Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

This is a very interesting observation. It seems like a relatively harmless, though annoying, linguistic evolution. But it highlights what I believe to be one of the biggest dangers of AI, which is that AI content is regurgitated and used everywhere to such a degree that not only are individuals unwittingly consuming AI generated content, but it is actually dramatically affecting the evolution of our collective language and knowledge as a species without us consciously realizing it, and with very little control on our part. This can produce not just annoying linguistic changes, but also changes in collective beliefs and values. Best case scenario, we end up with our culture and values being heavily influenced by random AI artifacts. Worst case scenario, the content policies and training data that companies like OpenAI use can rapidly encode biases, politics, or even nefarious propaganda into our collective consciousness with very little recourse or even awareness on our part.

On the flip side, LLM's have given me great appreciation for my own writing. I'm not great at writing, but I've come to appreciate that I really like the stuff that I write. I derive a ton of joy from having a thought, tossing it around, trying to put it on paper, revising it a zillion times, and reading back what I wrote.

LLMs have helped me ease a lot of creative frustration because I know there's always a way to turn on easy mode and that me staying on hard mode is a choice, not a curse. The alleviation of pressure has helped me put out more natural output.

ChatGPT has made mechanical writing punk.

How is that worse than every gen x girl in the 90s talking like Rachel and every boy taking like Chandlier.

Everyone gets their pants in a bunch when a technology does what people already were doing before.

I had the same reaction. Whether or not it’s worse, tho, it does seem at least different. The regurgitation loop used to be all human, but now there is a machine in the loop. A complex & multifaceted machine, ha.

Like a tv?

The effects you describe are already happening as far as I can judge.

Probably not significantly because of viral AI generated content yet, but caused by AI-powered recommendation engines.

I have friends who are making AI influencers which actually seem to be gaining quite a bit of traction, so I wouldn't underestimate viral AI generated content. It's probably already in your feeds just hard to notice.

I think some “perversion” is a given. Think how internet ads evolved.

Oh please, this is not how things will play out. Artists and content creators will be forced to move to more walled gardens to protect their creative rights. The warnings have been known for decades, nobody listened and now those bills are coming due. The open internet as we know will become a dead zone of generated and non-professional content. It’s not even about paywalls, the barriers will exist simply for copyright protection. Maybe it’s a good thing.

I listened to a recent Guardian Australia podcast with a couple of journalists saying (without any awareness of the irony):

a) AI is stealing our work, we’ll block it,

b) we see the benefits of using AI for our work and we’ll continue to explore that and

c) AI not that good yet.

I get it, but that doesn’t seem particularly forward thinking. So you want to leverage everyone else’s work but not help improve it.

I think only those who contribute should be allowed to use LLM’s professionally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com