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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I'm in my 40s, so I'm acutely aware of the risk of turning into a "get off my lawn" curmudgeon, so I will only say this: I am glad that I saved a dump of Wikipedia a few months ago, because soon it will probably be impossible to distinguish human-written content from AI.

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If it's indistinguishable, then how does it matter who/what it was written by?

Because I am far less likely to trust encyclopedic content written by an AI, which can lie so convincingly that it does not know that it is lying. I have even seen it generating fictional source references that are hard to verify.

I just don't trust it.

Maybe we just need a better attribution, so people can decide on the level of objective confidence. If you live in the US, it is already difficult to avoid seeing and listening to real people lie publicly, which may take journalists a long time to verify. Put it in another way, we might just see late night talk show hosts start parodying $next_gen_llm instead of real people, if this $next_gen_llm started affecting people in a more profound way.

>can lie so convincingly that it does not know that it is lying.

A human can also lie convincingly.

The problem with AI is that you can do it massively.

It takes more than merely being human to earn my trust.

Have you every tried to edit the Wikipedia? Spamming it is incredible hard for humans (whether AI is involved or not) because it has a pretty good system of moderators based on the social trust model. The only way to bypass it is to effectively bribe a mod, similarly to how spammers pay for backlinks to increase their PageRank. This is what prevents it from turning into a spam farm, not the lack of text content.

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