Should AI companies be liable for LLM output?
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Honestly, that's a tough one. We had it relatively easy. There was the usual mainstream media propaganda, but the Internet of the time offered a place for honest conversation. That's scarce now and under constant threat. I don't see anything on the horizon replacing it unless the Euro censorship pushes drive everyone to the darkweb, which would probably be the best outcome. Not to go full black-pill, but think about it:
What are the odds that someone on the younger side is functionally literate even if they make an above-average effort to be informed? And it's by design, outside of their control. What sane control information do they have to cross-check things against? It's bleak. Unless you have a root of trust, you're going to be cross-checking garbage against garbage. If you get lucky enough, maybe you accidentally come across enough truth that one day it clicks and upends everything you know, but I don't think that's especially common.
Even in the Soviet Union people could still properly read, and that was a place where you couldn't tell jokes without going to jail. I don't think the environment of the times is much excuse.
This isn't something that has to be handed to you. It's a matter of effort. The true problem we have is laziness and complacency
I think we're arguing past one another. I'm not arguing that we don't have a laziness and complacency issue. I'm saying that it's become more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Per effort, the achieved literacy is less. The laziness and complacency compounds with it.
Sure. Now increase the number of books they had access to by a factor of 10,000 but make all the new ones a mix of propaganda, AI-generated nonsense, and bad fanfic.
I'm not trying to absolve them of their lack of effort. I'm just saying they're in a markedly different situation than people born 20+ years prior.
And I'm pointing out that in living memory there existed a tyrannical society whereby nothing existed except state dictated information and we still had higher quality people than we do now. I lived through this tyrannical society myself, although the tail end of it thankfully for me. Shit was worse than it is now overall.
The sludge that is the internet isn't the proximate cause here imo.
Yes it's shitty. Yes the internet is a pale shade of what it once was and most things of use have been wrung out of it and replaced with junk.
But that's not why idiots try to cook chicken in Pepto Bismal.
I think being flooded with garbage from a thousand different angles may have a worse impact than having to differentiate between one flavor of propaganda and everything else. Like filtering out a specific, recognizable signal vs. being jammed by noise. How often was it that you couldn't tell if a given piece of information was state-dictated or not?
I think we agree that laziness, complacency, and a thoroughly poisoned well are all problems. Not much point in debating the exact magnitude of each.
And to your point, OP says registered US voters so these idiots are at least 18.
I want to point out that we have been deliberately teaching people how to read incorrectly for a long time now. The increasing illiteracy rates are a feature, not a bug for the elite.