It's one of those discoveries of "the end of the X as we know it", but actually have been existing for quite a long time already.<p>The author somehow misses the fact that governments has been engaging small number of opinionmaking professionals (journalists, advertisers, writers, celebs etc.) to create the feeling of majority support since the time when majority opinion became important. State controlled TV, and radio existed for decades, and they always talk on behalf of "majority" which supports gov't.<p>And in a more democratic country a small number of people who do news, or control social platforms can do the same out of solidarity, shared economic interests, or just because.<p>To say that thousands generated Twitter accounts are more powerful than Twitter itself, or even more than TV channels used to be just 30 years ago is obviuos exaggeration.<p>We have been living with this for quite a long time already, and while it's often works, one can't do it for a long time, because there will be inevitable cultural response: people stop believing, or just paying attention - examples are all over the recent history.
Curiously, the author "Jay Riverlong" doesn't appear to exist prior to a month ago, right around the time when GPT-3 came out. For a "professional poker player" who "travelled extensively throughout South America and Europe", it is interesting. Could be a pseudonym, but it's hard to tell whether the author is a real person.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=riverlong" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=riverlong</a><p><a href="https://github.com/jayriverlong" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jayriverlong</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/jayriverlong" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jayriverlong</a><p><a href="https://jayriverlong.github.io/about/" rel="nofollow">https://jayriverlong.github.io/about/</a><p>edit: I have pinged him on Twitter. Let's see what happens. <a href="https://twitter.com/breandan/status/1287148374077186059" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/breandan/status/1287148374077186059</a>
This isn't new and it's not even a technological issue. This is how everyone in a minority position feels. be that an expert, a religious minority, a sexual minority, or anyone else who faces a crowd. In 1931 it was <i>100 Authors against Einstein</i>.<p>I seriously wonder why it took some people twitter and gpt-3 to figure out that "more speech is the solution to bad speech" is actually complete nonsense that people who work at Facebook repeat because it increases their stock value.<p>The author isn't even really looking for free speech, they're just re-using the term because it's apparently the only acceptable adjective in front of 'speech'. What the author is figuring out is that free expression doesn't necessary produce truth or justice.
Zero-knowledge proofs solve this problem. Hell, even simple private key cryptography solves this problem. Distribute private keys to anonymous individuals who somehow prove their eligibility and only allow key holders to participate in the community. Easy peasy.
> the marginal cost of distributing astroturfed propaganda online has firmly hit zero.<p>This is just not true. GPT-3 costs money to train, use, customize, and maintain. I would guess that paying people is still the more cost effective way to astroturf.<p>Also, if the argument is we have to ban anonymity, I strongly disagree. Obviously people shouldn't carelessly trust anonymous sources, but that's just common sense. Banning anonymity would prevent people anonymously sharing insight into companies, whistleblowing, talking freely without threatening their employment (e.g. SSC), etc. It would increase the chances of physical threat due to online action, and it would provide the people in power with far to much sway over speech.
More speech doesn't prevent anyone from speaking. You're mistaking a negative liberty, the idea of free speech, for a positive liberty, the idea that everyone should have an equal amount of attention.
I never expected to see <i>"On the internet, nobody knows your a dog"</i> become a new moral panic.<p>Here's the pragmatic solution that doesn't involve entrusting so much power to governments: communicate with people you know. If you choose to communicate with strangers, be aware that they may be lying about anything they say.
Anonymous - in what context? For most purposes, a pseudonymous account is anonymous. Not that many people can doxx my account here at HN, but I'm not even trying to be anonymous here.<p>Anonymity towards a state actor or similar is very different problem and as is shown by TOR, it's a rather hard problem to solve even without considering GPT-3.
In journalism, anonymous reports are verified to some extent by the journalists. You're basically relying on the newspaper's reputation. This might work in other cases, where you have some known reputable third party that can vouch for the anonymous account, at least to verify that they're a real person and not a sock puppet.<p>Wikipedia does the opposite, where most editors are anonymous and untrusted worker bees, but they are supposed to cite reliable sources. That can work too. Teach a GPT-3 successor to cite things correctly and you might have something useful, sort of like a search engine that can combine data from multiple places.<p>But if all you have is an anonymous account, it's basically a rumor and you shouldn't trust it. Isn't it rather weird to expect strangers on the Internet to believe what we say without knowing anything about us?
Surprisingly confused. Some kernel of truth in here.<p>It's not really free speech that's at issue here is it?
It's discourse populated by other human beings, or the "right" to be clearly heard. That's already contested, without AI. No transparent attribution.
This idea is explored in the first part of Neal Stephenson's novel from last year,<i>Fall; or Dodge in Hell</i>. I'm still reading so no spoilers please.
You can say what you want, but you've never had the right to force people to listen to what you say.<p>I don't see what has changed in that regard.<p>Perhaps no one ever read your banner supporting X in the first place...
I know you got your profile photo off thispersondoesnotexist.com. There is a better adversary network out there and it can detect you, FYI.<p>2A224B042AC1EA9BF37F0FD43C36AF022C2ADEAB
I've thought this for many years, but I've never come up with so succinct and perfect a way of expressing it. Anonymity prevents free speech by making it easy to just drown any legitimate speech or valuable information in a torrent of bullshit.<p>This was always somewhat true due to the prevalence of human trolls and propagandists, but the ability to generate content automatically makes the problem orders of magnitude worse.<p>In the world of deep fakes and stuff like GPT-3 (which can be used for what amounts to deep fakes for text), any information without clear provenance is <i>worse</i> than worthless. It's a form of pollution whose result is to confuse, misdirect, misinform/disinform, and indoctrinate, and it's impossible to use it for anything legitimate since it's completely unverifiable and could easily be fake.<p>Right now it's possible to detect deep fakes, but it probably won't be long until the technology is good enough that this is very hard.<p>Then there's the fact that a lot of people won't even check. People just believe claims in stupid memes and forward them.<p>Example: a photo of a supposed Denver International Airport mural depicting kids in masks with different flags on them was going around a while back. The claim was that this showed some kind of foreknowledge of COVID-19 going all the way back to the 1990s. Turns out the photo was of a recent painting that was <i>not</i> from DIA. It was totally fake. I've still seen it making the rounds.<p>I've been predicting that deep fakes will make an appearance this October in the Presidential election. I think there's a really good chance. It'll be at the last minute so nobody has time to perform any analysis or fact check anything.