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Comment by TowerTall | Hacker News Reader

> to get an idea of pretty much what the average person would think

There is no such thing as an average person.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

Funnily enough I think you both might be right here, there isn't such a thing as an average person, but ChatGPT may be the synthesis of the average opinion.

what is an average opinion? it is the sum of opinions which disagree with the result

Maybe "balanced" rather than "average" is a better way of putting it?

What’s the balance between, say, opinions that trans people should be exterminated vs not? What’s the balance between Ukraine sovereignty vs Russian occupation? Etc

My general experience (not that topic) is that for anything even slightly approaching the sides of the Silicon Valley Overton Window, ChatGPT creates micro-essay saying "On the one hand, $foo, on the other hand, $bar. It's important to remember that $topic is controversial, and that many people disagree."

It would involve serious consideration of the opinions you don't agree with, rather than just qualifying them in the most hyperbolic and dismissive way possible. Hopefully ai is better capable of this sort of reasoning than people are.

It gives you the average opinion of someone on the Internet, particularly places like Reddit, which is FAR from the “average opinion” of most people. This has been a problem for a while, people keep assuming the Internet represents some kind of moral or ethical consensus on so many issues when it’s not even close.

On the other hand, since AIs are taught using user content from Reddit, once other cultures start using these AIs, they will begin to conform more towards those norms (or will actively go against it and The Great Sort will continue forward).

The other way to phrase this is high-dimensional spheres are "spikey".

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