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Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

> there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake news

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.)

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> that can change the game.

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.

> 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.

That didn't seem to be how it worked with the election-theft narrative. People kept believing garbage from discredited sources.

Yes, because the election-theft narrative was coming from sources they initially trusted (the President of the United States). That is not the same thing as trusting the hundreds of fake news articles that GPT-3 will be able to generate a second.

Agree, this is the same as if IEEE suddenly announced a breakthrough in cold fusion. A large chunk of even the highly educated and technical audience would tend to believe it, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt, simply because of the cachet and reputation IEEE itself has built up. At least until those are exhausted.

GPT-3 can't create a second IEEE so it's not an issue to be worried about.

> Society would very quickly believe none, rather than believing all.

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.

We both agree that language models allow for the quick creation of large amounts of content.

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.

Is it unbelievable that pressing a bar will bring you long term happiness? Surely it is, but primates will press the heroin bar. This has happened before with humans as well. You cannot simply dismiss the effectiveness of well - targeted propaganda.

The vast majority of generators of fake news today are from Content Mills, Copy Paste Mills and general SEO spammers. Political misinformation is the other big generator. The economics of it and not "ethical" gate keeping is what will affect their output. Realistically, normal people don't have the ability to coordinate hordes of proxied IPs to attack social networks requiring account sign ups and custom feeds.

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.

Rich people often try to purchase political influence and respect for their opinions. Historically, this has had very mixed results, but you can't deny that it has sometimes worked. The problem is that this does not have a market mechanism. If the rich person has funds from another source, economics can go out the window, and usually does.

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