Comment by brokenkebab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brokenkebab | Hacker News Reader

It's one of those discoveries of "the end of the X as we know it", but actually have been existing for quite a long time already.

The author somehow misses the fact that governments has been engaging small number of opinionmaking professionals (journalists, advertisers, writers, celebs etc.) to create the feeling of majority support since the time when majority opinion became important. State controlled TV, and radio existed for decades, and they always talk on behalf of "majority" which supports gov't.

And in a more democratic country a small number of people who do news, or control social platforms can do the same out of solidarity, shared economic interests, or just because.

To say that thousands generated Twitter accounts are more powerful than Twitter itself, or even more than TV channels used to be just 30 years ago is obviuos exaggeration.

We have been living with this for quite a long time already, and while it's often works, one can't do it for a long time, because there will be inevitable cultural response: people stop believing, or just paying attention - examples are all over the recent history.

Definitely,

Moreover, the claim that GPT-3 is a good tool for astroturfing is unproven so far and I am extremely skeptical. I don't think the supply of trollish garbage has even been the barrier to troll-speech shutting down constructive speech. I don't think even the limit on the ability of individual, "real" people to spout Trollish garbage has been the limit.

In the GPT-3 text I've read and the GPT-2 systems I've played with, what I read is a system that "weaves" a group of sentences that seem "well written and plausible" on the surface (maybe more well and more plausible than a lot of trolls). But any detailed look seems to show each reason step as both implausible and "weird", senseless. It's impressive but it's got the "talking dog effect" - people are going to be impressed by a talking dog even if the dog's statements aren't impressive otherwise.

Moreover, I think most would-be astroturfers have very specific aims. "Because of value X shared by group Y, group Y should hate group Z and like group Q", "Politician X violates strong social taboo Y" and similar formulas. Fifty people in boiler room in a third world country can be hired to make variations on the basic "payload" the astroturfer specifies for less than one silicon valley data scientist customizing GPT-3 and they have less chance of producing GPT-3 weirdness IMO.

Some even larger-scale hybrid system might automate the process further. But for the purposes of the astroturfer, it's hardly necessary.

> But any detailed look seems to show each reason step as both implausible and "weird", senseless.

Trouble here is that we're having this discussion in one of the most unusually concerned-with-logic spaces on the web. Your average facebook user isn't doing a detailed analysis of logical steps in a theory. They see something say "wind power bad" and that's that. Wind power bad.

If you read my whole comment, yes, trolls are indeed just "wind power bad" and you don't need GPT-3 for that. You've had that forever.

GPT-3 has this quality that yes, it's very impressive but much less useful for a purpose than such impressiveness suggests. Like much of current AI, imo. Certainly there are exception, valuable uses, but still.

Nobody says you need it, just that it can make the prevalence of more sophisticated WindPowerBad bots much worse.

> Moreover, the claim that GPT-3 is a good tool for astroturfing is unproven so far and I am extremely skeptical.

Fully agreed. These great "I've only clicked next ten times" examples are nice and all, but usually are still going nowhere. On the other hand, GPT-3 _is_ pretty good, even when it needs some form of human curation. At some GPT-n we _will_ have this problem (at least with a high probability), so the point still stands.

> I don't think even the limit on the ability of individual, "real" people to spout Trollish garbage has been the limit.

That's probably true, though.

It's been happening since the 70s. Go back and watch the Church Committee congressional hearings. The CIA admitted to having key players in the magazine industry all around the US. When asked if they were involved in TV, they refused to answer outside of closed session.

It is absolutely reasonable to assume much of the major TV and radio narratives we take in the US today are directly influenced by the government. It's also influenced heavily by Big Tech and industry players, to the point where we're not truly getting any unfiltered narrative, compared to just following random actual people on the ground on Twitter.

This is the classic "Manufacturing Consent" narrative/conspiracy theory, at least when "engaging" implies (sometimes) "pays".

You may not mean it that way, but rather "talks to/adjusts its messaging". In that sense, it's quite obviously true, but just... not quite as sinister?

Some people have more influence because they people have come to enjoy, trust, or otherwise seek it. Sometimes, this dynamic is formalized by putting them into position with in-built distribution advantages, such as TV personality or editorial writer.

There is nothing wrong with that. "Opinion-having" is a skill like any other, and it would be strange to make it the one category where quality does not lead to more widespread consumption.

The US is also divided in a way not seen for generations. I don't quite see how one can look at the state of politics today and complain about a lack of choices, or imply that "they are all the same". If there is some cabal of mighty though-leaders, they certainly failed quite spectacular in 2016, when the Republican establishment was opposed to the current president at least as much as the Democratic party.

Indeed, you acknowledge the possibility that opinion-makers aren't on-board for rather mundane, individual reasons with the reference to "more democratic countries". I posit that even in the US, a majority does, in principle, support "the system". The left-wing critics of capitalism I know would be perfectly happy with something like the "Nordic Model" of social democracy, which is a set of policies entirely consistent with the current political structure of the US.

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