
Ask HN: How will NLP models affect online discussion? - daenz
With the recent public advances in NLP[0], I can&#x27;t help but wonder if&#x2F;when it will become a common suspicion that people are arguing with advanced bots. It doesn&#x27;t take an expert to see how these sophisticated language models could be used to broadly target narratives online with counter-narratives through sock puppet accounts.<p>Imagine being in control of a fleet of a million social media bots, all with distinct ways of writing and wording their arguments, all with the capacity to engage content that passes through a sentiment analysis and classification filter. A million social media bots, which could all push, say, pro-life, or anti-gun narratives, generating massive amounts of coherent text on the subject. They can engage with dissenters automatically, endlessly, with a demoralizing amount of content, using multiple accounts to reinforce eachother.<p>Do you foresee some form of this happening? What do you think will be the outcome? If it happens, will people be aware of it, or will it be labeled a conspiracy theory? Have state actors been doing this for awhile now? How will people regain trust in one another if there is a looming suspicion that you are not engaging with someone genuine? Are services where conversation can take place prepared to verify and ban non-humans users on a massive scale?<p>0. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openai&#x2F;gpt-3
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gas9S9zw3P9c
A few thoughts:

1\. This has been possible for a while. GPT-3 is impressive, but I don't see
it enabling too many fundamentally new things because many interesting
applications are in the tails of the distribution where you don't have data.
You can spam social media using simpler techniques based on smaller generative
models (well before GPT, but still recent as in ~5 years ago), paraphrasing,
and crowdsourcing. Running GPT-3 inference is quite expensive right now, but
of course costs will go down over time. I'm not sure how much the lower budget
will matter though - politics and large companies have had a big enough budget
to do this anyway and it probably has been happening. The costs for this have
been low enough for a while.

2\. What makes an argument made by a machine less valid than an argument made
by a human? If the machine can make a valid argument by pattern-matching your
text to historical data and responses, why is that bad? That's what humans do
as well, just more unconsciously.

3\. I believe the culture around this will and has been changing. There are
already bots everywhere, and people are slowly getting used to it. I believe
there will be places where you can interact with verified humans, but not to
argue or get facts (why would you want to talk to humans for that? They're bad
at it.), but rather to foster relationships and get emotional support.

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patatino
I do not know if the outcome changes much, most people don't research stuff
because they want to form an opinion, they are looking for others confirming
their already made-up opinion.

It is the same with politicians, both sides show evidence why they are right
and the others are wrong. Who can I believe? I have no clue. If I'm interested
in a topic I'm gonna research it myself, otherwise, I just listen to my gut
feeling.

~~~
gas9S9zw3P9c
I think this is true, but I don't think most people are aware of this. As the
world becomes swamped with fake news and content of all forms, more people
will realize that humans are not the rational beings they think they were.
Perhaps that will result in more services that optimize for emotional well-
being, i.e. the opposite of the Instagram and Facebook's.

