I was thinking about this after a discussion at work about large language models (LLMs) - the initial scrape of the internet before Chat GPT become publicly usable was probably the last truly high quality scrape of human-made content any model will get. The second Chat GPT went public, the data pool became tainted with people publishing information from it. Future language models will have increasingly large percentages of their data tainted by AI-generated content, skewing the results away from how humans actually write. To get actual human content, they may need to turn to transcriptions of audio recordings or phone calls for training, and even that wouldn’t be quite correct because people write differently than they speak.
I sort of wonder if eventually people will start being influenced in how they choose to write based on seeing this AI content. If teachers use AI-generated texts in school lessons, especially at lower levels, will that effect how kids end up writing and formatting their work? It’s weird to think about the wider implications of how this AI stuff will ultimately impact society.
What’s your predictions? Is there a future where AI can get a clean, human-made scrape? Are we doomed to start writing like AIs?
Yep. Writing a good prompt is a skill like writing a good search query. Most people don’t realize how much thought really needs to go into it. Then it’ll need to be edited for both the human touch and for accuracy.
I think you’re spot on. I also think that it will be like what several large computer manufacturers used to do for tech support (maybe still do? I don’t work that side of things anymore). They used to outsource to India until, due to poor oversight and language barriers, the quality of their tech support was so bad that they had to bring it back to the US because they were losing customers. Now it will be content suppliers generating endless stuff with only LLMs in an attempt to save a buck, realizing that their customers are no longer viewing their sites, bringing humans back in to do most of it, then cycling through that on and off until they find a balance or completely destroy their reputation.