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A distraction from the war and ICE. I was thinking about posting in the fun thread, but it's not really a fun topic, though it may not be culture war either since I expect most people to be on the "this is bad" side. Maybe we should have a recurring "Butlerian Jihad Roundup" for posts like these?
Bots are taking over the internet. Corporate shills and (foreign) government propagandists have upgraded with virtual cybernetics. A related but lesser change is people using LLMs to reword their own posts (+ emails and other communications).
Some AI writing is obvious, but sometimes it's indistinguishable from (if not completely identical to) what a human would write. NYT has a quiz to distinguish human and AI writing. I did bad (3/5), but in my defense, I think most of the human examples are awful, making the quiz harder. See for yourself.
On Hacker News, it’s now so bad there's a new guideline, “don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”. Unfortunately, due to the extreme intellect of the average Hacker News commenter, it can be hard to distinguish their profound technological insights from even a markov chain trained on buzzwords. Indeed, looking at top threads I still notice lots of slop-like posts from brand new or previously inactive accounts, like this one. I've been sarcastic, but I really like Hacker News, and hope it finds a way to stop the slop.
Other networks are taking a different approach. For example, Meta has acquired MoltBook (the AI social network) in an effort to add even more bots to FaceBook. I’m joking — no wait, they may actually be doing that. Not content with the Metaverse, maybe Zuckerburg has become addicted to burning money on uncanny social experiments.
On the Motte, at least for now, I haven't seen any obvious bot posts. There were a couple AI-assisted posts (by "known" humans) over the past couple months that got called out.
How will social media evolve? Will people move to invite-only sites like https://lobste.rs and Discord? Will most people accept AI discourse as natural or even prefer it? Will AI discourse become so good that we prefer it? Right now, it seems even the best AI writing (prompted to be consice and human) is unnecessarily wordy and has certain tropes; but what if someone discovers how to train an AI on a specific human's writing, so that it's effectively indistinguishable?
It's difficult to say, but I think that at a minimum, people who debate online will prefer NOT to debate against bots. I base this on analogizing the situation to online chess, which has a problem with so-called "(c)heaters" Most human chess players prefer to play against other humans.
I'm speculating a bit, but I think that if (1) large numbers of bots start being unleashed in online discussions (which seems very likely to me since people are motivated to want to make it seem as though there is a lot of support for their position); and (2) it becomes difficult to distinguish bots from humans (which seems likely because technology is always improving); then (3) most natural persons will simply give up and we'll end up with a sort of dead internet of discussion boards.
I actually do prefer debating LLMs at the moment, and they're usually my first port of call if I want to work through an issue.
On the internet, if I go through the effort of posting something, there's a high likelihood it just gets ignored, downvoted with no counterargument, sneered at, tagged with thumbs down emoji or whatever. This is feedback, of a type, but I can't do much with it, and it doesn't help.
Meanwhile, I can go to the LLM and be like: "argue with me in a way that is maximally convincing to someone like me", and they will actually argue in good faith. They're sycophantic, of course, but they'll happily take the other side of an argument, and you can misrepresent your actual opinion to double check.
There's also the convenience factor, and not imposing on anyone else's time. Chess bots are nice for the same reason.
Well, I think you are about to get your preference granted in spades :)
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