Page 44 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2023

The inevitability of junk

The power of large language models lies in their ability to generate text that resembles what could only
have been produced by humans before. For the time being, their output can rarely be classified as original
or brilliant; more often than not, it is derivative and superficial. But therein lies the rub - most of the content
that humans produce is derivative and superficial, too.

Here's an assortment of headlines from some of the best publishers of online content, to illustrate my
point:

(screenshots taken by the author from cnn.com, nytimes.com, twitter.com, forbes.com and nbcnews.com)

We've already seen how, over the past 20 years, respectable outlets have gone from old-school
journalism to elephants blowing bubbles. What do we expect to happen if the production of such bubbles
takes 1/10th of the time it previously took? Or perhaps 1/100th?

As a general rule, lower cost results in higher quantity. And so, just as the increase in spam made our
emails unusable without spam filters, the use of LLMs in online writing will make the entire internet
unusable without junk filters.

AI vs AI

If we continue to follow the spam analogy, we might suspect that filtering junk is - in the general sense -
an unsolvable problem. Every filter we create, no matter how perfect it is at a particular moment in time,
will inevitably be circumvented by new tools and techniques.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2023 Edition 44
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