AI Megathread
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@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:
@Pavel said in AI Megathread:
In your circles. It’s not part of the general zeitgeist, so it’s easily missed or ignored.
I actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. The world of finance and business is not exactly my small little circle here.
Neither is the world of medicine, but the specific uses of technology in that field aren’t commonly known nor understood by the layman. You use tools we, the general public, don’t know about.
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Major newspapers post a summer section of AI slop that includes, among other things, a summer reading list for kids with imaginary books (complete with imagined summaries).
Apart from the obvious debacle, I think that article has a good take on the second-order effects of GenAI that many don’t consider.
- Most “free” internet sites are free because they have ads.
- As more people get their content from AI-generated slop like ChatGPT, the only people coming to sites are AI bots.
- Nobody’s going to pay to advertise to bots.
- Ad money dries up.
- Site goes behind a paywall, or (if it can’t sustain itself with subscriptions) no longer exists.
We’re already seeing more paywalls, and the problem will only get worse.
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If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
Until there’s no more content for them to gobble up because all the websites they stole from have shut down.
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Part of the reason we’re now drowning in content slop farms that themselves use generative AI is because advertising revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for advertisers or those who are paid by them because they form part of the ecosystem that put us in this mess. Let the model collapse, it stopped serving us long ago.
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@Juniper The existing ad model sucks, but there are other ways to solve that problem. If someone is doing work to put out professional content, they shouldn’t be expected to give it away for free, and it certainly shouldn’t be stolen from them by a plagiarism machine. They deserve compensation, whether that’s through a subscription or ads. I have no problem with, for instance, YouTube’s model where you get to choose between the two.
But regardless of philosophy, what I’m talking about is simple cause and effect. ChatGPT has to get its information from human content creators. If OpenAI drives them all out of business, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot too. But by the time that happens, the damage to all the other creators will already have been done.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality
That’s just late-stage capitalism. Internet advertising standards are a symptom rather than a cause.
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cool cool cool this isn’t problematic at all
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@Rathenhope alerted me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Made me think of the intermittent discussions we’ve had about how to identify AI writing. Maybe this will be helpful or interesting for some of you!
she/they
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@Tez I do find it interesting, for sure.
What I find a little “funny” (it’s not - I don’t have a better choice of words) is that you would think OpenAI and the other LLM providers would offer tools to detect their own LLM’s handiwork as a capitalistic venture.
This article made me think of the so-called “AI” detectors that I would contend venture towards snake oil, especially since they can generate false positives and negatives. The only people who could possibly make a “foolproof” detector are those who provide what you’re trying to detect. Even then, we’re getting into the whole schtick about random and pseudorandom number generation in computers, which is part of where LLMs get their “ideas” from.
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@Tez said in AI Megathread:
Just as a note, many (if not most) of these “signs of AI writing” are in fact signs of professional writing as well.
The so-called “ChatGPT Dash” is just the em dash, widely used by pro authors and well-known in Emily Dickinson poetry. Rule of three, “has been described”, parallelism… most of these are common writing tools that many people just weren’t aware of before. ChatGPT is able to imitate those tools because it stole the published work of actual writers.
Now if your coworker who couldn’t string a coherent paragraph together suddenly starts using elegant triplets and juxtaposition, it’s probably a sign that they’re using AI writing. Otherwise, it doesn’t mean much. And that’s why, to @dvoraen’s point, there is no reliable tool for AI writing detection that doesn’t have a zillion false-positives with real writing.
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Agreed with all @Faraday said above.
The only way you can truly tell if writing is LLM generated and not simply a style you’ve come to associate with LLM is to be comparative. It’s sort of like differentiating a student’s work from something their parent wrote, to use a reference from back in our day.
If you want to test someone that you can’t physically be with to monitor, the best way – which is not a foolproof way – is to get them to write something reflective, about a mutual experience if possible. You’ll more easily see the main flaw in LLM writing: When it makes shit up. An essay written by ChatGPT is going to look like any of the thousands of good essays written in the last hundred years. Because it’s copying them. It’ll probably even get most of the facts right. But a personal, reflective piece? Sure, the LLM can get the structure right, but it’ll just make shit up because there’s no googling for facts of someone personal experience.
