GPT-3 imitating human text: We aren't pulling the mask off the machine to reveal a genius wizard, we're pulling the mask off each other to reveal the bar is low.

Still, in places where very average people read very average comments all day long (reddit, etc) I think we can expect a Commentdämmerung moment in the near future.

Imagine you want to stonewall a thread about a topic. Or every thread about a topic. Any time the topic is made,

comments start rolling in. People arguing with each other along familiar lines. The same back and forth stuff like usual. Except this time, it's all bots, and it's indistinguishable because the speech patterns of average people are... average. And it's way, way louder.

How do you get to the point, then, where you're only filtering by human comments? What happens when its 99% bot comments? Will you know? Will you be influenced?

Will the average person be influenced? If advertising and the idea of saying something over and over works, and words

are free, and you can GPT-3 your hand-rolled (or state authorized) propaganda every day in every comment thread in every forum to look like an average person is advocating for X, will other average people be more convinced of X?

This is the twilight of the comment sections.

The creepy scenario is someone making up conspiracy theories or lies so wild that no respectable person would fall for them, then using GPT-3 to make it look like consensus is real, and convince millions via synthetic social pressure. https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1283940950411182080

Or people sometimes edit wikipedia, write an article and use wiki as a source, then several days later change Wikipedia to use the article as a source. A synthetic citation. What's that look like at scale?

Remember: The bar for writing is low.

I don't think the future will be dark. But I think social networks and forum sites will change. They won't compete over who has the biggest piles of content (user counts), they will compete over context (authenticity, real friends, small discussions).

In other words, the next reddit, twitter, & facebook etc competitors will not look like reddit, twitter & facebook.

They will be smaller by design, harder to get in to, and slower-paced. And they'll be better. Note that by solving the GPT-3 problem, you solve the troll problem.

(this thread was made using GPT-3 with @Aelkus source material)