[terminalshort]

I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons:

1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future.

2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome.

3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.)

Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is formatted like a scientific paper describing an experimental result I immediately feel I am being manipulated by appeal to authority. And the conflict of interest of the authors is about as irrelevant as pointing out that a paper on why Oxycodone is not addictive is paid for by Perdue Pharma. Perhaps Jessica's papers on IP are respected because they do not suffer from these obvious flaws? I owe the author no deference for the quality of her previous writing nor for her status as a professor.

[UncleMeat]

What do you mean "formatted like a scientific paper?"

Law review articles look like this. Scientific journals don't own the concept of an abstract, nor are law review articles pretending to be scientific research.

[rpdillon]

What does "Research paper" mean to you?

[rpdillon]

Yeah, I haven't gotten through the 40 pages myself, but skimming through the material, it does seem that the arguments rely on an assumption that AI will be employed in a particular manner. For example, when discussing the rule of law, they assert that AI will be making the moral judgments and will be a black box that humans will just turn to to decide what to do in criminal proceedings. But that seems like it would be the dumbest possible way to use the technology.

Perhaps that's the point of the paper: to warn us not to use the technology in the dumbest possible way.

[mrkeen]

Nah we know the punch-lines to this one.

Worries about reduced quality of work are overblown, because there's always a human operator of the AI, reviewing the text between copying and pasting (no different from StackOverflow!). Enter vibe-coding.

Worries about AI becoming malicious or Skynet are overblown. Again, it's just a text interface, so the worst it can do is to write text that says "launch the nukes". Enter agents and MCP.

It still staggers me that I occasionally read about a judge calling out a lawyer for citing non-existent cases (this far into chatgpt's life). It was bound to happen to the first moron, but every other lawyer should have heard about it then. But it still happens.

Dumbest possible way is what we do.

[chrisjj]

> Worries about reduced quality of work are overblown, because there's always a human operator of the AI, reviewing the text between copying and pasting

Unfortunately no there is not.

> I occasionally read about a judge calling out a lawyer for citing non-existent cases (this far into chatgpt's life). It was bound to happen to the first moron, but every other lawyer should have heard about it then. But it still happens.

There you go.

[t0bia_s]

3. Same, including press that is no longer unbiased and serve as propaganda of political opinions.

One might say that deinstitutionalization is actually good for plurality of opinions (some call it a democracy). If AI cause it, I'm fine with that.

[greggoB]

And if AI leads to a situation in which the very ability to separate factual reporting from propaganda is almost entirely destroyed for anyone besides those in control of it, will you still be fine with it then?

Pointing to a system with problems and then saying you have no issue with something that has the potential to be orders of magnitude more problematic seems an odd approach to me.

[terminalshort]

Those in control of it aren't able to distinguish factual reporting today. Remember a few months ago when all the so called "reputable" news was screaming about an alleged terror attack against the UN that was caught, and it turned out to be nothing but a basic SMS fraud operation? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4w0d8zz22o

[greggoB]

> Those in control of it aren't able to distinguish factual reporting today.

Can't tell if you're referring to media outlets or AI companies here.

I do remember this incident - it was an embarrassment for the outlets that jumped on that story. Especially because the general public has come to know there is a overriding tendency towards sensationalism.

But surely this is very different from actual outright propaganda operations?

[terminalshort]

I'm talking about the media companies. AI companies aren't any better at it, but at least they don't go around sanctimoniously claiming to be the source of truth in the same way as journalists do.

And it isn't different than outright propaganda operations because it is an outright propaganda operation. If you read the link in my comment, you will see that the report is just repeating claims from the government nearly verbatim.

[greggoB]

I'm not going to take up the mantle of trying to dissuade you from your beliefs, but needless to say if you think that equating CNNs sensationalism-for-views model with the likes of Musk actively trying to dismantle Wikipedia [0] because he wants to rewrite reality (nevermind what Grok is currently doing [1]), then you need to have a hard look in the mirror.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-launches-grokipedia-wi... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo

P.S. feel free to "do your own research" if the above are included in your supposed propaganda operation conspiracy.

[t0bia_s]

Would you follow AI generated news? Not me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

If AI leads to decentralisation of press, it sounds better to me. We certainly do not need one or few big entities that follows political tendencies.

[greggoB]

Not if I can identify it, which I fear is going to become a harder task in the future.

> If AI leads to decentralisation of press, it sounds better to me.

Seems optimistic to me, given the trend with pretty much everything AI since ChatGPT was announced is concentrating as much power as possible in the hands of a few big tech companies.

As an added example: decentralization was a big promise of crypto; at present, hard for me to see how that's lived up to the promise. I don't see how the current trend with the hands of control over AI will work out any better in this regard.

[t0bia_s]

Local AI exist as well. It's just hard to measure it.

Whats wrong with crypto decentralisation?

[greggoB]

> Local AI exist as well. It's just hard to measure it.

Yeah but you're not going to get your news from local AI, are you? you have to connect it to the internet and look up news for you, but if a lot of what's found online is AI generated and there isn't a clear way to distinguish it, then how are you better off?

> Whats wrong with crypto decentralisation?

It hasn't really happened? To my knowledge, a large proportion of crypto volumes are going through a handful of centralised exchanges. Traditional finance sector is also increasing its presence/hold.