“Before LLM’s there was_____”

I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable.

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dpoloncsak 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do LLMs require that much more data than the tradional ML approaches we've seen over the years?

	▲	sigmoid10 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. This is pretty well established. Neural networks in general are considerably less sample-efficient than traditional ML methods. The reason they became so successful is that they scale better as you increase training data and model size. But only with modern compute power they became useful outside of academic toy model applications.
	▲	Forgeties79 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That’s not the issue I’m hitting here primarily but yes. My concern is that I can open up chatGPT and even with a free, “anonymous” account run an assembly line generating tens of thousands of words a day to pump to Twitter that are good enough to prop up multiple fake accounts and cause mayhem. Now make it thousands of people like me doing it. Now add funding and political orgs. Add company leadership that turns a blind eye so long as it drives engagement. This scale and pipeline wasn’t possible 5 years ago, even if we clearly see the throughline. I’m not even getting into fake images either. That used to require some know how. There are basically no hurdles and even if most people learn it’s fake, millions likely won’t. If you’re a little lucky, less scrupulous “news” outlets will amplify it for you as well for free.

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b00ty4breakfast 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really hate this when it's something negative that humans also do. It's like, yeah, people do do that, but why are we automating {negativeTrait}?

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ToucanLoucan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable.

I have the faintest possible hope that such things are going to be the death knell of social media. Yeah a lot of credulous idiots are happily giving AI thirst traps their money for stroking their confirmation bias, but that's just who's left at this point. It feels like every social media app I use is gradually bleeding users who aren't hopelessly addicted to the dopamine treadmill, because what's left is just plain unappealing to them, which selects for the people who are most vulnerable to AI shit, which is far from ideal, but also means those platforms are comprised ever more of that vulnerable population and nobody else. And the problem with all these businesses going through that is without a diverse, growing audience, you just become InfoWars, slinging the same slop to the same people every day, and every ounce of said slop is great for what's left of your audience, but absolute garbage for getting anyone new in it. And it just goes on that way until you sputter out and die (or harass the wrong group of parents I guess).

I wish all social media sites a very haha die in a fire.

	▲	dpoloncsak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mate you're on a social media site right now that often has AI-generated content displayed at the top of whats "trending". Sure the general user-base does a better job here flagging that sort of stuff, as AI seems to be a shared interest in much of the community, but it still sneaks it's way by