[karaterobot]

I don't think the results of the last two decades of mass information dissemination have been all that great. People didn't trust anything on the internet before GPT, and the internet was already a cacophony of screeching voices too. Smart people were already decoupling from social media, and moving meaningful interaction to enclaves well before ChatGPT became a factor. ChatGPT did not ruin the internet, it was unleashed on a broken internet to begin with.

If, as this article predicts, the result of GPT is that we don't trust information from the internet, and everybody moves away from it, that's great. Traditional journalism was better, as it turns out. Talking mainly to your friends rather than millions of people was better, as it turns out. I'm ready to go back to that, should it come to it.

But it won't. This essay is making a catastrophic prediction that won't come to pass. Whatever the future is, it's going to be something nobody is predicting yet. It'll be better than the doomsayers predict, and worse than what the cheerleaders say. It will be nothing like a simple magnification of the present concern over epistemology.

[dns_snek]

You're confusing social media with the internet at large. "Traditional journalism" isn't a replacement for a niche blog writing about highly specific, highly detailed technical topics. What the blog post is describing isn't some bold prediction, it's already happening.

Today it's far more difficult (and personally quite frustrating) to find information written by actual people with actual experience on any given topic than it was 5 years ago, because for every one of those articles there are now 20 more written by LLMs, often outranking them. This frustration is only going to grow as the LLM proliferation continues.

[Henchman21]

Do you think this is also true of bookstores and libraries today?