• rottingleaf@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    I’ve just thought that LLMs are good for two opposite kinds of people:

    1. The obvious, psychopaths or people behaving like them, who think they’ll distort the concept of truth and possessing such technologies will make their approach to society easier.

    2. The people like me, who know that no random message written or picture drawn can be trusted anyway, so it’s better to overload the humanity with fakes so that it learned this simple truth.

    I think both are right to some extent. Still it won’t work the exact way they want.

    It’s like when Bolsheviks, when fighting illiteracy, basically conditioned people literate in first generation to think that everything officially printed is true, even that something being officially printed is identical to true, and that the religious darkness and ignorance is to doubt that. Like - blind belief is science and knowledge, and skepticism is darkness and ignorance. What could go wrong.

    And then in Stalin’s years there were shortened evening education courses for workers. Where, well, they’d learn how to calculate something in some specialty, but without depth and context.

    So you’d get a lot of engineers capable of really building and operating things and believing they could build and operate even more complex things (like spaceships eventually, or some planet-wide railway system, or whatever), but not understanding the context, the philosophy of science even. What’s worse is that they’d think they understand that well, because they’d have “scientific communism” about materialism and dialectics in their education.

    So, back to the subject - they got a lot of people to believe all they officially printed on paper for a generation or even two. And those who didn’t would still indirectly believe a lot of it from their parents or peers.

    But eventually, even if the damage is already done, right now not believing everything even from a “respectable” source is a good trait of many ex-Soviet people. Easier to notice among them than among Americans.

    EDIT:

    About that woman - this works too. She will see that a chatbot can’t provide depth when she wants it. I just hope she won’t feel too bad that moment.