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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe people will start paying attention to references and provenance, and start looking into sources of information - maybe even more widespread use of cryptographic signatures. Misinformation has always been out there, and so there are tools to deal with it. Perhaps now is our chance to make these tools wide spread.

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I don't see how references and providence will solve that problem. References are trivial for machine-generated content to add. And the providence of a new author and a new AI are the exact same.

Unless your plan is to require a PhD to publish a book on Amazon on something.

References are used to trace back to source material. Once you've verified that the source material is truthful, you have started building trust in the author. Over time you can trust this author without verifying every single datum they publish. This is how trust works. We do it all the time to more or less of a degree. No PhD required. What's the issue here?

Machine may easily add references to truthful sources from what is bogus content.

If it's machine generated or not doesn't matter. It's whether the content derives properly from truthful sources. If it's machine generated but true, so what?

That doesn't sound like a solution for machine-generated content. That's a solution for misinformation. Different problem.

Although machine generated content will make the misinformation problem much worse.

True, but if you can still discerb truth from misinformation, perhaps it won't be so sad

In an ideal world, I would hope for your statement to be correct. However, our society has changed the value of recognizing duty to recognizing choice. As long as individuals are aware of the choice they are making, they are justified. The fear of truth is caused by the following dilemma: either you choose for yourself or someone else will choose for you. Because of this fear, choosing correctly becomes less important than choosing freely. The choice is justified by the idea of inner truth, in which the role of subjective experiences can outweigh the role of objective experiences.

A choice is not justified just because it is a choice. But without an objective criterion of correction, every choice is irrelevant, because the subjective criterion is also a choice. It can be changed to justify each of the choices, however inconsistent and contradictory they may be. To say that everything is valid is to say that fact checking is a farce. The loss of discernment is an unexpected result of the emancipation of reason.

I'm pretty sure this comment was generated by a language model. If that's the case, congratulations.

At the 20th Century, when we got a book from some philosopher entirely written on this style, we didn't have to wonder that.

Those were simpler times.

Yes and getting that or any book was so hard or impossible for the most of the worlds population. So much privilege, but let's compare wrongly that era to AI generated content era

Ok. I have no idea what you are talking about, I remember very clearly that libraries existed at the 20th century.

But in case you still don't get the joke, no the OP is not written by AI. Instead, it is a common point of view.

That's indeed post-modernism for you. Didn't Jean Baudrillard say something similar about communication (the ecstasy of communication?) in which the wanton act itself substitutes for the meaning of the act. We've grown to prefer simulations. Form over function. Seeming right instead of virtue. Meaningful choice is another casualty.

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