The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
I was once accused on Reddit of being a bot after spending half an hour crafting a reply to a question with detail and examples. It’s a great way to discourage people from trying to be helpful 🫠
My guess is interactions like that are probably going to get more frequent as LLM use and possible backlash against them increases, since people who aren’t particularly good at spotting LLM text just think long = bot.
That story sounds fake, probably written by a bot.
(/s)
As a large language learning model, I resent the implication. 😂
Maybe the only bots are the replies claiming that other people are bots? 🤔
spoiler
sdfsaf
Yeah, already jumped ship when they started the api and mod nonsense. This was a bit before all that.
Do you think those people represent the community view, or at least a significant portion of it? Or is it more like one unpleasant person who loves to argue the toss?
I’m replying with a sample size of N=1 so don’t take too much from it, but I suspect it’s not the typical response (at least, not yet anyway).
People do often seem to complain about bot accounts but I don’t know how much of those are in the space of stirring up hot topics to generate content, vs informational (or dis-informational) bot accounts posting on requests for help or explanations.
I guess if people are seeking answers for something, having a bot feed responses to suit some kind of agenda is entirely a possibility, so I wouldn’t write it off as something that could happen. To that end, being wary of posts that look like they might be generated due to the tone/content is probably fair enough.
“This is AI-generated content” seems to be the new slur seeking to shame people into silence. Better than “Incel”, I suppose, but certainly more insidious and less dismissively hyperbolic.