[HN Gopher] Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's ...
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Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's not going to be
fun
Author : iraldir
Score : 334 points
Date : 2023-02-02 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lajili.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lajili.com)
| px43 wrote:
| 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.
| Neil44 wrote:
| I like your optimism that spammy content will be downvoted.
| px43 wrote:
| 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.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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.
| emporas wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| We're creating the tower of babel?
| emporas wrote:
| 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.
| Camisa wrote:
| Did you just describe reddit?
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| This is similar to what post.news is doing.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| Trust is not transitive. My friends reshare all sort of crazy
| memes, and their friends are even worse.
|
| Just because you know someone doesn't mean they're good at
| reading the news or understanding what's going on in the world.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I'm sure everyone says that about themselves. It doesn't
| work out like that though.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I know many people I like very much... but would never
| trust their judgment.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| 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
| tablatom wrote:
| 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
| dmonitor wrote:
| just look at reddit to see how quickly self curation devolves
| into complete and utter garbage
| savingsPossible wrote:
| I did and I don't see it.
|
| There are many useful subreddits
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| idopmstuff wrote:
| 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.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I think the extension of this concept is that if I downvote
| the crazy people then their voting habits don't impact what I
| see
| [deleted]
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 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?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Yes.
|
| These people I only interact with in real life, and I don't
| bring up anything on the news.
| px43 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think you deeply underestimate how entrenched inauthentic
| rage porn is a focal point of far too many peoples lives.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato tried something pretty
| similar and ultimately died.
|
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| An actor with a monetary incentive will always aim towards
| maximizing their financial outcome.
|
| Who wouldn't?
| Muehe wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
|
| 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".
| burlesona wrote:
| 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.
| px43 wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| run2arun wrote:
| That's also how you get into a bubble. If you are a true
| seeker, what you want is authentic and original thinking which
| challenges your beliefs.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 5 hops is a pretty big social network. If you are still in a
| bubble in such a system, you'd be in the bubble without it.
| hudon wrote:
| 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.
| c7b wrote:
| > 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).
| marban wrote:
| My biggest concern is the rise of the drag & drop content
| grifters -- Zero-knowledge individuals that can pollute the Web
| at scale that was previously only possible for a much smaller
| group. E.g. Look at the amount of TikTok how-tos for creating &
| selling generated children's books on Amazon.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| ghusto wrote:
| > 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.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| vernon99 wrote:
| How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain ranking.
| How an arbitrary website can compete with that?
|
| I always thought it's the opposite and platforms like SO and
| Medium incentivise posting there exactly via their crazy
| domain ranking.
| kadoban wrote:
| > How could it rank higher tho? SO has a huge domain
| ranking. How an arbitrary website can compete with that?
|
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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.).
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| 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.
| cruano wrote:
| Even if it doesn't, you now suddenly have the top 20+
| results with the exact same info
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| They probably rank higher on long tail keywords. Usually
| for more in the weeds issues that don't get as much search
| volume
| moralestapia wrote:
| >How could it rank higher tho?
|
| Because they sell more clicks, impressions, etc...
| Idk__Throwaway wrote:
| [dead]
| webjunkie wrote:
| Agreed. What is it with everyone wanting to see Chat GPT only
| in the light of accessing information and then complaining
| about it?
| starkd wrote:
| Because thats what you do to evaluate it as a service?
| brookst wrote:
| It makes me wonder if these people have ever talked to a real
| person before. Spoiler: real people can be wrong too!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
|
| "Gish gallop _as a service_ ", essentially.
| mahathu wrote:
| You can trust your friends to not straight up make up facts
| when they don't know something, like Chat-GPT does, for
| example.
| SinePost wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| zaroth wrote:
| This is a fun example;
|
| 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?
| soiler wrote:
| I mean, what exactly makes the first page garbage? I'm
| not disagreeing, but "is this site garbage" is not a
| question that a search engine can ask.
| mh- wrote:
| 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.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Full of Google ads probably
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Quantity has a quality all its own.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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_.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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."
| qup wrote:
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Cost
|
| Back in the day you'd have to pay to print your bullshit.
| Imagine if printing bullshit were free and instant?
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| I think it will be fun! We're seeing a paradigm shift right
| before our very eyes. Just think, you can tell your grandkids
| that you lived through the AI revolution.
|
| I'm excited to see what happens next, because nobody knows and
| certainly whoever wrote this article has no clue, either.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This is a carry-over bug from Web 2.0..
| spandrew wrote:
| "The Web 2.0 changed the way we related to that information by
| making it interactive."
|
| Web 2.0 was about users generating content on shared platforms
| (social networks). It wasn't about making it interactive -- that
| is just a feature. The benefit of 2.0 was scaling-up businesses
| was easier than ever with new web tech. This spiralled directly
| into the start-up boom of the last decade.
|
| Not sure I can take an article seriously that doesn't even
| understand its basic premises.
| evo_9 wrote:
| I don't know, to me this is just going to make real human,
| authentic content that much more valuable.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The current web is already 90% worthless garbage. Everything I've
| heard from the Web 3 crowd makes me think that Web 3 will be 99%
| worthless garbage. So I guess Chat GPT will make that 100%?
|
| I already think the web is, if not dead, then doomed in terms of
| the value it used to provide. My fear about things like Chat GPT
| is that it will have a similar effect on things outside the web
| as well.
|
| But we'll see. I really wish I felt more optimistic about all
| this, but the trendlines don't encourage that.
| bob29 wrote:
| 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.
| misto wrote:
| 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..
| [deleted]
| myth_drannon wrote:
| We will need something similar to the Biblical flood to flush
| everything away. And restart from local trust islands similar to
| what we had in 80's-90's with BBSs and possibly Fidonet. I don't
| know how it's going to work but I just don't see any future in
| Internet in its current commercial form.
| avitous wrote:
| Herbert's "Butlerian Jihad" keeps coming to mind; I wonder if
| something similar lies in our future.
| andai wrote:
| Re: An electronic version of Tom Riddle's diary
|
| >"Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you
| anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that
| can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?"
|
| -- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
| alexchantavy wrote:
| I came here searching for this comment :-) Expressed in terms
| of Harry Potter, I guess ChatGPT is kind of magical.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Unlimited 24/7 AI streamers on Twitch.
|
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| > 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.
| flopunctro wrote:
| > 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > 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.
| ideamotor wrote:
| Fuuuuunnnnnn
| qsort wrote:
| I see this take a lot and I don't get why this is different
| from what we have right now.
|
| > 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.
| mahathu wrote:
| > Which is TV right now?
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Imagine they were able to shit out entirely AI generated
| shows and slowly phase out real media because it's just too
| costly
|
| I mean, its easy to imagine, because its the same effect
| that drove the reality TV displacing scripted content
| trend.
| akaike wrote:
| 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
| lcampbell wrote:
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| lizzardbraind wrote:
| [dead]
| safety1st wrote:
| 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.
| ragazzina wrote:
| > 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".
| jstarfish wrote:
| > The net result is it will eventually generate an infinite
| amount of the most addictive content ever created.
|
| 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.
| eternalban wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| shiredude95 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Will be interesting to see what the post-AI movement will
| look like.
|
| Butlerian Jihad
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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"
| gryn wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Information wants to be wrong.
| ripsawridge wrote:
| I scrolled many pages for this. It is true!
|
| Information wants to be like an "earworm"...an annoying and
| "false" song that you just can't shake. Because then it's not
| anodyne. It has a personality. It will be remembered, not
| merely incorporated. In truth it is the purveyor of the
| information that has this desire, and it seeps into his
| leavings on the internet. In his many thousands of iterations.
| And so we are here.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| 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)...
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| iraldir wrote:
| 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
| webdoodle wrote:
| Microsoft and others clearly created Chat A.I. because they can't
| trust journalists or there employee's to continue lying for them.
| This is all about information control.
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
| qwertyforce wrote:
| web 3.0 - decentralized communities worshiping their own AI
| gods (content generators)
| snapcaster wrote:
| 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
| Idk__Throwaway wrote:
| > Not to be rude but...
|
| 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".
| pksebben wrote:
| That's a fairly vitriolic take on what I understand to be a
| pretty benign opinion.
|
| Am I missing some context here?
| hdbsbsisbs wrote:
| 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.
| josephwegner wrote:
| Seems like we need a new meme. `current_year` will be the
| year of web 3.0!
| koolala wrote:
| 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.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Web 3.0 = Semantic Net
|
| Web 3.1 = NFT/Blockchain
|
| Web 3.2 = AI Large Language Models spurting content into the
| ecosystem
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Web 3.0 = Semantic Net
|
| "Web3" = crypto nonsense
|
| Web 3.0 [?] Web3
| guessbest wrote:
| Web 3.0 = Semantic Net
|
| 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...
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's gonna be a gas!
| kefka_p wrote:
| I've only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let
| me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad
| enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At
| least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and
| web-related tech.
| xwdv wrote:
| I don't care much about what happens to the modern web at this
| point, I just long for those days of the early web and wish there
| was some sort of alternative web I could still browse that was by
| design forced to be that way forever.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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.
| pupppet wrote:
| I say fantastic, bring it on. This might be the final nail in the
| coffin of automated gatekeepers like Google and social networks,
| and back to person-powered indexes.
| LanceJones wrote:
| Perhaps "certified AI-free" zones/apps/websites will become a
| place of solace.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I think we need a new HTML tag which should be placed around all
| AI-generated content.
| Devasta wrote:
| Such a tag would only be used to filter AI content, so no one
| who uses AI would use it.
| boxingdog wrote:
| [dead]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Yawn, another doomsday post because someone is scared of
| change...
| pelasaco wrote:
| maybe then people start to go back to their lives, have real life
| hobbies, start a family, engage themselves in their
| communities...
| chatterhead wrote:
| All AI projects need to be immediately nationalized. None of the
| people in Tech have shown themselves responsible enough for it
| and it will only be used against people.
|
| That's a red line.
| realce wrote:
| I'm getting closer to this day by day too
| agentultra wrote:
| Definitely has a Fahrenheit 451 vibe going on. Wonder if we'll
| have a generation of people who'll be running off into the
| metaphorical woods with the old books and websites, away from
| society and modern culture.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| 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)
|
| More about Web3 [?] Web 3.0 for the uninformed / curious:
| https://www.nexxworks.com/blog/web3-and-web-3-0-are-not-the-...
| iraldir wrote:
| Aren't those just different vision of what the third iteration
| of the web platform will / should / can be?
|
| Should I call mine 3.0.0 to differenciate it and introduce some
| proper semver whilst I'm at it?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| The solution for Google is to filter generated content, period.
| That will lead to an arms race of sorts, similar to the SEO
| keyword arms race. The SEO arms race resulted in keyword
| relevant, but unoriginal minimally useful content.
|
| The problem for Google is that their advertisers love generated
| content.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Is there a reason AI can't filter the AI produced content?
| api wrote:
| That's an arms race that rapidly converges on a thin margin
| of detection and a high false positive rate.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| 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.
| drakenot wrote:
| > "Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost
| useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or
| downright misleading information," Sammann said.
|
| > "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.
|
| > "Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important.
| Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up
| with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well.
| They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing
| people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They
| created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the
| Reticulum. But it had to be good crap."
|
| > "What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous
| tone.
|
| > "Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of
| random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-
| written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable
| sentences and one that was subtly false. It's a lot harder to
| generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it
| out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and
| inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it
| didn't really take off until the military got interested."
|
| > "As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's
| reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are
| referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First
| Millennium A.R."
|
| > "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of
| enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the
| purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis
| leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan
| Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort
| of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners
| were able to bring matters in hand."
|
| -- Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
| blueyes wrote:
| Surprised that such a poorly written article as this gets so much
| attention on HN. Trite thoughts, misspelled words, poorly defined
| concepts and pessimism that can't back itself up.
| ozten wrote:
| Each webpage should express a piece of metadata that is content-
| quality.
|
| * primary - The content on this page is a primary source
|
| * secondary - The content on this page is high quality, but which
| is primarily research based and may thus be tainted by unknown
| sources
|
| * bot - The content on this page is mostly automatically
| generated by one or more ML models with some human curated
| improvements
|
| HTML elements can also have data-content-quality to override the
| page level metadata. So if you have a primarily sourced
| paragraph.
|
| Search engines can index this signal. Sites that claim primary,
| but which frequently are provably wrong or bot generated can be
| penalized.
|
| (edited for formatting)
| chias wrote:
| If I operate a webpage, and I incorporate this content quality
| metadata tag, why would I put anything other than "highest
| possible quality"?
| ozten wrote:
| If Google or Yandex provides Search engine Tools dashboard
| that shows their score for your pages and that your being
| severely punished in SEO. "This appears to be secondary
| content. Please update your meta data to secondary or bot"
| [deleted]
| jsemrau wrote:
| And who judges the quality? one man's trash is another man's
| treasure .
| ozten wrote:
| Search engines are already judging content quality by dwell
| time and many other factors. Do they have perfect
| judgement, no. As long as we have centralized search
| engines than we have specific judges of quality.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| Exactly, bro. Quality is subjective, so it's up to the
| owner of the website to determine the quality of their own
| content based on their own standards and goals.
| qup wrote:
| Disagree, the search engine needs to make the judgement
| on the quality.
|
| As a user doing the search, I can't trust the opinions of
| the website owners, but I have to trust someone. I want
| to trust the search provider, particularly because I can
| easily switch if I choose.
| jmull wrote:
| This is incoherent... not worth reading
| oblio wrote:
| AI generated? :-)
| sys32768 wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Well, this means that content curators and good content producers
| will gain in value.
|
| The hard part will be to stand out, and to create things that AI
| can't easily reproduce, such as linking content to a service.
|
| I think it's a good news for actual high quality original
| creator: they will rise to the sun.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Chat GPT + Blockchain is the birth of the real Web 3.0 and it's
| going to be wild and weird but ultimately it's going to be an
| improvement.
|
| AI is the use case blockchain didn't know it was looking for.
|
| The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards
| everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol,
| blockchain is great for that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > The best I can hope for is that some hacker collective manages
| to make an open source version of it, that can be more
| trustworthy than the current one.
|
| It's always interesting to me when someone makes an assert like
| this for a Big Data technology.
|
| If this were tractable, we'd have an open-source Google
| alternative right now that someone would have built for the sheer
| joy of being the folks that took on Google. But open source
| doesn't work that way because code is download-once, use-forever,
| but data is continuously changing and costs perpetual money to
| update and maintain. "Open source data" looks like Wikipedia, and
| the world won't sustain more than a few of those; Wikipedia has
| about 100,000 active editors.
|
| So instead of some hacker-alternative-to-Google techno-utopia
| idea, we've got plenty of open-source crawlers and a handful of
| _services_ paying the bills via rent-seeking their database and,
| often, advertising. No reason to think a ChatGPT-heavy future
| will be different.
| munificent wrote:
| _> because code is download-once, use-forever, but data is
| continuously changing and costs perpetual money to update and
| maintain._
|
| Not just the data, but also hosting the service and keeping it
| available.
|
| Open source works because the marginal cost of code is
| essentially zero. But the marginal cost of serving users is
| definitely _not_ zero.
| breckenedge wrote:
| Unlike Google, you can download Wikipedia and use it offline. I
| hope to see the same thing happening for a useful LLM. Of
| course that's not feasible right now, but hopefully those costs
| will come down and we do actually get to run a self-hosted
| version of this.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The tricky thing about data is that the world constantly
| changes. A downloaded Wikipedia has a lot of value, but it
| does grow stale. And it has the advantage of being a
| repository of relatively static facts in a way that, say, a
| search engine is not.
|
| Search engines (and I suspect a ChatGPT-style engine, if one
| wants to talk about it about current events, things currently
| available, or other topics of the day) have to be
| continuously refreshed to be relevant. So many things that
| those engines are used for frequently (including the keyword
| "ChatGPT" itself) had no definition months ago, let alone an
| inaccurate definition.
|
| Most data isn't static like code; it must be continuously re-
| invested in to stay relevant.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Search engines (and I suspect a ChatGPT-style engine, if
| one wants to talk about it about current events, things
| currently available, or other topics of the day) have to be
| continuously refreshed to be relevant.
|
| Maybe. It depends on what you're searching for. I'd say
| that 80% of the searches I engage in don't need a
| particularly fresh database to satisfy.
| bloqs wrote:
| This is the best time to use LLMs before the enshittening happens
| seydor wrote:
| No offense but in a world that includes video why will
| advertisers pay for text? This article is less thought-out than
| clickbait ads
| iraldir wrote:
| First because it's not an either-or situation. Marketing works
| by finding different channels and approaches. You could say "in
| a world with video, why would people pay for an ad on a bus
| stop" with the same logic.
|
| Secondly because advertisement is about trust. For a while, the
| ads on TV where all the rage because, if it's on TV then it's a
| proper brand. If in the short term future, like I postulate,
| the web becomes unreadable SEO filled trash, and people access
| it via Chat-GPT like technologies, then there will be an
| element of trust between the bot and the user. And that trust
| can be exploited, more or less subtly.
|
| So why would they not take advantage of it?
| tyingq wrote:
| May not be terrible that something pushes Google and others to
| re-think how to bubble up actually good content.
| 99_00 wrote:
| The difference is that instead of clicking on 3 or 4 pages to get
| your low quality content, you'll get it with a prompt.
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
|
| HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
|
| Eliza
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| So have there been lawsuits against Google or Bing by people
| led astray because they believe the search results are the
| final source of truth?
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| Okay my post was pretty specific...
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| hackernewds wrote:
| This is the opposite read. ChatGPT is mainly being used to
| relieve of low level thinking. Not to indulge in it.
| labrador wrote:
| And you know this how? Do you work for OpenAI?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Sample size of 1: It's how I use it.
| [deleted]
| konart wrote:
| >it's not going to be fun
|
| 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...
| hypefi wrote:
| Can we use blockchain technology to certify that a content is
| made by humans, is it possible, can someone enlighten me on the
| limitations ?
| username3 wrote:
| Web 4.0 will be deduplicating every possible opinion. We just
| choose from a path of opinions and we're back to web directories.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Neal Stephenson was right about the miasma.
| quattrofan wrote:
| [dead]
| zackmorris wrote:
| I agree with the headline and am glad that someone finally said
| it.
|
| Web 1.0 was great: designed by academics, it popularized
| idempotence, declarative programming, scalability and ushered in
| the Long Now so every year since has basically been 1995
| repeated.
|
| Web 2.0 never happened: it ended up being a trap that swallowed
| the best minds of a generation to web (ad) agencies with
| countless millions of hours lost fighting CSS rules and
| Javascript build tools to replicate functionality that was
| readily available in 1980s MS Word and desktop publishing apps.
| It should have been something like single-threaded blocking logic
| distributed on Paxos/Raft with an event database like
| Firebase/RethinkDB and layout rules inspired by iOS's auto layout
| constraint solver with progressive enhancement via HTMX, finally
| making #nocode a reality. Oh well.
|
| Web 3.0 is kind of like the final sequel of a trilogy: just when
| everyone gets onboard, the original premise gets lost to
| merchandizing and people start to wish it would just go away.
| Entering the knee of the curve of the Singularity, it will be
| difficult to spot the boundary between the objective reality of
| reason and the subjective reality of meaning. We'll be inundated
| by never-ending streams of infotainment wedged between vast
| swaths of increasingly pointless work.
|
| Looking forward: the luddites will come out after the 2024
| election and we'll see vast effort aimed at stomping out any
| whiff of rebel resistance. Huge propaganda against UBI, even more
| austerity measures to keep the rabble in line, the first
| trillionaire this decade. Meanwhile the real work of automating
| the drudgery to restore some semblance of disposable income and
| leisure time will fall on teenagers living in their parents'
| basement.
|
| Thankfully Gen X and Millenials are transitioning into positions
| of political power. There is still hope, however faint, that we
| can avoid falling to tech illiteracy. But currently most
| indicators point to calamity after 2040 and environmental
| collapse between 2050 and 2100. Somewhat ironically, AI working
| with humans may be the only thing that can save civilization and
| the planet. Or destroy them. Hard to say at this point really!
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Please tell me this is from chatGPT as a joke and you didn't
| write up a giant post about 'the singularity', 'ubi', future
| trillionaires, millennial politics and future environmental
| collapse on your own.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I had fun with it, nice bit of spec-fi
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I now cringe when I hear "Web 3.0"
|
| I wrote a book a decade ago with Web 3.0 in the title (semantic
| web, linked data, etc.). "Web 3.0" has been used in so many
| contexts and meanings, that we need something more description in
| a name.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| 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.
| juujian wrote:
| 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.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If the web degenerates to the point where verified
| identities are required, then it really and truly will have
| died.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Authoritarians are praying and dreaming for this to be
| realized.
| sureglymop wrote:
| And with that and stylometric analysis, online pseudonymity
| effectively dies.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Sorry, you can't comment because your certificate was
| revoked when you died. You didn't die?
|
| ----
|
| We will pay you 100 bucks to withhold filing your partners
| death certificate for one week and providing their
| certificates to us.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Absolutely, it's also going to get much more echo chambered and
| biased by corporate and political motivations.
|
| 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.
| kab0b wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean that is already how AI works now. Adversarial models
| are mainstream.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Both Google and Meta are massive targets.
|
| 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.
| altdataseller wrote:
| 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?
| dcow wrote:
| Sounds like the current web. What's the difference?
| 99_00 wrote:
| Better grammar and spelling.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > 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.
| tmaly wrote:
| I am hoping it will be an improvement over the long form blog
| content people write to rank for SEO.
|
| I don't want to read 10 pages of text for a simple cooking
| recipe.
| jsemrau wrote:
| 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.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| ChatGpt generated comment,?
| User23 wrote:
| Neil Stephenson predicted this in the novel Anathem. It ends up
| being an arms race with "bulshytt" filters versus generators.
| Oxidation wrote:
| 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.
| dpflan wrote:
| Infinitely-expanding snake eats infinitely-expanding tail.
| btown wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| imhoguy wrote:
| This! As data horder I see even more value in preserving pre-
| AI content, art, source code. That genuine stuff will be
| priceless.
| williamcotton wrote:
| We still have curated libraries and the knowledge contained
| in those books has a much better signal-to-noise ratio than
| the internet ever will!
| throwanem wrote:
| The Internet Archive _is_ a library.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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!
| throwanem wrote:
| The Wayback Machine is part of the library, too.
| Specifically, it's the periodicals room.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| pelasaco wrote:
| would be nice if we could have a way to navigate just in
| the old web...
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| " 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.
| sho_hn wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| How do you measure the future value of something you
| don't keep?
| amelius wrote:
| I suspect this will lead to a new wave of more advanced
| moderation techniques.
| imhoguy wrote:
| 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.
| blhack wrote:
| You could call it: "AI Kessler syndrome".
|
| The internet becomes _so_ full of hallucinating AI output that
| it becomes impossible to train the model.
| shilgapira wrote:
| This is a brilliant analogy
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| Curation is the answer. The more junk, the better off are
| the one curation for quality, relevancy and human interest.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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
| dwallin wrote:
| 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.
| mrtksn wrote:
| So the first one takes it all?
| Taek wrote:
| No more that as you get more AIs, all AIs get shittier
| together.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Or, the singularity.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| No AI will survive a solar flare! So we just need to
| hunker down in Zion and wait for that.
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| I'm going to suggest giving Accelerando a read and
| consider the late state of the singularity.
|
| 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."
| [deleted]
| Vvector wrote:
| One step closer to wireheads, with a trickle current going
| across a wire inserted into the pleasure center of the brain,
| in Ringworld.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| 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.
| neffy wrote:
| 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.
| ingenieros wrote:
| Curated content by non native Enlish speakers earning as
| little as $2.00 an hour. What can possibly go wrong?
| int_19h wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| It will never be able to detect sarcasm amd satire and this
| will contribute greatly to the degradation of content
| quality , I think.
|
| This will not work, its too soon.
| int_19h wrote:
| Why do you think so? It's certainly capable of producing
| outputs along these lines if you tell it that this is
| what you want:
|
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| c7b wrote:
| > 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?
|
| [0] edited, thanks!
| glomgril wrote:
| 'corpora' fyi
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean we all know how adversarial training works as it's
| already commonly used today. I would not expect that to be
| useful in the future.
| huijzer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hagbarth wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| That's part of the idea in The Expanding Dark Forest and
| Generative AI - https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34243709 - 29 days ago;
| 419 comments)
|
| > 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.
| altdataseller wrote:
| ... or just talk to people in real life? (Until we have AI
| generated humans I suppose)
| di456 wrote:
| 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?
| chefandy wrote:
| 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.
| schrodinger wrote:
| 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...
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| ionwake wrote:
| In b4 controversial users get their content banned by
| accidentally tripping the AI filter
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| The other problematic area with that detection is people
| who have disabilities and use an AI assistant to help them
| type.
| ionwake wrote:
| Excellent point
| dom96 wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Maybe information retrieval against unstructured text isn't the
| right model? Maybe it's time for google search to die.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| matt_s wrote:
| I think the internet is already there with bots/content farms
| posting and upvoting garbage on social media.
|
| Begun the Bot Wars have.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| One solution is pretty simple: pedigree.
|
| 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.
| valenterry wrote:
| That means anonymously posting on stackoverflow will be
| gone...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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?..."
| krona wrote:
| Simulacra and Simulation comes to mind. Eventually, the _real_
| internet will cease to exist.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| 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.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Although ChatGPT is going to worsen the problem of garbage
| information online, I don't think it affects anyone who is
| willing to learn slowly and deeply.
|
| We are already at the point that only certain books and videos
| are good references and their golden status is not going to wear
| down by time.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Stop guys, stop.
|
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| You mean stop enjoying the benefits of experience and wisdom?
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| No, stop being old. Age is no indication of wisdom.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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?
| altdataseller wrote:
| 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
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| If you did not buy Tesla at the absolute bottom in
| 2000-whatever, could you still have been a multi-millionaire?
|
| So why do you need to "be first"?
| altdataseller wrote:
| 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.
| penjelly wrote:
| 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?
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Ugh, "Web 3.0". The years of "Web 2.0" stupidity were bad enough.
| People want to revive this ignorance? Then again, they keep
| churning out the asinine labels for "generations" of people.
|
| In other news: Are we supposed to know what an "onsen" is?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Too late, ChatGPT isn't going to be the driving force behind
| inaccurate content on the web, we were there long ago. Google
| search is almost useless now for anything outside of "places to
| eat near me" and the blogosphere died long ago and was replaced
| by ad-rent-seeking recipe sites. All the value has moved on from
| web pages to small forum enclaves and video.
|
| There is a bright future though in direct real time
| communication. There's also a new search and indexing revolution
| waiting in the wings for whoever wants to lead the charge on
| distilling or better facilitating those conversations. LLMs will
| play a part in that if they can get the data of the quality
| question response interactions and use them to fine tune the
| models.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Google has gotten progressively worse year in year out. Its
| promoting farmed content of stackoverflow posts riddled with
| ads over the actual posts. It's making money that way sure but
| at the dismay if it's users. This I think opens up the space
| for more niche search engines that actually work for what
| you're looking for. I'd take a search based off of only
| indexing sites I actually care about over the dribble it's
| peddling any day. Bring on the competition
| mmkos wrote:
| 100% agree on the point that there's now space for niche
| search engines. I don't think a search engine for everything
| is a viable goal (there's too much crap to sift through), but
| I do think there's space for smaller search engines for
| particular domains.
|
| Even better, make them somewhat curated by domain experts so
| that users are served high quality content and not just low
| quality sites that magically rank high because they managed
| to tick all boxes in the ranking algorithm.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Bring on the competition_
|
| And this time, don't be afraid to charge for it.
|
| Because we know what "free" is worth now.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Lunchclub is just that. It is really nice to talk to real
| people in an intimate 1:1 rather than the cocktail party of the
| modern Internet.
| reidjs wrote:
| Haven't used it, but just looked that up, so take my comment
| with skepticism. I didn't end up signing up for that service
| because it seems like it will attract a certain type of
| person, so it may be yet another echo chamber on the
| Internet.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Can't judge a book by its cover
| zquzra wrote:
| All the criticisms I see directed at ChatGPT are met with "the
| web already sucks". So what revolution awaits us? I just think
| we're getting closer and closer to a boring dystopia.
| yyyk wrote:
| Web3 moniker is tainted. Let's just agree that version never
| existed and skip ahead to Web 5.0?
| D13Fd wrote:
| This article lost me with it's definitions of "Web 1.0" and "Web
| 2.0," which are totally divorced from reality.
| iraldir wrote:
| 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?
| D13Fd wrote:
| 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.
| markstos wrote:
| 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.
| havefunbesafe wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Can't or just doesn't need to? Their business isn't search,
| it's ads.
| anamexis wrote:
| If search quality degrades enough that people stop using
| it, it will impact ads.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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...)
| anamexis wrote:
| Or people could go to a competing search engine...
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Hopefully google will create a classifier and downrank
| anyone who just shoots out AI generated bullshit.
|
| Only if it affects their bottom line. And I doubt that's
| going to happen.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| It's kinda funny (in a very serious way), but if news papers
| can stick around long enough they are the solution to this.
|
| Curated content, by trusted publishers guaranteed to not to use
| ML generation.
|
| Created libraries for facts, curated newspapers for daily
| events.
| ncr100 wrote:
| 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.
| markstos wrote:
| Yes. The user claims he wrote one of the posts but admits
| that AI wrote some others. The tone and style look identical.
| mahathu wrote:
| 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..
| cosmojg wrote:
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| What if an AI-generated picture is a real person?
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding
| the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like
| Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation
| going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I
| think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally
| signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through
| what is real and what is fake.
| alar44 wrote:
| Welcome to online dating since its inception.
| reidjs wrote:
| Alternatively you can just go to real events now and spend less
| time on the Internet.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| But then I have to deal with people...why would I want that?
| matwood wrote:
| Then chatbots are a good thing :)
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| I'm so excited about ChatGPT making it much easier to spot people
| who went through an education system oriented toward learning
| versus the sit-in-class types. Bring on the fall of the bullshit
| tower coated in ivory! Hello, schools that help people learn
| about the Omniverse by playing with the Omniverse!
|
| This is the return of discipline.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| I'm pretty happy with Chat GPT. There was yet-another thread
| about the degradation of Google Search results a few weeks ago
| and folks here talked about the uselessness of it's results. I
| remember when my mom taught me to "search like a pro" back in the
| 90s. She was a librarian and she taught me valuable things before
| those search parameters were known as "Google hacks". I remember
| how powerful it felt to be able to find anything related to what
| I wanted to know. Google still provides useful results - buried
| in all the crap. There's so much valuable info to find, and so
| much more crap in 2023. The signal to noise ratio is worse.
|
| So I tried Chat GPT recently and I asked it about something I've
| never quite understood. "How is an antenna designed to prevent
| the feedline emanating radio waves?" and it gave me a very
| focused explanation of how impedance is matched between the
| feedline and antenna to reduce standing waves and power being
| reflected back to the transmitter. I was so happy with this,
| because although i could find countless resources on antenna
| design they were much too dry for my understanding. I was always
| lost navigating the text because I didn't have the formal
| education to piece together 'what they're saying over here
| relates to what is being said over here'. You have to have a
| certain level of comprehension with the subject material to
| locate information.
|
| I think Chat GPT and things like it represent the search engines
| of tomorrow. There's a DEFINITE risk of creating recycled,
| incorrect content and prompting it circularly into the same
| dumpster of misinformation. However, I spent 15-20 minutes re-
| articulating my question about antennas and "what part of the
| antenna prevents this?" and I came away very happy with my new
| understanding.
|
| I'm looking forward to AI-assisted learning, and it feels as
| magical as Google Search did in the 90s.
|
| In another instance, I asked it how to run a Powershell script on
| a remote computer with psexec and it produced the correct
| commands but did not warn me the script had to first be copied
| over to the remote machine. All good explanations /
| demonstrations should come with clarifying questions. I'm very
| happy I can ask technical things like this, embarrassing things,
| very abstract/broad things, and have an AI that will guide me
| into new understanding.
|
| Take it all with a grain of salt. Looks like I'll be doing the
| $20/month for ChatGPT Pro though. It's more valuable and
| entertaining to my day-to-day curiosities than something like
| Netflix.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| I think we'll see research into how to appraise AI models for
| what has been weighted. Whether a model creates objectively
| fair reasonings or creates something harmful. Also data
| democratization of these models (having them available outside
| of large institutions) will be important. At the same time
| harmful: A comment a few down is mentioning how these things
| will be used to create AI influencers, or how propaganda
| campaigns could be entirely automated and deployed against
| other countries. Very real threats. :(
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| Zetobal wrote:
| I just want to make a twitch stream and have hundreds of gpt bots
| as audience. With enough energy you can pretty much make yourself
| an influencer now.
| zzbzq wrote:
| That's been available for 10 years since all the popular
| streams were just full of bots spamming twitch emoji or
| parroting one another's one-liner
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| This is a case of a solution inventing the problem it was meant
| to solve.
|
| AI generated content is going to make search engine results
| effectively useless. The only reasonable conclusion to that end
| is that AI will be needed to answer the questions we used to rely
| on Google Search for.
|
| Has there ever been a situation like this before?
| EGreg wrote:
| This is ridiculous. Why does everyone try to claim "Web 3.0" for
| over a decade?
|
| Tim Berners-Lee said Web 3.0 was the semantic web, and allowing
| others to query data with SPARQL etc.
|
| The Ethereum community said Web 3.0 involved signing transactions
| with private keys and storing data on blockchains rather than
| centralized servers.
|
| Now someone is claiming that ChatGPT is the birth of the "real"
| Web 3.0 -- okay, first of all, chat has NOTHING to do with web.
| Web means hyperlinks and at the very least letting a user move
| between domains that serve content, and hopefully increasing
| interoperability using standard approaches like REST and JSON-LD,
| as opposed to a centralized provider that is owned by a tiny
| number of people, and relies on with Big Tech cloud providers
| (Microsoft). This isn't even a web, let alone open.
|
| And secondly, why not already move on to Web 4.0? It's been a
| decade or more. Everyone is "denying" the last thing was Web 3.0
| It's ridiculous. We _have_ a semantic web now (Open Graph, for
| instance, or schema.org, and more). We _have_ significant
| adoption also of "Web3"... crypto has co-opted the word
| cryptography, and Web 3... we just have to accept it
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cr...
| ... many people on HN hate crypto so much that they think the
| Web3 term hasn't already been solidified, whereas somehow they
| _do_ think that the word _crypto_ has solidified to mean
| cryptocurrency rather than cryptography.
|
| Jack Dorsey is using the new OPEN technologies from Microsoft /
| Sidetree protocol / DID standards to build "Web5", and he
| thankfully gave up his ideas of trademarking it:
| https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/30/jack-dorseys-tb...
|
| It's time to move on. Build applications that combine all these
| different tools. The Web has come a long way now. It can do
| PaymentRequest. It can do WebRTC. It can do Web Push. Just use
| the tools.
|
| But definitely ChatGPT currently is everything that is OPPOSITE
| of what "The Web" was supposed to be. _Maybe_ if an open source
| version comes out, and obliterates all current systems of content
| and reputation on the current web, then we can talk about "a new
| (dystopian) web", a kind of dark forest with chatbot swarms
| descending to shout down / annoy / destroy reputations of
| individuals and forums who espouse an inconvenient point of view.
| There is obviously going to be an arms race of bullshit drowning
| out actual thoughtful posting. But right now it's not even web.
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