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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> We have already entered the age where it is impossible to determine with certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth.

Is that any worse than unreliable humans? Whether they're intentionally lying or just mistaken, internet posts should always be taken with a grain of salt, for decades now.

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For historians its a catastrophe. After 2023, the good old roman source poison assumation is back in full effect. He who is in power can actually rewrite history. Assume everyone uses written documentation just to proof loyalty to the current computational power holder.

Truth will become something similar to the roman emperors history, a million comments, blog articles condemning past rulers and CEOs as wrong all along, while praising the current instance, with similar spam in the forgotten archives.

A species ruled by madmen, one worser then the other. Praise be on the Bezos, who undid the mad world that reigned before.

I think they mean ground truth in terms of what human created content looks like, not ground truth in terms of what is actually going on in the world, which of course we don’t collect completely accurately.

I wonder what will be the first year when most of the meaningful comments on hacker news will be AI generated.

I dunno, seems hard to say. Upvote systems favor funny quips and matching the popular sentiment so I guess we won’t get a good measurement of meaningfulness.

The unreliability of humans is still valuable data because it shows what humans were thinking at the time.

I guess, but that's a really noisy signal once you account for deliberately misleading posts.

Even deliberately misleading posts give you insight into what people are thinking at the time, though.

> Is that any worse than unreliable humans?

Yes, I think so. Maybe not (but maybe) in terms of factual information, but in terms of opinion, analysis, arts, etc. You know, human things. The value of those things is, in my opinion, tightly couples with them being produced by humans.

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