One of the most interesting aspects of the WoW forums is we’re in fact (still) discussing with actual humans. Other platforms like reddit are swarmed by bots, youtube and other social media outlets, same. Not sure by Discord, never used it. With the technological advancements, sometimes its even hard to distinguish real users from bots.
Here at least we can see each other characters and know thats an actual subscriber to the game, with a profile, achievement points, etc. Well, bots still exists, but are most likely in the game farming gold and stuff so I don’t think they bother engaging in mundane discussions!
Yet another fair point, but well, that can be the case more for thread starters right? With big walls of text. Not actual responses in an ongoing discussion
Now that you mention it, since Chatgpt has been a thing there has been a marked decrease in walls of text on the forums. I think people who have trouble organizing their thoughts are getting help from Chatgpt, which isn’t entirely a bad thing.
It is, since said wall of texts are usually incoherent because said people haven’t thought about what they actually want to say. Sure folks make mistakes or aren’t well-versed in writing out responses, but that doesn’t get better by:
Not writing out your own thoughts.
Hallucinating which LLMs do.
Doesn’t change that if incoherent nonsense comes in, incoherent nonsense is outputted.
AIs can be of tremendous help (I use Grammarly which is just a Grammar-focused “AI”), but when people replace thinking or believe their thinking got better because a LLM wrote it for them… That’s on average just going to be someone Dunning Kruger:ing themselves.
The answer isn’t “let an AI write my argument for me” it is to come up with a better argument. Which people don’t do if they don’t learn and the reality is that being told repeatedly “structure your text” is far more effective than trying to tell someone “use less ChatGPT.” Specifically because their argument for using a LLM is going to come straight from said LLM as well, having used zero critical thinking skills in the process.
All of this is to say though that these forums aren’t immune to bots, they aren’t immune to LLMs, and they aren’t immune to people arguing in bad faith. Whether it be because they think Twitter-style arguments somehow is a winning strategy, or because of the Dunning Kruger effect… there’s a lot of people who behave just like bots on these forums as well.
IDK, every once in a while I see a post and think… that’s Blizzard testing the waters with an idea which makes me wonder is it real, or is it part of a social media farm
So many people don’t even think for themselves and just copy paste whatever it is chatgpt writes. Half the time it’s not even relevent to the current state of the game or the conversation that was going on.
And that’s the part I think some people gloss over.
Using a LLM to help you reword or format a post isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’s been an increase in the number of posts that are entirely generated from ChatGPT where you might as well be talking TO ChatGPT directly as the only thing the other poster was doing is copy pasting messages back and forth between the forums and ChatGPT.
You might as well be talking to a bot in that situation because the only responses you’re getting is direct from ChatGPT.
Funnily enough having AI write code for you is useful if you’re too stupid to learn it like I am. Sure, the instructors discourage it, but the future will be entirely AI-written code anyway, so…
I have had conversations with people having had to explain that no, the Warcraft lore isn’t the same thing as what a hallucinating AI was saying. Instead of looking towards any Wiki or anything like that, they would just ask one of the multitude of web-browser AIs (don’t remember which one) and it just made up stuff that was easily disproven by just reading what it said.
It isn’t though. Yes, LLMs can write simple code as prototypes or proof of concepts if it is simple enough. But said code very rarely if ever is able to integrate properly, making it effectively into useless code that just causes errors.
Not really the case but even if one want to go down that doomer-route, that just makes it all the more important to understand code and why it isn’t working.
Yes, indeed fellow human, who is made of meat, as am I! It is very good we do not have those superior robotic intelligences here, working openly to engineer our inevitable demise.
Well, I better be going. I need to consume organic products to fuel my meat body. As we do!
It is a skill like any other. You learn it via practice, doing, and just… learning in general. No one is “born smart enough” to do anything. Literally anyone can learn to do it, just a question whether said person want to do what’s necessary to learn said skill or not.
Hard work is only half the battle. You need the capacity to learn first, otherwise you’re doing the mental equivalent of trying to exercise an amputated arm.
At the risk of off-topic… in my case here I’m looking at something as simple as using PHP to display a database and let me add or remove entries from it. You know, stuff 16 year old high school graduates are expected to be able to do. I can’t, because I’m too stupid to learn.
Sure, the instructors discourage it, but the future will be entirely AI-written code anyway, so…
