[grumbel]

I am more optimistic here. While LLMs allow you to produce tons of garbage, they also provide the tools to filter through that garbage, something we didn't have before. LLMs allow us to view content in a way that we decided, not the content creator. That's extremely powerful and lets us sidesteps a lot of the old methods used to manipulate us.

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.

[frozenwind]

> 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.

[tough]

I see LLM's as the new UX layer, mobile was it for a while after mouses/keyboards.

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.

[zamnos]

Reflexively then, good comments are good, no matter what produced them. Or is a quality comment impugned by knowing it came from an LLM? Does it cheapen what it means to be human if other humans think highly of an LLMs attempts at English? Is it at all impressive that ChatGPT is able to spell words correctly, given that it's a computer? What does that mean for the spelling bee industry?

[levesque]

Predicting whether a text was written by a LLM or not is not trivial. What was the latest number by OpenAI? 30%? As LLMs get better, it seems like we won't be able to distinguish real text from fake text. Your LLM will be able to summarize it, but it will still be 99% spam.

[grumbel]

You don't need to predict if it what written by LLM, if it's a human or machine makes no difference to the validity of a text. You just need to be able to extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources.

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.

[Sindisil]

"just" need to "extract the actual information out of it and cross check it against other sources".

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?

[jerf]

You're trusting the LLM a lot more than you should. It's entirely possible to skew those too. (Even ignoring the philosophical question of what an "unskewed" LLM would even be.) I'm actually impressed by OpenAI's efforts to do so. I also deplore them and think it's an atrocity, but I'm still impressed. The "As an AI language model" bit is just the obvious way they're skewed. I wouldn't trust an LLM any farther than I can throw it to accurately summarize anything important.

[pixl97]

>cross check it against other sources.

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

[mensetmanusman]

If LLMs start writing a majority of HN comments, we won’t know what is true or not. HN will be noise and worthless then.

[levesque]

For HN and forums in general, I think this will mean disabling APIs and having strict captchas for posting.

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.).

[satisfice]

Banal is banal, whether written by a human or not.

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.

[pmoriarty]

> 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

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.

[ChatGTP]

It’s already happening at scale, people are already deciding there’s no point to continue education unless required.

[sebzim4500]

Aren't people going further in education now than ever before?

[MichaelZuo]

Going further in schooling maybe, but getting degrees nowadays is usually not primarily for personal enlightenment.

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

[CuriouslyC]

Bachelors degrees have mostly been a signal for a long time. The problem is that we have credential inflation, so now you need a masters or phd to send that same signal to employers. As a result, you have fewer people going to college, but a greater percentage of people who go to college are getting advanced degrees.

[AnimalMuppet]

LLMs check the answers? How do they check the answers? By what appears most frequently in the training corpus - that's the "answer".

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.

[coffeebeqn]

Nothing new under the sun. The king, the church, the state, the media, etc. there has always been gatekeepers who decide what the populace sees.

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

[mensetmanusman]

LLMs don’t know what garbage is or is not, depends on what they are trained on.