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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out."

While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by some human who has taken the trouble to check it for accuracy before posting it.

Just one problem: what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI? Then there is no longer any other source of information available to check it against (or if there is, it's so hard to find that it might as well not be there at all).

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> what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI?

I don't find it credible that all content on the Internet is ever going to be generated by AI, and the two scenarios are wildly different.

What happens is you pick and choose, in the same way the fact that 99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper they're printed on doesn't make reading worthless.

To make an example many developers are painfully familiar with, if you google something about the C++ standard library, chances are the top results are pure and utter w3cschools-style garbage. What happens is I go on cppreference.com.

How do you figure out what are the good sources of information? You study. For real. With books.

>99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper they're printed on doesn't make reading worthless.

That seems a pretty extreme claim especially in the context of "in a bookstore." You may not be interested in a lot of the content but some publisher thought it worthwhile to edit and publish a given book and a bookstore thought it worth buying copies to take up shelf space. There may be a lot of mediocre content out there but a book on a bookshelf did pass hurdles to get there even if it's not to your taste or interest.

> Just one problem: what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI?

The vast majority of the content of the internet is junk now, how do people deal with that? They have specific known sources that they trust to faithfully relay primary works and/or to provide trustworthy analysis.

I was going to say books, then my colleague wrote an entire book using ChatGPT at work today.

Where are these known sources on the Internet that can be trusted to faithfully relay primary works and/or provide trustworthy analysis?

I can think of one of the former: Project Gutenberg, which has done a great job of making electronic versions of primary sources from throughout history available. But they don't help at all with deciding which primary sources to read.

I can't think of any of the latter. Every single source I'm aware of that claims to "provide trustworthy analysis" has failed to keep that promise.

But at least, at the moment, I can be reasonably sure that something on the Internet that purports to have been written by a human, actually was written by a human. So I can at least make use of my knowledge of humans to judge what is written. What happens when AIs can generate wrong content that I can't distinguish any more from wrong content written by a human? And then the AIs start claiming to be humans (after all, on the Internet, no one knows you're an AI)?

There is a simple solution to the AI spam issue (and spam in general) - a social trust graph at the heart of content aggregation and discovery. Associate all content with real humans and allow people to control their level of trust in other humans, then derive a trust score for content based on a weighted combination of your trust of the creator and the trust your friends put in the creator. When bad content shows up as trusted for a user and they "corrects" the system, that correction backpropagates trust penalties through the social graph. By allowing people to see when they lose trust, it creates a feedback loop that disincentivizes sharing/trusting garbage to preserve social trust.

That’s how PageRank effectively worked, and people created deep networks of pages voting for each other. To solve this problem for real you either need Sybil protection or to make it economically infeasible (impose a tax for making content available).

To some extent I have been wondering for a while if prioritizing Ads in Google Search is Google’s way of creating that economic barrier to spam content (for some meaning of spam) - you can take the fact that a brand is willing to spend money as some indication of “quality”.

Two points to note - first, if individual users have trust graphs rather than having a single global trust graph, this sort of gaming is basically impossible outside of exploits. Second, this behavior is detectable using clique detection and graph clustering, so if you're not limited by the constraints of a near real-time production system it's fairly straightforward to defeat it (or at least relegate it to unprofitability).

If you want to know what Hobbes really advocated for in Leviathan, you can go and read it. It's available off the Internet.

What to do when printing duties are handed off to statistical models that print the most likely sequence of words and punctuation given the author and topic, rather than reproducing the real historical text, I don't know. Hope someone kept old copies.

Ironically, another article on the HN front page makes this same point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864276

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