{"id":1676,"date":"2023-02-08T23:05:32","date_gmt":"2023-02-08T23:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1676"},"modified":"2023-02-12T13:35:54","modified_gmt":"2023-02-12T13:35:54","slug":"large-lms-disinformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/large-lms-disinformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Large LMs and disinformation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have never understood the idea that large LMs are uniquely positioned to enable the propagation of disinformation. Let us stipulate, for sake of argument, that large LMs can generate high-quality disinformation and that its artificial quality (i.e., not generated by human writers) cannot be reliably detected either by human readers nor by computational means. At the same time, I know of no reason to suppose that large LMs can generate <em>better<\/em> (less detectable, more plausible) disinformation than can human writers. Then, it is hard to see what advantage there is to using large LMs for disinformation generation beyond a possible economic benefit realized by firing PR writers and replacing them with &#8220;prompt engineers&#8221;. Ignoring the dubious economics\u2014copywriters are cheap, engineers are expensive\u2014there is a presupposition that disinformation needs to scale, i.e., be generated in bulk, but I see no reason to suppose this either. Disinformation, it seems to me, comes to us either in the form of &#8220;big lies&#8221; from sources deemed reputable by journalists and lay audiences (think WMDs), or increasingly, from the crowds (think Qanon).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have never understood the idea that large LMs are uniquely positioned to enable the propagation of disinformation. Let us stipulate, for sake of argument, that large LMs can generate high-quality disinformation and that its artificial quality (i.e., not generated by human writers) cannot be reliably detected either by human readers nor by computational means. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/large-lms-disinformation\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Large LMs and disinformation&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-language","category-nlp","category-politics","post_format-post-format-aside"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1677,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions\/1677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}