Comment on ‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Sure, and we had an internet before the world wide web (ARPANET). But that wasn’t hugely influential until it was expanded into what’s now the Internet. And that evolved into the world wide web after 20-ish years. Each step was a pretty monumental change, and built on concepts from before.

LLMs are no different. Yes they’re built on older tech, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re a monumental shift from what we had before.

Let’s look at access to information and misinformation. The process was something like this:

  1. Physical encyclopedias, newspapers, etc
  2. Digital, offline encyclopedias and physical newspapers
  3. Online encyclopedias and news
  4. SEO and the rise of blog/news spam - misinformation is intentional or negligent
  5. Early AI tools - misinformation from hallucinations is largely also accidental
  6. Misinformation in AI tools becomes intentional

We’re in the transition from 5 to 6, which is similar to the transition from 3 to 4. I’m old enough to have seen each of these transitions.

The way people interact with the world is fundamentally different now than it was before LLMs came out, just like the transition from offline to online computing. And just like people navigated the transition to SEO nonsense, people need to navigate he transition to LLM nonsense. It’s quite literally a paradigm shift.

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