game dev companies don't see the point in actually implementing it, so it never goes anywhere.
Not to mention that there are significant technical hurdles. Two different platforms might be different enough that it's difficult or impossible to use the same social graph or game items in both.
Been thinking about all this recently, and it's related to starting up something new. Here's a few thoughts I believe resonate with your comment. (I'm just hoping for some discussion to consider)
"the moat" = that thing which a business has that others do not = walled gardens and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.
Expectations related to returns. Often 10x is a starting point. Nobody wants to invest, unless that 10x or some form of disruption is on the table. Forming that "moat" and making some sort of walled garden and or pool of locked in users almost always appears to be the primary piece able to make 10x plus claims plausible.
Those returns are never associated with cross platform, open type efforts. Frankly, those efforts can be seen as toxic, actually vaporizing "value" that would otherwise be on the table.
Web 1.0 was great!
Regarding "walled gardens", there is a secondary pattern in play. I didn't really notice until we saw Reddit and that "Sanders for President" sub kick into action. Prior to that time, /all was seen by everyone. It was possible to write something and have most of Reddit see that something. And that was, to some degree, true of other platforms too.
Suddenly, very large numbers of people could get behind an idea and act on it!
That happening is completely unacceptable to the established players. I don't care about the politics, or the players here. Just saying that large numbers of people all resonant in some way is a dynamic considered toxic by most, if not all, leaders in the world today.
Last time we saw that kind of thing happen in the USA, we also saw the New Deal happen.
This time, we didn't see any kind of legislative effort. What we did see was changes:
Government being involved with big tech. And top of the list seemed to be changes that insured people all saw different views. No more /all reaching millions at at time.
I'm trying to make a point here related to "lots of people want to create such an audience" and that point is, "yes they are, but they also need that audience fragmented in various ways too."
Some people have suggested public efforts. I'm totally open to those ideas, but am concerned about whether they would be implemented in a way that encourages competition and accountability.
And they will in one respect, that being the little guy having to compete hard to make it through a modest life while being held to account (via real names and ID linked to network activity in a very difficult to shake way), for what they say and do online while the "powers that be" are not experiencing either of those things to a degree of concern.
Right now, there is an authoritarian, puritanical move to "clean" the Internet up. It's everywhere and it looks to me like a move to bring traditional media online as a peer, not disadvantaged as it has always been, until recently. This last decade has been a big push to somehow make sure the likes of FOX and MSNBC have a placement advantage over [ insert indie voices here ].
The thing is pretty much anyone under 50 could care less about big, corporate media. And quite a few over 50 are right there with them, myself included.
I sure miss Web 1.0 in these respects.
But, getting back to tech and the basics of your comment:
Some how we need market rules that require competition. No enterprise wants it that way. They all want to flat out own their niche and keep their costs and risks low while also being free to deliver the least value for the highest dollars possible. If nothing else, that's needed to deliver those huge returns promised at some point in return for investments needed to get started.
Where there is meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the best value for the lowest dollars.
Where there isn't meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the least value for the highest dollars.
> Imagine a world where the only content you see is from publishers that you trust, and that your friends trust, and their friends, to maybe 4 or 5 hops or so, and the feed was weighted by how much they are trusted by your particular social graph.
Sounds like what Facebook was (or wanted to be) during its best days, until they got afraid of being overtaken by apps that do away with the social graph (TikTok).
Generally, you would only care about up-votes from people you trust, and if you vote down stuff that your friends up-voted, then your trust level in those friends would be reduced, rapidly turning down the volume on the other stuff that they promote.
Social graphs will enable trust between people, just like governments are doing right now. Any person not included in the graph and shown up in your newsfeed is an illegal troll. The only difference with automated electronic governments and physical governments is that we can have as many electronic governments as we like, a million of them.
One other feature of LLMs is that they will enable people to create as many dialects of a language as they like, english, greek, french whatever. So it is very possible that 100.000 different dialects are going to pop up in English alone, 10.000 dialects in Greek and so on. That will supercharge progress by giving anyone as much free speech as they like. Actually it makes me very sad when i listen to young people speak the very same dialect of a language as their parents.
So we are heading for the internet of one million governments and one million languages. The best time ever to be alive.
Nope, people will be able to communicate in a language widely recognized, but speaking with their peers or community there will another language of choice. Just like the natural language evolution over the centuries and millenia, but easier and quicker. 1 century of language evolution compressed over 5 to 10 years. Programming languages are following the same pattern already.
not much privacy then, eh? somebody will be able to trace that key to you or other things you've signed at least
PS I'm not too obsessed with privacy and I'm ok with assuming all my FB things including DMs can be made public/leaked anytime, but there is a bunch of stuff I browse and value that I will never share with anybody.
This might just push users to more narrower content options. ”ChatGPT FREE Verified”, anyone? Has its ups and downs I guess, but already before ChatGPT I had grown quite a filter for estimating the trustworthiness of a site. I guess the BLOCK -rules just keep on piling..
PoW mining is about validation of transactions and getting paid by the network and the users for performing this service. As a miner, you're doing work, that you are paid for, and you don't even know your customers or any details about them. This is a novel concept.
I see web3, from the business point of view, as being that whole concept. It won't just be PoW mining, but there will be cases where protocols are developed, that anyone can participate in, and incentives are developed to encourage that participation.
web3 will morph into many things. It will be painful to watch and there will be many mistakes along the way, but I'm glad it is happening. I like to be positive about people experimenting with new ways of doing things.
I made this comment on a post that got flagged for reasons I don't understand. I don't want to feel like I wasted my time so I'm re-commenting here:
I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often.
But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me.
What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them.
That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox.
This is insane. People aren't going to use chatGPT to think, they are going to use it for the opposite. That chatGPT doesn't even know when it's wrong is why this is a problem. The vast majority of projects I've seen purport to replace your needs for other things (developers, lawyers, etc) but not being a domain expert, any such user is not going to be aware of the significant flaws chatGPT has in its answers. Heck, someone posted a chatGPT bot that is supposed to digest and make understandable legal contracts, but the bot couldn't get the basics of the ycombinator SAFE right and had the directionality of the share assignment completely opposite what it should be. This is a fatal mistake that a layman wont realize.
> That chatGPT doesn't even know when it's wrong is why this is a problem.
Have you never had a conversation with someone about a topic which they know nothing about, and they say/ask something that is wrong/stupid, but it still raises some question(s) you haven't thought about before?
I kind of think of ChatGPT like that, a dumb friend that is mostly dumb, but sometimes makes my brain pull in a direction I haven't previously explored.
It's good that you think of chatGPT like that. My point is that clearly, that's not how most people are envisioning it nor is that how businesses are purporting to sell it.
No, what's your point? Google doesn't purport to offer legal advice, unlike the AI companies that do but simultaneously disclaim any liability. You can be obtuse if you want, but it's completely disingenuous to compare companies purporting to offer legal advice with a google search.
I'm thinking about Chat GPT in the general sense as a search engine replacement. I have no knowledge of or interest in apps that offer legal advice using Chat GPT as a back end. Seems risky unless you show a lot of disclaimers.
Depends on how you define "fun". Just a few days ago this russian guy defended GPT written diploma and now we have a shitshow going on. Really fun to watch.
391 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadDitto with the “ChatGPT gave me wrong info for a query” complaint. Well, how does that compare to traditional search? I’m willing to believe a Google search produced better results, but it seems like something one should check for an article like this.
IMO we’re not facing a paradigm change where the web was great before and now ChatGPT has ruined it. We may be facing a tipping point where ChatGPT pushes already-failing models to the breaking point, accelerating creation of new tools that we already needed.
Even if I’m wrong about that, I’m very confident that low quality, biased, and flat out incorrect web content was already a problem before LLMs.
"Gish gallop as a service", essentially.
I always thought it’s the opposite and platforms like SO and Medium incentivise posting there exactly via their crazy domain ranking.
It's unclear, but they do. My guess would be that they're willing to do shadier SEO than SO will, and any that get caught just stand up more domains.
Because they sell more clicks, impressions, etc...
This annihilates the SEO spam and is useful for most of my searches. It's glorious finding recipe ingredients without wading through a blogger's life story or a search result page filled exclusively with ads above the fold.
I searched "lowest temperatures in boston every year" and got some shit-looking MySpace-like website with a table of temperatures, hell knows where it got its data, instead of a link to the correct page on NOAA or something more authoritative.
First hit in DDG for that query is a trash site but at least the data is there…
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/MA/Boston/...
Versus trying to pull the data from NOAA;
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search
The way that the first site works the keywords into the intro text repeatedly to juice their rank is almost impressive. Can the search engines really not see that the page is garbage?
The currentresults.com page seems.. fine? It has a proper source cited at the bottom of the data. I wish it didn't have display ads, but that's the nature of the web nowadays. That's not a problem solvable by a traditional search engine.
Why not? If it has headers that say it was made with FrontPage 2003 and has five thousand AdSense boxes, uses old world fonts like Arial instead of HelveticaNeue Light, uses 16-bit VGA colors like #0000ff, or has bgsound and blink tags, it should perhaps be downranked.
A search engine should not see a site written in Arial and derank it for that reason. Blink tags, sure, they're obviously wrong for accessibility reasons, but there's a huge gap between those two things - and even so, how badly should they affect ranking?
I'm saying "garbage" can be subjective, and when there are objective "garbage" indicators, it's not obvious how to deal with them. What you've listed is only a small set of indicators from a small niche of so-called "garbage" sites. And personally, I don't even want to see old or old-styled sites dismissed from the web if they have good content.
Poorly.
Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance).
GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either accept what it tells you or not. It is not going to disclose what links it scraped to provide the information, and it's not going to change its mind about how it put that info together. This is because of the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”."
AI peddlers will use every UX dark pattern possible to make it look like what you are seeing really is magic.
Definitely, and I believe the post admits as much. The point he's making is that it's going to get exponentially worse, until the web is useless (the "tipping point" you mention).
What are the "new tools that we already needed" though? I think I'm too pessimistic in my outlook on these things, and would be interested to hear your optimistic future scenarios.
Right now, my view is that as that as long as something is profitable, it'll continue. A glimmer of hope is that once the web is completely useless, people will stop using it, and we can rebuild.
Your point also seems to assume no curation can happen on what is ingested. Simply because that might be what’s happening now you could also simply train the LLM on known good sources and be as permissive or restrictive as is necessary. Depending on how good the classifiers are for detecting LLM output (openai released on recently) or other generated / automatically derived content you can start to be more permissive.
My point is people seem to be blinded by what is vs what may be. This is not the end of the development cycle of the tech, it’s the pre-alpha release by the first meaningful market entrant. I’d be slower to judge what the future looks like rather than assuming everything stays fixed in time as it is.
The issue is again, fundamentally, one of data. Without authenticating what's machine generated and what's "trusted" proliferation of AI generated content is bound to reduce data quality. This is a side effect of these models being trained to fool discriminators.
Ultimately now I think there is going to be a more serious look around the ethics of using these models and putting guard rails around what exactly is permissible. I suspect the US will remain a wild west for some time but the EU will be a test-bed.
Ultimately, I'm fairly excited about the applications of all this.
I see this counter-argument all the time and it makes no sense to me.
Yes, the web is already filled with SEO trash. How is that an argument that ChatGPT won't be bad? It's a force multiplier for garbage. The pre-existence of garbage does not at all invalidate the observation that producing more garbage more efficiently is even worse.
Potentially it doesn't really become more difficult.
That "just" is an arms race so fantastically difficult that the current leading business doing it has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.
Those algos are, to date, some of the world's most sophisticated uses of AI.
This is like observing that the howitzer was just invented and saying, "Don't worry, we've got chainmail armor."
Also assuming you meant 1.4T=Alphabet, I cannot go along with your pretending that the 1.4 trillion dollar cap is a function of PageRank, nor can I pretend that it's remotely related to whether they can continue providing good results post-chatGPT.
Why don't you think they can handle it?
Between the 0.0001% we care about and the 99% percent that’s automated trash, there’s a solid 1% of content churned out by actual humans at very low quality. Think about things like recipe fluff, “news” articles for noname organizations, and all the super low effort blogs giving Birds Eye view summaries of things like Kubernetes ripped right off some other intro material.
ChatGPT produces straight up better and more informative content than those actual humans, and I am almost sure that it does so much faster and at a lower price. Actually, I think in some ways ChatGPT produces better content than most of the users on Reddit these days too
If they can't do it, we have a problem.
I guess there's the additional problem of bots posting comments everywhere, but that's really just a problem for social media sites and so I'm fairly unsympathetic.
People do spend a lot of their time these days on social media, but that's a new phenomenon, and I doubt it will last, so I don't think the future web is ruined.
Are we winning?
“New thing X is going to destroy the world!”
“Actually it’s an extension of decades-long trends and may accelerate issues we already face”
“Well it’s still bad, so any negative statement should be treated as true, even if it’s false!”
The article didn’t say ChatGPT was making low quality content worse. It said, in as many words, that ChatGPT will create this problem.
Back in the day you'd have to pay to print your bullshit. Imagine if printing bullshit were free and instant?
One important implication of a ChatGPT centered web is the removal of reward/credit to content creators. Now when you Google for something you'll probably arrive at some StackOverflow, blog, or Reddit post where there's at least an author's name attached to an answer. But ChatGPT just crawls that content without citing sources, reducing any reward for contributing. Maybe this doesn't have serious implications - after all most people contribute under pseudonyms, but its worth bringing up.
The rest is generally churned out en masse at the cheapest price, so in practice it contains no content and is very poorly written.
ChatGPT can produce decent quality content faster and cheaper than most humans. Despite not being fully accurate, and falling apart in certain domains like math, it has an amazing breadth of topics and things it can do at an acceptable level.
Right now, enough prompt engineering work is required that it still takes handholding to get ChatGPT to churn out content. But given where we are now it seems well within reach for the next gen of models to be able to go from “Write me an article about X that covers Y and Z” to “Write me 100 articles about varying topics in X” to “Take in the information from this corpus and distill it into 50 articles based on the most interesting parts.”
The main thing that should stay safe is detailed technical content like programming guides where you need to actually be able to reason about the material to produce good content, and can’t just paraphrase the ten thousand related sample materials in your training set. ChatGPT is decent about giving mostly-working code snippets (especially if it can use a library, although it may just make one up) but getting it to reason through things will probably require an entirely different approach to how it works. Still, because it’s already capable of producing technical content that passes a basic first glance, it could precipitate a trust crisis. I worry more about what happens when people try to get ChatGPT to generate recipes, or give medical advice, or operate in the support group/personal advice/etc. space.
It's just the beginning, just like the internet on the early 90s. Give it 30 more years and we all gonna be AI dependants, like we are on the internet. On the near decades the future generations will not be able to just imagine life before AIs.
The posts don't offer anything novel or personal to conversation, as they only repeat the most common talking points on the topic. Ugh.
Only if it affects their bottom line. And I doubt that's going to happen.
I know that truth is relative but it's like there's no point in using the word truth anymore. Everything is just becoming a collection of words.
Another challenge to our notions of identity, brought on by evolution of technology.
Curated content, by trusted publishers guaranteed to not to use ML generation.
Created libraries for facts, curated newspapers for daily events.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
If AI becomes the way we consume data then Semantic patterns will only help it.
And then you proceeded to intentionally use rude and abrasive language.
You can disagree with someone and challenge their opinion without using phrases like "who gives a shit" and "let it go".
Am I missing some context here?
Web 3.1 = NFT/Blockchain
Web 3.2 = AI Large Language Models spurting content into the ecosystem
"Web3" = crypto nonsense
Web 3.0 ≠ Web3
Web 3.1 = Virtual Assets backed by cryptography encoding/decoding
Web 3.11 = Search for Workgroups built by $2 an hour Kenyan workers
> https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/19/openai-paid-kenyan-workers-le...
I wonder if the answer is a network of topic-focused archives; like moving from a "Library of Alexandria" model to a modern nationwide system of libraries.
It raises the issue of governance of the curator, but the IA is already more transparent than Goole & co.
The nation of, say, Japan, has limited interest in funding an american noprofit today; but they would likely have a great deal of interest in funding an equivalent focused on Japanese content, for example.
So now you get into the issue of haves and have nots. Who is allowed to be considered an authorized archivist from a robots.txt perspective? Or what happens if an archivist becomes blacklisted for not respectfully crawling? How do national sanctions affect the Internet Archive of Russia? I imagine there would be a certification process and it would probably cost some money.
It's an interesting topic and I'm simply looking at the weak spots. I'm not against the overall concept though.
Distributed governance on the internet is a massive issue, and it's effectively unsolved for everything from pairing to DNS. In practice, good faith goes a long way, particularly in areas that are largely academic in scope - like archiving.
If most of it is crap I would call not archiving it a feature.
There is a weird convoluted analogue to CERN particle detectors. They smash particles together and then image the resulting storm of particle contrails via detector that is basically a sandwhiched ccd detector (like you have in camera, but different) the size of a cathedral. Resulting in far too much data for any system to analyze or even store in the first place. Hence they need/needed to runtime filter the massive amount of particle trail signals and only pick out the critical ones.
If there is too much data you simply need to drop the parts you are fairly confident you don’t need.
There is no reason there should be only one internet archive, there might very well be parallel operations filtering a bit different things.
I guess it’s a bit odd Unesco does not already have a parallel effort.
I share the same hope but have doubts that as a society we'll have the collective critical thinking skills to disconnect from the AI overlords. We've already had the US and US inspired Brazilian coup attempts fueld by social media placements and it's only going to get more fine tuned and effective.
What can I do as an individual? One path is to simplify and declutter my digital life. How else to cope?
> The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online.Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
> It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.
> Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.
The internet becomes so full of hallucinating AI output that it becomes impossible to train the model.
http://www.accelerando.org
(heh - checking that link Charlie Stross just posted (Jan 31) a blog post: "An AI app walks into a writers room")
Anyways the link I was actually after ... give https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... a read and consider the "what happens in the later parts of the book."
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how ML works, which very well may be true.
This will not work, its too soon.
https://i.imgur.com/B2cHXRA.jpg
To me this implies that things such as "sarcasm" is a pattern simple enough for an AI to match - and that should go both ways, whether it's being generated or recognized.
If you're arguing that it won't be able to detect the more subtle sarcasm, then yeah, sure. But, well, Poe's Law predates GPT.
No, you got it right. Describing it as a game of telephone is a great analogy. This is exacerbated by the confidently incorrect problem. LLM output looks sophisticated and correct and may at time actually be correct. However some unpredictable percent of the time it will be incorrect and confidently so.
I suspect we will see the rise of both groups of machines, curated A.I.s and A.I.s just trained on anything, which should be entertaining.
https://i.imgur.com/u8Np332.png
The curation, such as it is, appears to be limited to humans downweighing the undesirable answers. Which is why there's always a way to work around it, even though it requires more and more elaborate prompts.
Stable Diffusion provides already good enough images to cover a lot of visual content online.
If you look at image shares sites for the purpose of entertainment like Imgur, you will also notice that a large portion of the viral content are screenshots from Twitter or traditional media.
Is content opinions? Most people don't have opinions on every topic on the planet. Is Gobekli Tepe the place of Noah's Ark? What's going on with Hunter Biden's laptop? How will Meta's VR strategy work out? Will it rain tomorrow in Sydney, Australia? Depending on your area of interest you might or might not have an opinion about it which you may or may not publish online.
——
We will pay you 100 bucks to withhold filing your partners death certificate for one week and providing their certificates to us.
Isn't that extrapolating the current trend a bit too much? Clearly, the text corpora[0] amassed before mass LLM content distribution are already big enough to train such models to decent general language fluency. So why would AI creators contaminate those datasets with potentially spurious content?
Sure, you want to keep your model up-to-date about the state of the world (the GPT corpus ends in mid-2021 afaik), but you can be much more careful about which texts you include. Those newer training data serve a different purpose than the original corpus, you don't need to bootstrap general language proficiency anymore. OpenAI already released a product for classifying AI-generated text, why would they not use something like that to filter future training data, for example?
[0] edited, thanks!
Divide up the 'net into trusted and untrusted sources. Make the trust ratings public. Use search tools and corpuses such as the Google Books dataset to source "knowledge" back to pre-Internet roots, when necessary. In short: bring academic reputation back and bring it back hard.
It will make for a more elitist web, but given that even without ChatGPT we've had a problem with wildfire misinformation spread in social media networks it might be a change that's a long time coming.
What it means is the bar for becoming a new StackOverflow contributor (or Reddit admin, or Wikipedian) might become much, much higher. "Oh, you want to contribute your first post? Show me the bicycles in this image, find the letters in this image, and provide the names of two existing Stack Overflow users with over 1000 karma who can vouch for you, and also you see a tortoise on its back, baking in the sun. You're not helping it. Why aren't you helping it?..."
And I'm not looking forward to a swathe of AI generated songs pumped into the charts and streaming services at potentially lots of songs per second.
Although I hope we may see big come back of Web 1.0 forums such where users have to gain street cred and even invite referals with realy genuine contribution into community, no way to fake with AI today.
Man I'm so tired of this very obvious observation. I wouldn't think a company smart enough to create an AI would also be dumb enough to fall into a pitfall that even the most casual observer can identify.
In the Kessler Syndrome analogy, that's an ablative aerospace impact armour company deliberately launching and blowing up satellites to sell their goods to spacecraft builders.
Its completely empty calories in terms of knowledge.
Begun the Bot Wars have.
Meta collapses if all its properties are filled with AI generated spam content.
Same for Google.
Meta will likely fall later since visual content at scale is still 12-18 months away. But for Google, the clock is ticking.
I don't want to read 10 pages of text for a simple cooking recipe.
today "AI is just spicy autocomplete" gets flagged off front page.
For MONTHS, front page has been full of sub-script-kiddie level "AI" tools that are just `curl "{static_prompt} + {user_input}" http://chatgptapi`
or mediocre examples of things that would have been impressive a computer could do in 1960, but are absolutely easier to do since 2010 with google or other tools.
Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).
Unlimited AI opinions about any topics.
Unlimited AI “grassroots” campaigns.
Unlimited AI propaganda from every country and military (perfectly chosen each time).
Unlimited AI comments, “friends”, and engagements on every social media platform for your posts.
The bigger struggle will be for discovering authenticity and filtering the content down.
Suddenly everyone’s frustration with their AI generated newsfeed and social feeds will become necessary filter tools to communicate and digest information.
Just my opinion. Fun to think about. Will watch “Her” this weekend again.
> Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch.
So basically Twitch as it is?
> Unlimited 24/7 AI TV shows and movies (RIP Netflix, Hollywood).
Which is TV right now?
> Unlimited AI opinions about any topics.
Welcome to Twitter.
You filter in the same way people always have. Studying, learning, acquiring taste.
Yeah, not much a change now, but I hope demand for real TV/film will remain. Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too costly. A lot of good stuff (a lot of bad stuff too, but that's beside the point) would be thrown out with the bath water imo.
I mean, its easy to imagine, because its the same effect that drove the reality TV displacing scripted content trend.
For starters, you can't evaluate most of it at all because you don't have time to do any significant sampling of any significant portion of it. How many TV episodes, movies, books, YouTube videos, video games, were made in the last twenty years? Do you really think that "garbage" is an accurate description of 99% of them?
I don't thinks that objective. It _might_ be fair to say that 95% are relatively poor quality or not to your taste. But "garbage"?
The thing that's challenging is that to be fair to this content we have to separate our superficial judgement of its quality from our evaluation of it's relevance to us. For practical purposes, we have to find ways to dismiss almost all of it because we do not have a million years to consume content. But that doesn't mean that it's almost all bad content.
I mean the AI Seinfeld was terrible, but it's an entirely software generated "show." Someone will figure out how to feed measurements of engagement into the model, and the model will continuously "improve." The net result is it will eventually generate an infinite amount of the most addictive content ever created.
And of course all this will be a profitable thing to do, because ads.
The addictive trash content on the Internet is basically going to go from heroin to fentanyl.
or it could go in the Stable Diffusion direction, where you can just ask for whatever you'd like to see more at any given time.
"Computer, please play a four episodes TV series about a cyborg chef killing aliens in space. Please add violence, drug use and a plot twist at the end".
I played around with the free tier of NovelAI to see what all the fuss is about, and am absolutely convinced you are on to something.
Generating a story by repeatedly pushing a button and being fed different outcomes is literally slot-machine behavior.
This right here is where we can make obscene money off of Hollywood. LLMs are a godsend for streaming platforms. Everything from script to sound track. Production costs will sink, and can scale to meet demand. Open Q is whether people will eat the AI dog food (think faux meat..) and history suggests the proverbial couch potato will lap up any slop if continuously delivered.
Just like it has happened with so many terms before it.
Butlerian Jihad
I never thought of that, but it's entirely possible and sounds pretty scary. Assuming that this works and then add 2 human generations to it, which would perceive our movies like we do the black and white ones.
While a "classic movie" would then mean a human-made movie, it's scary to think that the new stream of media entertainment would be unlimited. Like you'd have to decide when to stop binge-watching, because the show would always go on.
I would argue that this is already the case. I'd hazard a guess that almost any concept one is interested in, that can be synthesized in a few words (e.g. "deep-ocean human habitats", or "ethics and techniques for this niche psychological framework"), has an infinite rabbithole available online: usually, starting from Wikipedia, there are countless pages and videos about and around the topic.
So the ability to stop binging, i.e. sufficient self-awareness, is already a pretty useful skill, and it will be increasingly necessary.
It could evolve to a point where the my version of Breaking Bad would be a completely parallel universe to the one you would be offered. Suddenly one variant could become more interesting and so popular that it would become the official version. There's a lot that can be thought and discussed about such a capability.
But in essence you're right, unlimited binge-watching is already a reality.
Go to a local open mic! We're pretty far off from having to worry if the person singing their kind-of-alright song is a robot or not. The Cactus Cafe in Austin has a fantastic open mic night and you will definitely see talented songwriters and meet plenty of authentically human musicians.
It’s gonna be a gas!
More about Web3 ≠ Web 3.0 for the uninformed / curious: https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-...
Should I call mine 3.0.0 to differenciate it and introduce some proper semver whilst I'm at it?
It's incredibly annoying but no matter how hard you push back the online majority zeitgeist quickly overwhelms the previous meaning.
I can picture a Chat GPT browser that transforms those pages into their essential meaning, if they have any.
I think too there should be standards and rules regarding affiliate content. For example, affiliate review sites. If the reviewer cannot prove they actually purchased the product and used it, their reviews are filtered out, SEO rankings be damned.
For now I'm mostly excited about Chat GPT going into role playing game engines and NPCs, and as a sort of dynamic encyclopedia to aid my research and learning.
Be young in your mind. Be young.
How are young people interpreting this?
"Oh wow, I can get it to write or help edit essays"
"I can use it as something to bounce ideas off of"
"I can use it to take ideas from my head into the digital realm."
Stop being old people.
So why do you need to "be first"?
How about "if X did it, I can too." Which way would you prefer to live?
What do you mean by "being old" here? What is it, concretely, that you want people to stop doing?
So, replace "old" with "inflexible" and you get the gist.
In general, "old" people are inflexible, but we professionals are lucky that we don't have to be in a field that is always expanding.
i love how you point out "write or help edit essays" and cant see how that could have potentially negative effects on society. If someone can generate an essay for class in 2 minutes that's better than their writing produced in hours, why would they ever bother to improve their writing?
If you start seeing spammy content, you downvote it, and your trust level from that part of your social graph drops, and they are less likely to be able to publish things that you see. If you discover some high quality content, and you promote it, then your trust level will improve in your part of the social graph.
I'd say that the actual web3 (they crypto kind) is largely about reclaiming identity from centralized identity providers. Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold. Once all content on the internet is signed, these trust graphs for delivering quality content and filtering out spam become trivial to build.
In this world, it doesn't matter if content is generated with ChatGPT, or content farms, or spammers. If the content is good, you'll see it, and if it's not, then you won't.
Either way, a lot of those networks depend heavily on inauthentic rage porn, which should have a hard time propagating in a network built on accountability.
These people I only interact with in real life, and I don't bring up anything on the news.
Put it other way, today you already have an option to go to sources which are as scientific or objective or factual as possible. Most people choose otherwise.
Just because you know someone doesn't mean they're good at reading the news or understanding what's going on in the world.
I have friends whose movie recommendations I trust but whose restaurant recommendations I don't, and vice versa. I have friend that I trust to be witty but not wise and others the opposite.
A system that tried to model trust would probably need to support tagging people with what kinds of things you trust them in.
I always envisioned it requiring some sort of micropayments or government-issued web identity certificates.
Everyone complaining about bubbles needs to realize that echo chambers are another issue entirely. Inorganic and organic content both create bubbles. We are talking about real/notreal instead of credible/notcredible
Arguably Twitter with non-algorithmic timeline and a bit of judicious blocking worked really well for this, but even that's on the way out now.
> Any time you publish anything, you're signing that publication with a key that only you hold.
People could in theory have done this at any time in the PGP era, but never bothered. I'm not convinced the incentives work, especially once you bring money in.
Who wouldn't?
If you're writing for the joy of writing (intrinsic motivation) and then start getting paid for it (attaching an extrinsic motivation to it) the original "for the joy of X" tends to get lost.
It isn't a "who wouldn't" but rather a "why would you".
I would say the current model of information retrieval against a mountain of spam is already broken and LLM will just kick it over into impossible. I feel like we are already back to the world of Lycos, Excite, and Altavista where searches give you a semi relevant cluster of crap and you have to query craft to find the right document. In some ways I think the LLM chatbot isn’t a bad way to get information if it can validate itself against a semantic verification system and IR systems. I also think the semantic web might have a bigger role by structuring knowledge in a verifiable way rather than in blobs of ascii.
There are many useful subreddits
In theory there was a time in the past where there was such a thing as a generally "trusted" expert, and it was possible for the rest of us to find and learn from such experts. But the experts are also frequently wrong, and the rise of the early internet was exciting in part because it meant that you could sample a much wider range of "dissenting" opinion and, supposing you put thought and effort in, come away better informed.
These things -- trust, expertise, and dissent -- exist in great tension. That tension is the underpinnings of the traditional classical liberal University model. But that is also gone today as the hypermedia echo chamber has caused dissent in Universities to be less tolerated than ever.
I can't imagine any practical solution to this problem.
This is another key advantage of web3 social networks vs web2. You own your identity, you own your social graph, and you can use it to automatically curate content on your own without relying on some third party to do it. A third party that might otherwise inject your feed with ads, or "high engagement" content to keep you clicking and swiping.
This reminds me of all the talk a couple years ago about using blockchains to make video game items work across different game worlds. Sounds great for the players, but game dev companies don't see the point in actually implementing it, so it never goes anywhere.
Not to mention that there are significant technical hurdles. Two different platforms might be different enough that it's difficult or impossible to use the same social graph or game items in both.
"the moat" = that thing which a business has that others do not = walled gardens and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.
Expectations related to returns. Often 10x is a starting point. Nobody wants to invest, unless that 10x or some form of disruption is on the table. Forming that "moat" and making some sort of walled garden and or pool of locked in users almost always appears to be the primary piece able to make 10x plus claims plausible.
Those returns are never associated with cross platform, open type efforts. Frankly, those efforts can be seen as toxic, actually vaporizing "value" that would otherwise be on the table.
Web 1.0 was great!
Regarding "walled gardens", there is a secondary pattern in play. I didn't really notice until we saw Reddit and that "Sanders for President" sub kick into action. Prior to that time, /all was seen by everyone. It was possible to write something and have most of Reddit see that something. And that was, to some degree, true of other platforms too.
Suddenly, very large numbers of people could get behind an idea and act on it!
That happening is completely unacceptable to the established players. I don't care about the politics, or the players here. Just saying that large numbers of people all resonant in some way is a dynamic considered toxic by most, if not all, leaders in the world today.
Last time we saw that kind of thing happen in the USA, we also saw the New Deal happen.
This time, we didn't see any kind of legislative effort. What we did see was changes:
Government being involved with big tech. And top of the list seemed to be changes that insured people all saw different views. No more /all reaching millions at at time.
I'm trying to make a point here related to "lots of people want to create such an audience" and that point is, "yes they are, but they also need that audience fragmented in various ways too."
Some people have suggested public efforts. I'm totally open to those ideas, but am concerned about whether they would be implemented in a way that encourages competition and accountability.
And they will in one respect, that being the little guy having to compete hard to make it through a modest life while being held to account (via real names and ID linked to network activity in a very difficult to shake way), for what they say and do online while the "powers that be" are not experiencing either of those things to a degree of concern.
Right now, there is an authoritarian, puritanical move to "clean" the Internet up. It's everywhere and it looks to me like a move to bring traditional media online as a peer, not disadvantaged as it has always been, until recently. This last decade has been a big push to somehow make sure the likes of FOX and MSNBC have a placement advantage over [ insert indie voices here ].
The thing is pretty much anyone under 50 could care less about big, corporate media. And quite a few over 50 are right there with them, myself included.
I sure miss Web 1.0 in these respects.
But, getting back to tech and the basics of your comment:
Some how we need market rules that require competition. No enterprise wants it that way. They all want to flat out own their niche and keep their costs and risks low while also being free to deliver the least value for the highest dollars possible. If nothing else, that's needed to deliver those huge returns promised at some point in return for investments needed to get started.
Where there is meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the best value for the lowest dollars.
Where there isn't meaningful competition:
Buyers tend to get the least value for the highest dollars.
Market advocates often talk up compe...
Sounds like what Facebook was (or wanted to be) during its best days, until they got afraid of being overtaken by apps that do away with the social graph (TikTok).
One other feature of LLMs is that they will enable people to create as many dialects of a language as they like, english, greek, french whatever. So it is very possible that 100.000 different dialects are going to pop up in English alone, 10.000 dialects in Greek and so on. That will supercharge progress by giving anyone as much free speech as they like. Actually it makes me very sad when i listen to young people speak the very same dialect of a language as their parents.
So we are heading for the internet of one million governments and one million languages. The best time ever to be alive.
PS I'm not too obsessed with privacy and I'm ok with assuming all my FB things including DMs can be made public/leaked anytime, but there is a bunch of stuff I browse and value that I will never share with anybody.
I see web3, from the business point of view, as being that whole concept. It won't just be PoW mining, but there will be cases where protocols are developed, that anyone can participate in, and incentives are developed to encourage that participation.
web3 will morph into many things. It will be painful to watch and there will be many mistakes along the way, but I'm glad it is happening. I like to be positive about people experimenting with new ways of doing things.
I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often.
But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me.
What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them.
That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox.
HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
Eliza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Have you never had a conversation with someone about a topic which they know nothing about, and they say/ask something that is wrong/stupid, but it still raises some question(s) you haven't thought about before?
I kind of think of ChatGPT like that, a dumb friend that is mostly dumb, but sometimes makes my brain pull in a direction I haven't previously explored.
Depends on how you define "fun". Just a few days ago this russian guy defended GPT written diploma and now we have a shitshow going on. Really fun to watch.
https://twitter.com/biblikz/status/1620451262822252544
PS: well, the diploma was not written entirely by GPT, but nevertheless...