Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?

I don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths.

Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.

Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced.

LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.

LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.

You are shadowbanned and have been writing mostly into the void for the last three months.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067472

I'm confused, how can I see it, for example?

Looks to me that the ban was reversed at some point. The GP's comments are quite reachable.

Enable showdead and scroll through their history

They have a lot of dead comments, and their recent comments are all non-dead.

Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.

Strangely, I'm still seeing the comment. How does that work?

A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.

I wonder how that algorithm works. At the risk of discussing a bit of a taboo topic (are there rules against this? there might be...), I've never vouched for a comment and had it come alive. I have many times been the final nail in a comment where my flag caused it to die, but I have never seen the opposite with vouch.

Interesting. Every time I've ever vouched a comment, it came alive. (Though the last one I vouched ended up dead again after enough people flagged it, oops. I hope that doesn't mean I lost my power. In my defense, it was flagged to death based on being AI [apparently], which I didn't pick up the signal on, nothing super terrible / controversial.)

You are probably shadowbanned from flagging and vouching, which is separate from a commenting and posting shadowban. A shadowbanned comment only requires one vouch to come alive. A comment that is dead because of excessive flags or moderator action may require more.

> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.

maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)

> Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?

A printing press that does the thinking for you.

A thinking press?

> A thinking press?

Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.

Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.

WALL-E captured this sentiment.

What was the scapegoating in WALL-E?

That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.

You get paid for having liability attach to you. Soon it may be the only thing you could be paid for.

Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.

It may not even legal liability, just blame.

For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.

Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.

Your job description won't say scapegoat - that would be too obvious. It'll be more like how Amazon drivers are forced to piss in jugs while driving.