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Notes -
Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.
I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.
What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.
Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.
Edit:
Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:
Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
Two thoughts: One, the quotes on which the article is based are real, however. While I obviously have a dim view about AI-only articles, it's not like the opinion on which it is based is wholly fabricated. There's even a link to the original plagiarized tweet that served as the seed. So while the specific words might be AI-generated, the opinions and facts behind them still strike me as fairly representative. In that regard it's totally fine to engage with the post, and it isn't all that different than a human's post (other than the AI is probably a little less careful with their specific phrasing... but an unskilled human writer might make similar mistakes).
Two, my impression is Silver, who has been on a few-month-long tear recently on Twitter, is just doing regular engagement-bait confirmation bias stuff. Rather than say "he's been captured" I would say let's look at the more likely reason - it's an emotional, not intellectual, reaction. He's frustrated about Democrats and their nonsensical, misguided strategies in the last few years. Many agree with him. Of course, these posts happen more frequently when you get twitter-brain. Even data scientists are emotionally vulnerable to human network effects, where our brains are incapable of realizing twitter has enormous selection bias. Nope, our brains don't care, they find it very hard to correct for the bias. Much like how your sense of humor is developed by the people around you and their reactions. Is that population-representative? Often, no. But the brain doesn't care because the brain (often rightfully) assumes you care more about the opinions of those immediately surrounding you then the larger population. It's just that adjacent people have been hijacked and replaced with twitterati.
So, the good news is that I believe pretty strongly that if you remove twitter, you remove the problem and things can revert. The other good news is that this isn't actually all that abnormal. If you treat twitter-Silver like a woman who doesn't want her problem solved, but rather just wants some listening and sympathy (I mean that in the most charitable way), you see this is fine and just regular human things. While some good actual-ideas discussion happens on twitter, it's rare and tends to get overshadowed.
Nope, the quotes are fake. See my edited OP.
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