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Comment by anileated | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s likely that, unless regulated, commercial LLMs will have a chilling effect on most human-created information sources. With eliminating the opportunity for authors to engage with information seekers (a chance to get constructive feedback, upsell something, show ads, see interest stats) will come reduced willingness of authors to publish.

If you publish on StackOverflow only for LLM to gobble it up and no human even sees the upvote button anymore… why would you? You are basically an unpaid ghost content producer for Microsoft/ClosedAI at this point.

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It opens an opportunity for shilling, pushing your agenda, and other ways of poisoning users' generated content. While LLMs will be brainlessly sucking in and replicating. Till they learn to check first and filter out obvious fakes. Still there will be not obvious. The problem is how to make money on this...

I wonder if the very nature of LLM emergent correctness and intelligence itself will identify weakness, fallacies and illusion? I would expect a well-read person to be similarly immune.

Humans aren't immune to manipulations. Neither personally, not in mass. LLMs should be possible to manipulate to some degree if attacker controls significant portion of information on some topic. For example manufacturers can 'upgrade' specs on their devices. Till they get caught LLMs will parrot them as a ground truth. The same with 'human values' and political events interpretation. China already introduced policy on LLMs, they should be politically correct. LLMs producers can manipulate, but not eliminate, the bias by selecting and weighting the sources. Which they do. Plus humans interventions when they see unpleasant output.

Humans have free will and ethical standards and ability to manipulate ideas. LLMs have none of that. They are tools designed to do what told.

This is a simplistic vision. First, not everybody believes they have no consciousness, or ideas. Or cannot generate new ideas. This already happened with 'crazy' chess gameplay style. Humans had never seen it before.

Yes, they are tools, build by humans. But this doesn't mean humans can understand what, how, and why they are doing. Historically observations may take hundreds of years to explain.

If it is admitted to be conscious, idea-understanding, it would be enough like a human and would have to have human rights (and not abused like it currently is). If it doesn’t have human rights, it’s not human-like enough for this to matter. I think these are mutually exclusive.

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