“Sort By Controversial”, 2018-10-30 (; backlinks; similar):
[Contemporary SF short story; inspired by NN text generation, social media dynamics, clickbait, and debates like ‘the dress’.
Alexander imagines AI natural language processing systems like GPT-3 run amok after being trained to maximize user reactions to create clickbait (like RLHF), leading to learning to generate scissor statements: claims which are maximally controversial and divide the population 50–50 between those who find the statement obviously correct and moral, and those who find it equally obviously false and immoral.
The mass production of scissor statements leads to intractable polarizing debates, contempt, civil war, and the collapse of civilizatio.]
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