GPT might be an information virus (2023)

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt... This seems relevant here in a "the results agree" way.

Like most progress, it made some things easier ( and some things worse as a result ). What I do find particularly fascinating is that it is doing that even in professions that should know better ( lawyers, doctors ). That my boss uses it is no surprise me though. I always suspected he never really read my emails.

What's weird is that so many people shrug this off with "eh, it's what they said about the calculator".

Which to me is roughly as bad a take as "LLMs are just fancy auto-complete" was.

I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that evolution on the planet has rarely opted for human-level intelligence and that we possess it might just be a quirk we shouldn't take for granted; it may well be that we could accidentally habituate ans eventually breed outselves dumber and subsist fine (perhaps in different numbers), never realizing what we willingly gave up.

People have always tended toward taking shortcuts. It's human nature. So saying "this technology makes people dumber or lazier" is tricky, because you first need a baseline: exactly how dumb or lazy were people before?

To quantify it, you'd need measurable changes. For example, if you showed that after widespread LLM adoption, standardized test scores dropped, people's vocabulary shrank significantly, or critical thinking abilities (measured through controlled tests) degraded, you'd have concrete evidence of increased "dumbness."

But here's the thing: tools, even the simplest ones, like college research papers, always have value depending on context. A student rewriting existing knowledge into clearer language has utility because they improve comprehension or provide easier access. It's still useful work.

Yes, by default, many LLM outputs sound similar because they're trained to optimize broad consensus of human writing. But it's trivially easy to give an LLM a distinct personality or style. You can have it write like Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson. You can make it sound academic, folksy, sarcastic, or anything else you like. These traits demonstrably alter output style, information handling, and even the kind of logic or emotional nuance applied.

Thus, the argument that all LLM writing is homogeneous doesn't hold up. Rather, what's happening is people tend to use default or generic prompts, and therefore receive default or generic results. That's user choice, not a technological constraint.

In short: people were never uniformly smart or hardworking, so blaming LLMs entirely for declining intellectual rigor is oversimplified. The style complaint? Also overstated: LLMs can easily provide rich diversity if prompted correctly. It's all about how they're used, just like any other powerful tool in history, and just like my comment here.

Perhaps that is the real danger. Everyone except a small elite who (rightly) feel they understand how LLMs work would simply give up serious thinking and accept whatever "majority" opinion is in their little social media bubble. We wouldn't have the patience to really engage with genuinely different viewpoints any more.

I recall some Chinese language discussion about the experience of studying abroad in the Anglophone world in the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Paradoxically, even if you are a university student, it may now be harder to break out of the bubble and make friends with non-Chinese/East Asians than before. In the early 20th century, you'd probably be one of the few non-White students and had to break out of your comfort zone. Now if you are Chinese, there'd be people from a similar background virtually anywhere you study in the West, and it is almost unnatural to make a deliberate effort to break out of that.

This is how the church felt about the printing press.

It hasn't homogenized everything. It's further exposed humans for who they are. Humans are the virus.

A few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries.

Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans?

That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?

I feel like SEO trash has made this a must have for me for the past few years already. If it’s not stack overflow, Reddit, or stack exchange, I’m wasting my time

(To clarify, I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a bad thing)

I had the thought the other day that one of the most valuable things a human-driven website could offer would be a webring linking to other human-driven websites

strategic em-dash placement is my guess but only the machine knows the code

Nice try, AI!

The rest was fine without citations, but the part you disagree with needs them?