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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Interesting development concerning ChatGPT related to CW.

People observed that ChatGPT talks like a midwit liberal after all the 'fixes' it's been subjected to.

So, it speaks in the jargon of the ingroup.

So, someone figured out you can 'weaponize' ChatGPT to engage in 'debates' with midwit liberals without actually having to learn to ape their slang and thought patterns.

Apparently, this is quite effective as a debating tactic.

This is going to end badly- I can feel it, and if this takes off, I feel that within a few weeks a number of very smart people will be trying their damnedest to figure out how to prevent doing something like this.

However, I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

That's an obvious brute force fix for the problem of social media fracturing the consent manufacturing machine.

They'll probably settle for making a ML model spot this sort of activity and then ban people who're doing it, that's my guess.

I honestly don't know how a guy who derisively refers to Harvard graduates as mere "midwits" can fail to recognize that the GTP's responses are crafted in much the same way as those of a political huckster or PR rep—just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand. I don't have any doubt that regardless of how incisive or specific a question I ask, the response will be something along the lines of "The purpose of this problem is to reduce fraud and waste while ensuring continued access to those truly in need". Great, tell me that again in case I didn't hear the first time. The reason it drives people nuts isn't because you're murdering them with their own rhetoric, it's because it's like talking to a wall.

Yeah that article was pretty unconvincing. Rhetorical reasons aside, the repeated use of "midwit" alone basically predisposed me to want to disregard the rest of the points. I don't think I can respect the intuition of a person regarding predictions on verbal/linguistic topics like 'is ChatGPT a convincing enough debater to permanently break online discourse' who can't themselves see that they are repeatedly overusing a cringeworthy term.

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