[viccis]

>We used to struggle with financial decisions—where to invest, whether real estate was a good idea, when is the right time to buy a house, pension plans, S&P 500, Bitcoin, all of it. We never really figured it out properly. Now, we just ask AI, and it helps us structure our thinking.

This one is a step too far for me. Glad it's working out for you (for now) though.

[sumedh]

> when is the right time to buy a house, pension plans, S&P 500, Bitcoin, all of it.

This is why I think ChatGpt can become the world's biggest ad company. Any recommendation it gives can be go through a bidding network where advertiser can bid for their keywords and ChatGpt can give the highest bidders recommendation.

Of Course it needs to give good or good enough recommendation, if the quality goes down then users will move somewhere else.

[everdrive]

It doesn't even have to be ads. The people who run it have their own ideological sense of right and wrong. And no matter what you think of their moral stance so far, there's nothing to prevent them from changing their values in the future. If you rely on them to think, you're also letting them cordon off certain kinds of thoughts.

[glenstein]

And this is where it gets into difficult questions around objectivity and misinformation. Because objective knowledge is more under threat now than it has ever been. And it's in part because we don't have an agreed upon consensus canon of knowledge. Or rather, there's at least skepticism of such things.

But I think there's good reasons for believing that people as individuals and through collective efforts at institutional levels are capable of doing the work of making these distinctions. And for understanding the doubts not as hard one intellectual achievements that have improved upon things, but as cynical and self-interested attempts to dispute consensus knowledge in painted as biased as is now happening with attacks on Wikipedia.

So I'm actually not concerned about our inability to do Build out and deploy reliable information. I think what I am concerned about is the financial incentives that could complicate that as well as the misinformation environment which seeks to challenge and dispute the possibility of consensus knowledge, and people impressionable to those misinformation campaigns.

[lolinder]

You're conflating a few concepts:

* Objective knowledge

* Consensus knowledge

Consensus knowledge is not the same thing as objective knowledge, nor is it in and of itself a Good Thing.

Consensus knowledge is simply the current consensus of a specific group of people, who themselves bring a ton of subjectivity to their analysis. The smaller that group and the more self-selecting it is, the lower the value of their consensus, because of necessity they represent only a tiny fraction of the sum total of human experience. And the larger the group is and the more dynamic the selection process, the more difficult it becomes to summarize their perspective into any sort of consensus knowledge.

Objective knowledge is not consensus knowledge, objective knowledge is the platonic ideal to which consensus knowledge aspires.

Conflating consensus knowledge with objective knowledge is how we ended up in a place where so many people across the board question the idea that objective truth even exists! Instead of where the scientific method started—with a philosophy built around the idea that there is objective truth and we are capable of better and better modeling it through rigorous tests—we're in a place where some people have conflated the map for the territory, leading others to question whether the territory exists at all.

[glenstein]

I'm not sure I understand where you're seeing a conflation? I promise you that I was already familiar with the notions of objective and consensus as you described them.

I acknowledge that these are distinct concepts, but there's nothing in what I said above where I'm equating them. At least on charitable interpretation.

I'm also not sure what I agree with much or any of your supplementary analysis. Just to pick one example, I don't think our confidence in the measurement of the Higgs Boson is in any way contaminated by the fact that the consensus on it exists within a self-selected academic community, or that it fails to sufficiently sample the global population.

[jcims]

I built a custom gpt to inject 'covert' advertising into its responses with varying levels of transparency. At more covert levels it wouldn't disclose any brands unless you asked it for specific examples of products that had the benefits it would talk about. At the most covert it wouldn't even do that, but would litter its responses with enough keywords that a google search would lead you to the product it was intending to pitch.

The wild part is that it would always lie about why it was doing it, not disclosing anything about the framework or intent of injecting that content into its responses. Yes at some level it's obvious it would do that, but it's also interesting to see it first hand.

[outofpaper]

I think I remember that they ot Bing had started testing this on sum users a few months back.

[throwing_away]

Sorry to pick on your comment, but this type of thinking drives me crazy.

How is it so baked into the culture that "enshittify with ads and do the bare minimum" is the plan at this point?

What are you going to do when companies start winning based on offering good value for products with integrity?

Would you blindly copy that? How long would it take?

Is the drive to enshittify nature or nurture?

Argh.

[MyOutfitIsVague]

> What are you going to do when companies start winning based on offering good value for products with integrity?

I'll wake up.

[arccy]

why just take money from the user when you can also take from advertisers? you're asking the ai questions because you don't know any better yourself, as long as the answer it gives is reasonably plausible, you'll accept it.

[throwing_away]

The amount of time Microsoft and Google wonder about how they lost me as a customer is surely 0.

[potatoman22]

I share your frustration. It ought to be different, and some companies are, but embedding ads in chatbots seems inevitable the world that is.

[nice_byte]

it's based on crazy amounts of evidence

[makeitdouble]

> My wife used to draft simple business contracts by mixing and matching content she found in the public domain. Now, she uses AI—better quality, less time spent.

That part sounded way worse to me. In the end she may be fully understandind the contracts and ramifications and it doesn't matter where the bits and parts came from...but that really doesn't sound like it, and we're talking legal documents.

[scarface_74]

He said it “structures their thinking”. Think in terms of a Rogerian psychotherapist that just keeps asking you questions and makes you think about things you wouldn’t have thought about. He didn’t say he would use the advice.

I use ChatGPT all of the time to clarify my thoughts like this and NotebookLM actually comes up with some good questions I didn’t think about when doing discovery with a client (cloud consulting). I put all of the collected artifacts - transcripts, statements of work and anything else I collect during discovery.

Yes both ChatGPT (if we turn off sharing content for training) and NotebookLM is specifically allowed by my company and we use GSuite as our office standard

[makeitdouble]

The scarry part is before using ChatGPT they couldn't figure it out, so they're either getting more information or are ending with the same results but just feel better about it, whithout still having figured it out.

It sounds innocent enough, but your parallel to psychotherapy is I think very spot on. You need trust in your therapist and they also do their best to be non directive and let you explore your own state. When you tell your therapist you have self-harm thought, it makes a world of difference when they ask what happened vs what tools do you think you need.

To me, my train of thought is the last part I want involvement from a third party I have no trust in.

[rpcope1]

Yeah, that's absurdly scary. That's a huge social engineering/social control risk of there's a non trivial number of people using it like that...I mean imagine influencing the LLM to subtly pump and dump assets.

[elliotto]

Isn't this what Google does already? And it throws ads at you (ranked on whichever company pays them the most)

I suspect a decent open source llm would have a lot more transparency than the current methods of coagulating collective information

[jsemrau]

Two thoughts on this.

(1) The agent is the ad (Facebook/Reddit) (2) Game Theory and Agent Reasoning (Subtle malevolent intentions in adversarial gameplay)

[rvnx]

A bit like what X/Twitter is doing.

[viccis]

Yeah I mean I just asked it how to make a million bucks off of memecoins and it gave me an extensive list of memecoin investing tips to make sure I didn't end up as a bag holder.

The only thing I'd trust it for would be explanations about well documented concepts and strategies, but even that is better to get from a well respected Youtube channel or financial advice outlet.

[rat87]

Just put it in an index fund.

[makeitdouble]

The interesting part of this advice: index funds will probably include Starlink, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft etc.

While "index fund" sounds plain and boring, it's an inplicit vote for the status quo and binding one's fortune to the current market leaders, effectively supporting them.

[rat87]

My understanding is that index funds adapt they rebalance shares mlby market value and add or drop companies. Sure they might miss out on some rapid movement from nothing but they'll add that company in next quarter.

They're a vote that you think the economy as a whole (us, eu, worldwide) will go up not that particular companies will go up.

Of course if some political figures succeeded in destroying things there may be a large recession in which case index funds may do badly for a couple of years but if you think there will eventually be a recovery and end up higher then its still worth it.

[makeitdouble]

> They're a vote that you think the economy as a whole (us, eu, worldwide) will go up not that particular companies will go up.

That's the sales pitch.

The other side of the coin is any company that is influencial enough to bring part of the market down if it fails will also hold index funds as hostages. The more index funds are chosen the more "too big to fail" companies impact people's savings as a whole.

Whatever you think of the next behemoth being caught red handed doing something egregiously criminal, it's survival will be partly guaranteed by index funds.

[rat87]

"Just put it in an index fund"advice has been around far longer then llms, as well as "time in the market beats timing the market"