I was thinking about this after a discussion at work about large language models (LLMs) - the initial scrape of the internet before Chat GPT become publicly usable was probably the last truly high quality scrape of human-made content any model will get. The second Chat GPT went public, the data pool became tainted with people publishing information from it. Future language models will have increasingly large percentages of their data tainted by AI-generated content, skewing the results away from how humans actually write. To get actual human content, they may need to turn to transcriptions of audio recordings or phone calls for training, and even that wouldn’t be quite correct because people write differently than they speak.

I sort of wonder if eventually people will start being influenced in how they choose to write based on seeing this AI content. If teachers use AI-generated texts in school lessons, especially at lower levels, will that effect how kids end up writing and formatting their work? It’s weird to think about the wider implications of how this AI stuff will ultimately impact society.

What’s your predictions? Is there a future where AI can get a clean, human-made scrape? Are we doomed to start writing like AIs?

  • I don’t mind them charging a fee. The freemium model is nice and usually sustainable. It lets people pay for extra features but provides the free tier to those that don’t want to.

    I kinda wish we collectively started becoming okay with paying for internet-based products and services.

    Even something like beehaw. Why not pay a couple of bucks a month for something you get value and joy out of?

    I say this as a guy who runs Linux fulltime and uses mostly free and open source software, but who also donates to System76 (my OS’s maintainer) and to a few of the projects I really like.