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fidotronyesterday at 7:57 PM3 repliesview on HN

The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct. Those properties are in the eye of the beholder. If they're human or not is beside the point.

After all, no one knows I'm a dog.


Replies

LeifCarrotsonyesterday at 8:15 PM

No, those properties are tied to the state of mind and experiences of the human, dog, or LLM behind any given comment.

When someone posts:

> You could use Redis for that, sure, I've run it and it wasn't as hard as some people seem to fear, but in hindsight I'd prefer some good hardware and a Postgres server: that can scale to several million daily users with your workload, and is much easier to design around at this stage of your site.

then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author. You can't know whether that's good advice or not without being the author, and if that's posted by someone you trust it has value.

An LLM could be prompted to pretend they're an experienced DBA and to comment on a thread, and might produce that sentence, or if the temperature is a little different it might just say that you should start with Redis because then you don't have to redesign your whole business when Postgres won't scale anymore.

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AlecSchueleryesterday at 8:04 PM

> The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct.

This already falls apart though. There are while categories of things which I find "incorrect" and would take up as an argument with a fellow human. But trying to change the mind of an LLM just feels like a waste of my time.

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craftkilleryesterday at 8:11 PM

Not necessarily. Using AI you can trivially perform astroturfing campaigns to influence public perception. That doesn't really fall on the interesting or correctness spectrums. For example, if 90% of the comments online are claiming birds aren't real with a serious tone, you might convince people to fall into that delusion. It becomes "common knowledge" rather than a fringe theory. But if comments reflect reality then only a tiny portion of people have learned the truth about birds, so people will read those claims with more skepticism.

(naturally "birds aren't real" is a correct vs not correct thing, but the same can be applied to many less-objective things like the best mechanical keyboard or the morality of a war)