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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.

(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)

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Nope, not having trouble following it, but the metaphor leaves out an important link between AI output and the AI itself. The question is, did the AI gain anything from this training? And the answer is, it did not, since the training used it's own answer with no other input. There's nothing in the water metaphor that draws this line.

Maybe a better metaphor is something involving drinking your own piss, but I don't feel the need to flesh that one out

So you’re saying LLMs are feeding us their piss instead of water

Well dang. That’s a problem ain’t it.

GPT-5 came and went, and we’re still here adding decimals to the model numbers hoping this fundamental fuckup will go away

Feels like everyone, including you and the guy you’re arguing with, and the researchers at openAI, knows this is a problem. Is it laziness? Lack of creativity? Are we seriously all out of ideas other than scaling compute?

When are we planning on figuring this one out boys. Who’s actually working on this today

Religions are an example of a system feeding back into itself and going off the rails. This is not an AI problem, this is the problem of any evolving system.

In humans this problem is solved by dying. If you get too stoooopid, well you get culled by your own stupidity. Luckily we run in a massively parallel fashion and those that aren't fatally dumb carry on.

This is also why human civilization fundamentally changed (not humans, our civilization) after wide adoption of the scientific method. Humanities growth in relation to our potential intelligence level was horrifically slow. It's really easy to say "hur hur, machine dumb" when we could have had rockets 10,000 years ago if we weren't dumb ourselves.

Lmao, adding death maximalism to the solution matrix

It’s a good metaphor, your point is valid

He’s being too literal

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