alt Hacker NewsThe Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
Part 1 was discussed here: ML promises to be profoundly weird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (571 comments)
Comments
Best line:
> I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.
It's hard to say it's not actively happening. And we don't even know it, don't realize it? don't care?
(Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)
It's kind of an aside in the post, but connecting LLMs and Searle's Chinese Room argument is a brilliant observation. Although there are people who believe LLMs are really thinking, it's mostly confirming that the Turing test wasn't the right way to test this.
Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.
> I can think of a few good myths for today’s “AI”. Searle’s Chinese room comes to mind, as does Chalmers’ philosophical zombie. Peter Watts’ Blindsight draws on these concepts to ask what happens when humans come into contact with unconscious intelligence—I think the closest analogue for LLM behavior might be Blindsight’s Rorschach.
LLM's remind me of sprites, pixies, and the like, who are situationally helpful but require constant supervision. We're like modern magicians who learned how to summon these sorts of spirits and bind them -- imperfectly -- to our will. But their perception of truth and reality is "through the looking glass" relative to our own. They aren't lying, from their own frame of reference, even though what they say is untrue relative to ours.
If 'aphyr is reading comments here, I'm curious: have you read Joseph Weizenbaum?
If fear is the mind-killer, then sexy chatbots are the libido-killer, for me. Hard no.
This has already happened with media for the past 100+ years. We're shown what companies and governments want us to see. People develop parasocial relationships with people they see on tv...
> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act
NSFW blog content on HN? Really?
> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…”
May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)