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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting.

I'm really wondering when LLM's are going to replace humans for ~all first-pass social media and forum moderation.

Obviously humans will always be involved in coming up with moderation policy and judging gray areas and refining moderation policy... but at what point will LLM's do everything else more reliably than humans?

6 months from now? 3 years from now?

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"Obviously" isn't really that obvious to me. We've seen plenty of companies willing to pass a huge amount of work to automation and if you have the misfortune to be an edge case the automation can't handle, said companies are often perfectly happy to let you fall through the cracks. Cheap and good enough often trump costlier and good.

I agree that companies will do whatever they can to cut costs, including anything which can remove the necessity of a human worker via automation. But I think this comment is not responding to what was written (maybe there was an edit I missed):

> Obviously humans will always be involved in coming up with moderation policy

This comment seems to respond to:

> Obviously humans will always be involved in [moderation]

The first statement seems to hold true -- at least, it's a more "obvious" conclusion. What scenario is required to fully remove humans from coming up with moderation policy? These companies who are so eager to automate certain tasks will likely still be staffed by humans who would make the decision to automate certain tasks.

Fair enough. I suppose it's partly a question of what level of policy we are talking about. I guess at some level, humans have to set an umbrella policy. The question gets unto how granularly humans get into enforcing policy specifics below that.

The Google motto of 'good enough for most and screw the edge cases'.

As LLM prices come down social media is going to be absolutely inundated with bots that are indistinguishable from humans. I can't see a world where forums or social media are _useful_ for anything in 10 years unless there are strict gate keepers (e.g. you have to receive a code in person or access is tied directly to your physical identity to access the site).

Yeah the ability to astroturf (at massive scale!) product reviews or political opinions as comments in reddit posts and the like will be sort of horrifying. The dead Internet hypothesis may yet come true.

Isn’t there a limit to this when one requires an account to be tied to a phone number? Perhaps pseudonymous posting is on a countdown clock.

The worst part is social media networks aren't necessarily against AI/bot engagement since it greatly fluffs their numbers and keeps their users occupied.

It seems inevitable that some sort of signature or identity proof will be necessary soon to participate in most online forums.

Either esoteric networking between people or straight up government/private entity issued multi factor authentication.

Ironically for crypto bros, I think the way forward will be to codify the real-world trust structures into the digital world. The future is trustful.

I just really hope we find a way to codify it without scanning people's eyeballs into the blockchain like the guy in charge of the world's first AGI wants to do.

> or access is tied directly to your physical identity to access the site).

This is what is inevitably going to happen. There will be some kind of service provider (probably one of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon) who will verify who you are via official documents such as passport and driving license. When you sign up to a smaller company's service they'll check with the providers to see if you're a genuine person and if so then they'll let you join, if not you'll be blocked. You might be able to use the forum with an anonymous name but the company will always know who you are and if you use your account to spam or abuse people you'll get blacklisted and reported to the police. Any service that doesn't implement the model will be an unusable hell hole of bots and spam.

The internet will splinter into two and you'll have the "verified net" and the "unverified net" with the latter basically becoming a second dark web. To be honest, I think this will probably be a good thing. I think the vast majority of people will spend most of their time on the verified net, which will actually be a more pleasant place to be because people won't be able to get away with what they can now without real consequences in physical reality.

That being said there are plenty of ways it could go wrong - if those accounts get hacked and the owner of the account can't prove it then we could see innocent people going to jail. Or state actors could hack the accounts of citizens they see as problematic and frame them. But all that stuff could happen today anyway - the verification or lack there of doesn't make that much difference but does substantially reduce the use of bots.

I have been thinking the same sort of thing as well over the last while.

I was thinking more of a browser level plugin, in which content from unverified users would be blurred out with a "unverified user - click to view content" type of system. Everything you post will be connected to your identity, so you would be liable for deepfakes and the like. You would also have an activity rating connected to your identity, so other people could see if you are posting 1 piece of content per hour, or 1000.

Maybe a personal media manager connected to the browser so all of the public content that is "signed" by you will be easily viewable by you, and if someone posts something that is not actually yours under your identity somehow, you will be easily be able to rescind the signature.

Just random shower thoughts...

Except now there’s a human problem: let’s say I’m Filipino and you’re “supposedly” Chinese. The Chinese government swears to the system you’re a real person. Can we trust that?

Did you just describe AOL??

Maybe that’s the method behinds Reddit’s api madness this whole time. (/s). Now only the hugest brands can run their own bots

Back of the envelope calculation says it could be possible now.

Twitter gets about 500M tweets per day, average tweet is 28 characters. So that’s 14B characters per day. Converting to tokens at around 4 char/token that’s around 3.5B tokens per day. If GPT 3.5 turbo pricing is representative it will cost about $0.0015/thousand tokens which is $5k per day. So it’s possible now.

However, you can probably get that cost down a lot with your own models, which also has the benefit of not being at the mercy of arbitrary API pricing.

this is some black mirror stuff

imagine Google's general approach to customer service/moderation, but applied all over the place by companies small and large

I shudder at the thought

Especially with fairly systemic labor shortages, it seems inevitable that we'll see more and more self-service and automation with the corollary that getting an actual human involved will become more difficult.

I’ve found that it’s pretty much impossible to talk to a person in most customer services in the past few years, it’s always a “robot”. And this has been going since well before LLMs.

I find it easy to talk to a person. A US based person, no. A person who can resolve my problem, maybe. But a person, yes.

Yup, most companies are now simply providing “emotional” support using sufficiently apologetic, but powerless agents. That is, if you can defeat chat bot screen or IVR maze. The hope is for user to give up..

Or it could be precisely the opposite -- LLM's take care of all of the easy customer service/moderation, so that it's actually affordable for Google and others to hire high-quality customer reps to manage the hard/urgent stuff that LLM's surface.

I don't know, but generally speaking with technological progress, while we lose some things we gain more things. It's important to think not just what technology gets rid of, but what it enables.

They are already sufficient for high level classification... its just a question of cost.

It's getting tiring reading all the LLM takes from people here who clearly don't use or understand them at all. So many still stuck in the "predicting next token" nonsense, as if humans don't do that too

You are seriously telling me that humans predicting word for word when they speak?

A system that "predicts the next token" in such a way that it is indistinguishable from a human, is just like a human in practice yes.

How does a human decide which word to use in your mind? Magic?

No, it's a logically based biological/neurological process through which at the end of it, you've decided on a word. They are both forms of computing that can produce largely indistinguishable output... doesn't matter that one is biological and the other isn't

It's quite possible a human forms a full representation of a coherent thought before translating that thought into words, meaning no token by token prediction.

And digital audio will never match analog. Can anybody tell the difference anymore?

If a machine produces highly similar output does it matter? LLM's clearly exhibit behavior of having implicitly learned systems, which is the valuable part of intelligence. Humans infer systems through text too, by the way.

We're not at the point where people can't tell the difference though.

A human will often say "I don't know". The machine will outright lie using it's best probabilistic guess.

It’s also possible that translating a coherent thought into words is done on a token by token basis.

I’m surely not the only one who sometimes can’t “find the right word” in the middle of a sentence when trying to describe a thought or idea.

Right, but that would still be functionally quite different from what an LLM does, given that it has no full thought and is entirely predictive by token.

Actually yes, architecturally that's the essence of predictive coding.

It's among the leading theories in neuroscience for how our brains work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

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