Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Oct 7

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.

Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.

Show threadOofOct 10

@richpuchalsky
AIs write bad books (and texts, etc.) -- incoherent mash-ups of existing human works, and eventually worse mash-ups of human and AI works. But how does the existence of a bad book destroy knowledge? The good books still exist.

The problem in my view is less bad AI books, and more bad indexes and catalogs, (i.e. search pages made by foolish search engine corporations), and the ignorant public's very much misplaced trust in those bad indexes.

Show threadDerPumu (he/him)Oct 13
@oof @richpuchalsky AI books and articles become less and less incoherent. That's what they are made for, after all, to sound reasonably similar to human-written text. They don't become more truthful, though, because that's what they're not made for. Bottom line, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish AI slop with a good amount of bullshit from human-written, good research. And even the latter over time is infested with more and more bullshit because when your sources are citing sources that are citing sources that contain made-up AI BS, at some point you won't know what's true and what is not.
Show threadOofOct 13

@DerPumu @richpuchalsky

To uncritically cite a faulty source directly or by proxy is bovine scholarship. Give it less attention.

What's needed are scholars who critically cite faulty sources to corral them.

(The opening chapters of Gilbert's 'On the Lodestone' offer an unrelenting rundown of centuries of careless pseudo scholarship on magnets, whose authors comprise a kind pre-enlightenment artificial intelligence endlessly repeating and embroidering their own output.)

Show threadDerPumu (he/him)Oct 13
@oof @richpuchalsky how do you determine that they are faulty? You check their sources. You check the sources of those. It all looks legit. Do you go for a fourth layer of sources? A fifth? When do you stop? When the original slop article is buried 5 layers or more in, it becomes impossible to fact check.
Show threadCecelia
@DerPumu @oof @richpuchalsky Plus the sheer volume of content that can be generated in a short amount of time. How do people keep up?
Oct 14 at 6:56pmWeb