- 45 minutes
You can absolutely still believe things on the internet. AI has changed very little in this regard.
- 2 hours
Just need to figure out who to trust. Some fact checking is also helpful and has always been.
2 hoursI don’t need to change your mind, I agree completely. Something I wrote a couple weeks ago:
My unsolicited rant:
The technology is good and anyone who says it’s “just autocorrect” are wrong. Having said that, I agree that LLMs are useful really for nothing more than low-risk, personal research and/or signposting to other sources. It’s in no way a replacement for a human (unless your definition of what a human does is that it’s just a thing that produces words at you - in which case, you’re probably a middle manager - very myopic, regardless). It’s also not appropriate for anything financial, professional, or confidential. Here, the first L in LLM is a hindrance. Local, small language models are more appropriate and cost-effective here.
Anyway. I don’t “use AI” like some people but over the last year I’ve used my access to Proton’s Lumo (already included in my subscription) a handful of times and been pleased with the results. The way that I see it is that all the LLM libraries are trained almost entirely on Reddit or websites that stole their content from Reddit anyway, so use it like you would Reddit: “LGBT horror movies before 2000,” “Summarize and cite criticisms of Camille Paglia,” “Was Bioshock 2 well-received at launch?” All very low-stakes. Doesn’t really matter. Could’ve been a Reddit thread, but it’s likely that any response there would’ve been a middleman for an AI answer anyway.
Anyway. More: Call it cope but I’ve been developing a theory/outlook that the internet as a thing is basically dead and that the Pandora’s Box of LLM tech, which can produce a basically infinite amount of what was once the internet’s currency (read: information, but really: text), has killed it. The Fediverse is utopian but I don’t think anyone here really believes it will ever be anything more than a cluster of fringe communities. Having said that, I justify good LLM use (like mine, lucky that) as being the “New Game Plus” mode of the internet. Everything is already there, everything’s unlocked. There is no challenge. It’s kind of cheating and you’re not really supposed to play the game like that. But at the same time, there is no going back to the real beginning, I just have the option of nostalgically re-creating it by going to old.reddit or postfixing before:2022 to all my
GoogleDDG searches. Fun, and game-ish in it’s own right, but also artificially limiting for no reasons beyond that./rant
Didn’t even know proton had a chatbot, tho offhand I can’t remember if I’ve set up a paid account yet. Been too busy and mentally strained the last couple of years to even keep up with all my emails, I’ve still got >100 unreads (not the important ones).
Also I appreciate the bit of self-awareness in your rant. People have become so dogmatic nowadays there’s not a lot of that going around. Also glad to see someone else pumping DDG.
Tho I myself have just made the jump to Lemmy specifically because old.reddit has become locked to lurkers. I even still have a reddit account (which admittedly I hadn’t really used to do more than vote and search for subreddits since the API changes) but I’ve never wanted to use it on my phone so now the mobile reddit experience for me is completely blocked off. Just kinda feels like invoking old.reddit now after they locked it behind an account is a bit off the mark.
Lately whenever I hear about a bill or a vote I find it on Congress.gov
There is a concerning number of people who think the USA and Israel are already a combined military and that the NDAA 2027 has been passed.
But, hey, if they vote GOP out because of it then all the better.
