Another more broad prediction: In a decade, the overall influence of language models on our society will be universally seen as a net negative.
GPT type models are much better suited to low effort blogspam, and whilst that's not a good thing, they produce better blogspam than existing blogspamming techniques. I think we underestimate how bad the Internet already is, and at worst text generated by AI is simply going to reflect that.
Been there (as an independent press member years ago), simply you cannot beat that.
Real human journalists have a delay of about 1m before making a short tweet. Funny (or not), something similar was in the "live update" article page in less than 10s. Including photo(s). I was on quite a lot of tech-conferences/live events and earned a decent living then as an independent tech journalist (but then I got bored and really it was a 1-man-show).
Another personal observation (from field), that was not happening prior to 2010-2012, the years we all got Siri, Cortana..
You can make the dots and dashes.
Language models can now pass as human in many situations but there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news, this isn't a new capability.
We have already created mechanisms for deciding which voices to trust and no matter how good language models get they will not be able to prevent you from visiting economist.com
You have to pay them, and most of them are not very good at writing. Even with a big budget, you get a limited number of good articles per day.
If you can make writing fake news 100x cheaper, and then just throw everything at social networks and let people sort out the most viral stuff, that can change the game.
Also, computers can be faster. If something new happens today and hundred articles are written about it, a computer can quickly process them and generate hundred more articles on the same topic, than a group of humans would. (Many humans can do the writing in parallel, but each of them needs to read individually the things they want to react to.)
The value of exercising critical thinking, checking trusted curated sources, information hygiene, recognizing and avoiding manipulation tactics in news and ads will have to go up. The internet is already almost entirely unreliable without requiring any fancy AI. The listed skills will be necessary regardless any increase of politically manipulative content, advertisements or product misrepresentations.
I don't think people, organizations, and government, pushing false narratives, is some new game. I think it's a game that people are dangerously unaware that they're already playing. Destroying the trust of content on the internet, resulting in having people be more diligent about what they believe, is, I think, almost certainly a net positive.
But, as a counter argument to myself, people are lazy and will, instead, just go to a news source that they "trust", and listen without ever questioning.
Either way, I don't see the fake news, itself, as being anything but a fleeting problem for society. The problem will continue to be people, organizations, and governments taking advantage of laziness.
For an example, imagine Dall-E 2 was released for political use. For a few weeks, we would have a flood of fakes of every politician doing every imaginable act. Society would very quickly believe none, rather than believing all.
That didn't seem to be how it worked with the election-theft narrative. People kept believing garbage from discredited sources.
GPT-3 can't create a second IEEE so it's not an issue to be worried about.
Authoritarians benefit from a society-wide lack of trust in there being any sort of consensus/objective truth. When people don't know what to believe, they either turn to conspiracy theories that claim to offer a peek behind the curtain, or more likely just tune out and hope that their favorite strongman can simplify the chaos.
There's been speculation on Twitter that the conflicting narratives from Russia itself during the invasion aren't really a political problem, since confusion makes it more difficult for the public to rally behind a counter-narrative.
There already exists far more content than anybody can read. We have developed mechanisms for filtering out content which isn't worth our time, and language models don't have any special ability to force you to read their creations.
And even if content can be placed somewhere you will read it: no matter what I put into this box you will not suddenly be susceptible to believing the unbelievable no matter whether I wrote it or whether a language model wrote it.
The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a tool that can sway public opinion without any basis on facts. I'm not sure, by your response, if you find that to be problematic or not.
I think we've recently found that people haven't decided which voices to trust and can be led to believe things placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread that information - there is significant impact on society.
That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience.
Also, getting a computer to do something will always scale several orders of magnitude more than having billions of people do it.
> That's the reason some people have issues with fake news, from my experience.
From my experience, most people who believe Fake News is a significant problem are people who dislike WHOM some have chosen to trust.
Few see fake news coming from their preferred media sources, or supporting their preferred narrative, as highly concerning, and instead usually treat it as benign (human errors happen etc etc).
However, when it's coming from their political adversaries, or from sources they dislike, it suddenly is presented as some huge issue.
In reality, it is all the same, and people are decently good at filtering it out when it contradicts what they want to believe, and very bad at filtering it out when it agrees with them.
For an example of fake news from outlets like the NYT, the most egregious recent one has been the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop, calling it a Russian hoax, calling it "fake news", listing intelligence agencies (of all people) as proof of this, getting Twitter and Facebook to outright ban the New York Post article on it - when in fact everything in their article was 100% true.
How many people (especially Dem voters) have taken this story as "dangerous spread of Fake News by the NYT, Washington Post etc"?
My point was that we all have blindspots when the news sources we have chosen to trust are feeding us false information. Also, the problem isn't that people don't choose a news source to trust, it is that they choose a bad news source to trust, and this can happen for very different reasons.
My prediction is that in the next 10y we will really struggle to determine between fake-people and real-human. There will be an explosion of fake-identities posting more and more human-like.
But I'm not Nostradamus so I could be very very off here.
I’d say Neil Stephenson has a pretty good take on what this might look like in his recent book: Fall, where in everyone has a “feed” and those that or more savvy/wealthy have better editors (AI, etc) of their feed.
And even if the powers that be manage to get those future AI bots to post stuff that will very much resemble what we now post in here, it is my belief that the uncanny valley will be, in the end, impossible to pass (in fact that's one of the main motifs of many of Asimov's books when it comes to robots).
You know, the PGP web of trust idea may yet take off all these decades later, not because we need a web of trust to send 100.0000000% safely encrypted messages to each other to protect from governments, but because we need a web of trust just to know who the real humans are.
[1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
There would be some of the usual web of trust problems, e.g., trying to explain to Joe Q. Public that you only sign for people you know, beyond doubt, are human. Preferably in person. Many other problems, too.
I guess you could say, my thought here isn't that this would solve the problems. The problems at this point are somewhat well known. What has been missing is any benefit significant enough to motivate us to get past those problems. If there is, it's obviously many years away. Wouldn't exactly suggest building a startup around this idea right now, if you get my drift. We still need to go through a phase of the problem getting larger before we even get to the phase where people start to realize this is a problem and start demanding that people online prove they are actually people, and goodness knows "I'm a human" is merely the lowest of low bars itself, not the solution to all trust problems.
I've been hitting these sites in searches accidentally more and more over the past few months. Goodness help you if you don't realize it's totally fake; some of what I've seen is dangerous, like, bad electrical advice being blithely generated by whichever exact transformer variant is spewing that stuff.
News outlets are nothing without a track record. People trust names they recognize. You can spin up as many CMS instances, domains, and social media profiles for fake news as you want, but without a history shared with its core audience, all the language models in the world aren't going to convince anyone but the most credulous when the content is coming from unfamiliar sources.
I don't know about the next generations(s), the only thing in common for the above mentions was that they were made by a real-human.
Once the account has gained enough real followers, they can carefully start to push payload content, the content the operator really cares about.
This drives polarisation. There's this idea that sinister foreign adversaries are trying to "spread chaos", but I don't buy it. I think it's merely a by-product of building an audience. Russia (to pick an example) doesn't care about BLM, anti-BLM, US culture wars or the Assange case. Rather, it cares about exactly the things you'd expect it to care about: sanctions, conflicts it is involved in, allies etc.
(For that matter, ad-driven media does much the same. Gawker before its demise had really gone all-in on "outrage bait" stories.)
They're going to start with the most credulous, maybe, but they'll build confidence in the same way as everyone else who's an unknown at start.
The actually bad consequence is SEO spam of high quality. You can now generate a hundred articles a minute in any topic.
A lot of the outputs look incredibly genuine. We live in interesting times.
That's not at all clear. You're assuming people will continue to give credence to random stuff they read. But once fake AI-generated content is common, people will surely become less trusting. The end result could easily be that fewer people than before believe fake news is real. Presumably, fewer people will believe real news too, but the result could still be net positive.
But still, you have to assume that the cost of creating fake news is the primary limit to it's appearance in front of people to claim AI will seriously have an impact and that's not at all obvious.
Sure there is: An inevitability.
I am hoping we will increasingly turn attention towards how to handle it (although I am relatively certain that's already going on at rapidly growing scale at fb, google and openai).
I could see updated legislation doing a lot of heavy lifting – strict rules against automated mass-disinformation – but more action is certainly going to be required.
This is like saying "you should classify this as blue" and then a response like "no, it's heavy".
Search for most any topic on google, e.g. recipes, and the first two pages will be chock-full of AI-generated copy.
Because of large language models, detecting Fake News becomes trivial and cheap. Building and doing inference on language models is too expensive for most attackers, so they give up. Only well financed state actors are capable of disseminating fake news, and they are no better at it than they are today because content generation is not a bottleneck.