Cool post from @RichardHanania where he shows the results of a "Turing test" on his writing. I personally found it very easy to identify what was AI written, but around half of respondents did not.
This has really interesting implications regarding how public opinion will be shaped in the AI era, and who our "storytellers" will be, as Richard himself notes.
It seems that such results point towards a trend predicted by @danwilliamsphil and others, where AI will lead to clustering around "expert consensus" and a de-democratization of opinions -- the opposite of what we saw with the internet.
The interesting thing is that AI is arriving on a vacuum of intellectual authority, as trust in academia has been eroded. Obviously, academic publications still form a large part of its training corpus, but I think academic opinion will be less relevant relative to its volume at least. Especially in non technical fields.
So who will be the shapers of public opinion in the AI era, then?
We already saw that those who have written a lot on the internet, for example rationalists and effective altruists, seem to have their opinions overrepresented. This might not just about volume, but also the style of their argumentation (very indexed on logical coherence), which might be favored by LLMs.
But how will this look like in the future? Important question imo.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/can-ai-replace-me-already
