Mastodawn

Erin Kissane May 7, 2023

As someone who has participated in multi-year edit wars over, yes, Nazi shit, I will say that my biggest concern here isn’t about unedited LLM text hitting wikipedia articles—that’s v bad but probably largely fixable—but with the way Talk page sophistry is about to become absolutely fucking unmanageable as malicious editors set chatbots to do their infinite argumentation for them

To generalize: LLMs on the web’s surfaces are bad. LLMs in the backstage are much worse.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

Volunteers who maintain the digital encyclopedia are divided on how to deal with the rise of AI-generated content and misinformation.

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Eggmont 🐘May 8, 2023

@kissane
The only thing worse than trolls are automated trolls.

The developers of LLM's pretend that they have no control over whether or not their LLM tells the truth, but I think that will eventually be tried in court and they will be found liable because they could have trained their model to recognize patterns of ethical and unethical behavior and to distinguish between fact and fiction prior to producing results.

I believe that #ChatGPT and others of this generation of AI will eventually become a very expensive cautionary tale.

The Ford Pinto or Lawn Darts of #AI.

The danger of which was known and acknowledged by the developers and ignored by their corporate sponsors in order to make a quick buck.

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Rob Corless

@eggmont @kissane I have worried for some time now that the pollution of the information space by these products is deliberate, with the idea that once that's complete enough only people who can pay money will be able to get good information.

Doesn't need a conspiracy to do it, just some bad actors. The truism goes that ascribing malice is not necessary when stupidity will do, but it seems to me that people can't really be this stupid, can they?

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Eggmont 🐘May 8, 2023

@rcorless @kissane
I agree and since most of our tech giants have their roots in unethical, amoral, or actual criminal behavior I am concerned that the motives are less that pure and that safeguarding the public is not foremost in their minds as much as fleecing the public is.

I think these can be very useful tools in the right hands, but we are already seeing paywalls being put in place to rent yet another technology to the unsuspecting public.

Monthly subscriptions are the modern equivalent of the Enclosure Act whereby public information is privatized by moneyed interests.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison