[gordian-mind]

Companies are not the only ones who have something to gain from that exchange. Democratization of AI will also be used to push harsher legislation on the internet, in the guise of fighting "misinformation" (now possibly AI-generated!).

[jjoonathan]

Genuine question: how should we fight LLM astroturfing?

[JieJie]

In my humble opinion, LLM astroturfing is only a productivity increase over what is currently already a very automated process (social media bot farms, etc).

While this seems like it would exacerbate an already existing problem, it may not have so profound an effect. You see, while LLMs may be able to increase the amount and quality of fake information, fake information isn't currently in short supply, so increasing the amount and quality of it may not have that strong an effect.

In short, we already have 24-hour fake news cable channels and infinite doom scrolls. The bottleneck is there, not in the quality or quantity of fake news.

Now, if they invented a LLM that doomscrolled Twitter and voted based on generated summaries, we would have much greater grounds for concern.

[edit: I hope this doesn't sound too snarky. What I mean to say is that we should fight it by creating less gullible consumers of information, a project in which AI may be uniquely qualified to assist us.]

[jjoonathan]

Human attention doesn't scale. LLMs do. "Git gud" is a losing strategy in aggregate.

[JieJie]

We're talking past each other.

The whole point of what I was saying is that yes, human attention doesn't scale and that is what is going to save us from a deluge of LLM spam.

A billion pieces of fake news or ten, it makes no difference. Humans can only look at one at a time.

[MichaelZuo]

Eventually they'll spend 99% of their time on LLM generated stuff, who cares if it's only 1 at a time?

[DethNinja]

How do you propose we fight government/corporate astroturfing?

At least LLMs will democratize the astroturfing.

[hospitalJail]

From what I've seen on reddit/here, companies buy old accounts. This costs too much for the average person.

[SuoDuanDao]

LLMs can usually tell when they wrote something, so we can at least recognize it. But really, LLMs could be used by genuine grassroots campaigns as well - possibly make grassroots campaigns easier, since the skills to write persuasively aren't always available to the groups that most need them.

I suspect the observation that 95% of anything is crap will hold true, and simply have to filter out more crap now that it's easier to produce it. There'll also be more gems, so it's hardly all bad.

[visarga]

Use LLM anti-astroturfing to fix it. Fight fire with fire.

[permo-w]

stop using the internet

[jonhohle]

With the exception (currently) of in person conversation, AI can be used basically every other form of communication (phone calls, written communication, TV, radio, etc). It’s not just an Internet issue.

[permo-w]

I was mostly joking, but even so most of this is a stretch as of now

I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure we’re not yet at the point of convincing, real-time voice gen, nor any kind of decent quality TV (sadly), although printed text and (non-live) radio are certainly viable right now

[trafficante]

Real-time convincing-sounding TTS is extremely close - I’d be surprised if we don’t get an elevenlabs equivalent to gpt-turbo before the end of summer.

I spent an hour or three over the weekend messing around in Skyrim VR with a mod that does player speech recognition, pipes it out to GPT with identifier tags to give scene context, sends GPT output to elevenlabs (optional), and then the mod integrates it into Skyrim mouth rigging etc.

Yes, there’s an extremely obvious lag before you get a response, but it’s on the order of seconds even though this is an early Skyrim mod with a ton of moving parts interacting.

And the result is…astounding. As someone said in a comment on the below linked video: this is the biggest leap for video games since Half Life 1.

https://youtu.be/d6sVWEu9HWU

[permo-w]

that’s fascinating. God only knows where we’ll be with this stuff in ten years time