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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

I think it is amazing and it will democratise information. A lot of times the concept ends up being simple with a lot of jargon exists as a gatekeeping method. Well of course the incumbents wouldn't like that rando from outside gets to understand and speak about things they worked on for many years. Sure he doesn't get it right 100% but he's in the correct direction.

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I very much doubt it will do that because access to that information was already available to anyone who wanted to know. It was not a secret. All AI did was to provide it via single interface, for a fee - which strangely do not go back to the original source of the knowledge, but to the AI company these days. This is not democratisation of information, it's commodification of it.

you can say the same of google, or libraries, information technology is the technology of moving and rearranging information, not of creating it

Awesome, now balance that out will education levels dropping like a rock, due to various factor but also due to LLMs, and things will be balanced out by also democratizing stupidity, until we live in Idiocracy.

Partially true, but only partially. It also makes people believe they understand more than they do, because every answer comes so easily to them. But the LLMs are easily steered and tend to agree with what you want them to say.

> also makes people believe they understand more than they do, because every answer comes so easily to them. But the LLMs are easily steered and tend to agree with what you want them to say.

Well agree to disagree but my load bearing claim is that a lot of "effort" that the original people put are mostly useless. If you can get information without having to do that effort, you haven't lost anything. For example an archivist finds an 18th century spoon or something and he went through a lot of bureaucratic hoops and logistics to get it. After getting hold of the spoon, you and him are on the same epistemic level because the logistics added ~0 to the truth.

But finding a spoon (really?) is binary - you have the spoon or not. But understanding a complex situation is nuanced and contains different perspectives, tradeoffs, context etc.

Surely you are not comparing finding a spoon with being an expert in some complicated matter.

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