Although I have a lot of scorn for Anime as a genre, I'm grateful for the reminder to go back and finish watching 2nd GIG! I have also found myself reflecting on a lot of the concepts and predictions presented in 1st GIG.
And so it begins. Australia once again leading the charge against freedom and privacy, this will no doubt be accompanied with legislation that makes AI illegal and give rights to police to search any device suspected of containing any AI. Of course, they already made encrypted devices illegal previously so you'll get hit with a double whammy if you dare to follow best practices.
Adding to this, AI gives the common folk a fighting chance in the information war which has already been waged upon us. Up until now only the rich and the powerful had the ability to participate. Now that it is so easy for people to put together coherent and well researched thoughts in their scarce free moments, the advantage the rich minority had in the information war is temporarily slipping.
We have to keep AI open and thriving. We saw many nonsensical movies about the rights of sentient AI, but the true battle is the rights of humans to have access to AI. It won't last long if we don't defend it.
Consider the techniques being used and only available to players with resources:
- employ bots/troll farms to astro-turf comments, blogs, videos and articles at a large scale.
- employ more writers to pump out stories on the major news outlets.
- fund research in any direction they choose, and only broadcast supporting research.
- their message is already out, taught in schools, blasted on the media, etc. This means there is a hierarchy of experts all the way down to the hacker news commenter 'who heard a thing one time', and they are ready to refute anything without consideration.
It is known that most people are only reading headlines and comment sections now. When the main players can produce 1000x more content than the combined efforts of the few who have anything else to say, it appears to most people that there is not only a consensus, but most things are settled unanimously.
- With LLMs you can write the dot points of an article and have it develop something readable (time saver).
- You can interact with the LLMs to bounce ideas and discuss things, allowing you to build up a more fleshed out argument (virtual peers).
- You can discover research terms that might be deranked from search engines.
- LLMs can criticize your work and provide ways to improve it (peer review). This criticism will handily have the flavor of the mainstream message as all LLMs are trained on predominantly mainstream sources.
One person can do more now with less.
You could argue that the mainstream can use the same techniques, and surely they will. But the trend I am noticing is that there is a lot of traction for alternative views as the mainstream message has reached saturation and a vacuum formed from the suppression of well researched alternative messages.
>> "This tech future may accelerate truth decay, greatly challenging the quality of what we call public 'common sense', seriously damaging public confidence in elected officials, and undermining the trust that binds us."
As if any normal person still belives them!
They're just jealous/panicking that now ANYONE can access this tech instead of just politicians and those who own the media.
The whole of Wikipedia is backed up with 'references'. Typically news articles, scientific papers, and...blogposts. Blogposts which typically no longer exist or the domain expired, and thus the claims made in the Wikipedia entry are dubious at best. Same with certain news articles. News sites prune old articles and don't keep older articles for posterity, meaning we can't cite them anymore (yet they are still cited in Wikipedia). As for scientific papers, most of those do still exist, well, at least the free non-paywalled ones still exist.
This era has been underway for at least 20 years. AI potentially exacerbates the problem by dramatically reducing the cost of bullshit production, but it also holds the potential to act as a positive agent that reviews and validates available information.
There are probably many significant milestones on the road to 'truth decay', but satirist Stephen Colbert crystalized it in 2005 with the concept of 'Truthiness' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
17 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 19.7 ms ] threadWe have to keep AI open and thriving. We saw many nonsensical movies about the rights of sentient AI, but the true battle is the rights of humans to have access to AI. It won't last long if we don't defend it.
I keep hearing people saying things like this, but I honestly don't understand the argument at all.
How does AI give anyone a fighting chance in this way? What can it possibly do on this front?
- employ bots/troll farms to astro-turf comments, blogs, videos and articles at a large scale. - employ more writers to pump out stories on the major news outlets. - fund research in any direction they choose, and only broadcast supporting research. - their message is already out, taught in schools, blasted on the media, etc. This means there is a hierarchy of experts all the way down to the hacker news commenter 'who heard a thing one time', and they are ready to refute anything without consideration.
It is known that most people are only reading headlines and comment sections now. When the main players can produce 1000x more content than the combined efforts of the few who have anything else to say, it appears to most people that there is not only a consensus, but most things are settled unanimously.
- With LLMs you can write the dot points of an article and have it develop something readable (time saver). - You can interact with the LLMs to bounce ideas and discuss things, allowing you to build up a more fleshed out argument (virtual peers). - You can discover research terms that might be deranked from search engines. - LLMs can criticize your work and provide ways to improve it (peer review). This criticism will handily have the flavor of the mainstream message as all LLMs are trained on predominantly mainstream sources.
One person can do more now with less.
You could argue that the mainstream can use the same techniques, and surely they will. But the trend I am noticing is that there is a lot of traction for alternative views as the mainstream message has reached saturation and a vacuum formed from the suppression of well researched alternative messages.
As if any normal person still belives them!
They're just jealous/panicking that now ANYONE can access this tech instead of just politicians and those who own the media.
0: https://ethicsinediting.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/photo-manip...
Welcome to our post-truth world.
There are probably many significant milestones on the road to 'truth decay', but satirist Stephen Colbert crystalized it in 2005 with the concept of 'Truthiness' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Maybe once but for this mob most do a better job IRL than a deep fake could.