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by keenmaster 2099 days ago
We're playing a sequential game. No one is going to happily lap up GPT-3/4/5 generated articles in the long run as their primary reading unless they only read articles that take the form of "X happened, then Y, and A said B" (which actually is a lot of people, but they're not really readers anyway).

GPT will serve as intellectual humiliation. Some people will be embarrassed to find out that most of their reading materials can be generated by robots. On the margins, that can lead to people deliberately seeking out more intellectual content. That includes long format materials such as books. On the labor side, writing talent will be allocated away from shallow topics. That's a plus to me.

1 comments

If GPT could produce something intellectually interesting, wouldn't that pass the Turing test?

Seems like all GPT can produce is an infinite supply of shaggy dog stories. I don't know if I'd call that intellectual humiliation, just a lack of a point or punchline.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story)

To rephrase: it will humiliate people who consume non-intellectually interesting material but don't really think about what they're doing. E.g. Someone whose daily reading consists of the top articles on Yahoo News. I don't think they'll continue to do so if Yahoo and its partners switch to GPT-X. So either Yahoo will source better material, or its readership will decline.
In GPT's current iteration, I agree.

If GPT produces better output and is carefully mixed in with existing stories, I don't think anyone will notice.

What percentage of stock price stories are generated by a bot? Off the cuff and totally guessing, I'd say 50%. Do you know the exact number? Could you tell? Would the headline service tell you? (probably not)

Ethos matters, especially when there's money involved and you're taking advice from someone. You'd be disturbed if that someone is a bot. Maybe you shouldn't be, because sometimes financial advisors are worse than bots, but people don't know that.

As for the stories that merely describe stock movements without any real analysis, I myself would read those. I'm completely fine with that as long as there's reliable QA on the output.