Let me just throw this trash overboard. What's the harm? It's not going to make the pacific garbage patch any bigger!

The risk is more in the LLMs themselves, as whoever gets to control them gets to decide how people are going to experience the world. For the time being I might still double check all the answers I get from ChatGPT, but overtime the LLMs will get better and I'll get more lazy, thus making the LLMs the primary lens through which one views the world.

You've underlined the major risk these LLMs are for humanity. For a brief time in the history of human race, after information was democratized, most of us (at least educated people) had to use our own critical faculties to understand the world we live in. Now, that capacity will be outsourced to custom LLMs, most of them derived from other pre-trained with some ideological biases built-in. The informational Dark Ages of the technological era.

If they provide the tools to filter through the garbage, it'll probably be standardized in some way as an interface to the web. So just as HTML and its satellite technologies limit and standardize the representational aspect of information on the web, I think this AI-interface will severely limit the knowledge/wisdom aspect you can derive from information on the web. It's a hard thing to put my finger on, I hope you can understand what I'm saying.

Since LLM's work mostly with text, I see how a downgrade in the interaction medium can become a downgrade in the information outputs.

The thing is, lets hope the current web doesn't totally disappears/obliterates.

HN will still be HN LLM's or not, shitty comments are shitty however they get produced.

The summary that an LLM can provide is not just of one text, but of all the texts about the topic it has access to. Thus you never need to access the actual texts itself, just whatever the LLM condenses out of them.

How do you determine the trustworthiness of those other sources when an ever increasing portion are also LLM generated?

All the "you just need to" responses are predicted on being able to police the LLM output based upon your own expertise (e.g., much talk about code generation being like working with junior devs, and so being able to replace all your juniors and just have super productive seniors).

Question: how does one become an expert? Yep, it's right there: experts are made through experience.

So if LLMs replace all the low experience roles, how exactly do new experts emerge?

The problem comes in when 99.999999% of other sources are also bullshit.

Beyond HN, I think this will translate in video content and reviews becoming more trustworthy, even if it's just a person reading a LLM-produced script. You will at least know they cared enough to put a human in the loop. That and reputation. More and more credit will be assigned based on reputation, number of followers, etc. And that'll be until each of these systems get cracked somehow (fake followers, plausible generated videos, etc.).

But GPT text is inherently deceptive, even when factually flawless— because we humans never evaluate a message merely on its factuality. We read between the lines. The same way insects are confused and fly in spirals around light, we will be flying spirals around GPT text based on our assumptions about its nature or the nature of the human whom we presume to have written it.

There's going to be a progressive de-skilling and dumbing down of humans, as AI's and robots do and think more and more for them.

Nor does it usually make people any more intelligent, in fact there may be an inverse correlation...

So, how well curated are the texts that make up the training corpus? Is it just what's generally available on the internet? How much do you think that text accurately reflects reality? "Truth is determined by the most frequent posters" seems like really bad epistemology.

Just look at the second largest economy in the world where truth hasn’t existed for decades

I'm not sure what rock you've been living under, but this has been the internet for probably longer than a decade by now, the only difference is the volume. Even back before LLMs, or before Facebook, you couldn't take any "fact" at face value when found via the internet. And before that, the same people who fall for it now on the internet, fell for it when watching TV, or reading newspapers. People who are not interested in truth because it doesn't fit their world-view, will never be interested in the truth, no matter what medium it comes via.

Interestingly, this claim is self-referential.

Incorrect.

The claim is: "People who are not interested in truth because it doesn't fit their world-view, will never be interested in the truth, no matter what medium it comes via."

It is not a suggestion, it does not say "it is unlikely, it is an unequivocal assertion of fact.

> This can create a self-reinforcing cycle where the individual becomes increasingly resistant to new ideas and perspectives.

That's my point (about the thinking underlying the comment in question).

It's interesting how humans self-privilege themselves when applying epistemology - other people's claims must be actually true, but for one's own claims "close enough" is typically an adequate bar. And it is typically only the other person who needs to improve their thinking.

i feel i can start to read when someone uses gippie, because i use it alot. I imagine a future where i use gippie to write an email and the receiver uses gippie to summarize and respond. There's also a future evolution of 'typo', where gippie hellucinates some non sensical answer. "Oh my bad, my bots trippin' LOL'

But there is a countermeasure: everything has a source.