Or at least, not always. I'm in plenty of online groups with people who have shown their trustworthiness and expertise. They are people with a reputation.

[–] Delphia@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

IKR. People these days dont realise that confidently incorrect people pre-exist facebook.

If you blindly do what ChatGPT says you deserve what happens to you.

[–] BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.zip 6 points 9 hours ago

Yeah but we automated the confidently incorrect idiot and every massive corporation is pushing the robo-idiot as a friend, confidant, tutor, assistant, and trustworthy source of accurate information. I'd rather have the confidently incorrect human than the lifeless simulacrum of one

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 10 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

People these days dont realise that confidently incorrect people pre-exist facebook.

It's different though.

If you were a flat earther in 1982, you probably would have a weird self published "newspaper" by someone 4 times a year, and two or three books and no platform beyond literally shouting on the street at people who all considered you a moron.

Nowadays, if you're a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas. They will also drag you along by pure crank magnetism into other bullshit. You can spread your bullshit far and wide, and since people are automatically served with similar content, you're even likely to find other idiots like you "in the wild", which is actually an algorithmic bubble.

Before, nobody you met in real life would agree with you. Nowadays, everyone you "meet" online agrees with you.

So yes, confidently incorrect people have always been there, but not in these numbers, and rarely to this level of confidence. That's why people react to vehemently, they rarely ever reach outside their bubble. Your ideas that the world is round aren't the general concept to them, they hear from flat earthers every single hour of the day.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago

Nowadays, if you're a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas.

And because crackpots like this are very engaged in their crackpottery, it's a great place to put ads. That means that the big Internet ad companies all want to be the ones to host those bullshit ideas.

Back in the day, the reason crackpot newspapers had to be self-published is that the big publishers didn't want to have anything to do with the crackpots. But, in the modern world, Google / Meta can find someone who wants to run an add to your crackpottery, so you get the same treatment as a big media publisher. In fact, you might get better treatment because crackpottery may be stickier than say the Boston Globe, so Google / Meta might prefer to work with you because it allows them to show more ads.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

However, this has worked wonders for my atheism!

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Sure but (and this goes to the other person who replied with much the same thing) there’s an order of magnitude of difference going on there, plus usually when someone says something wrong on a forum others usually show up to correct them.

AI responses have so far been very clearly a step down in reliability, so don’t be treating it as a binary.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Depends on the forum, plenty of echo chambers out there...

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 points 5 hours ago

A lot of the forums I'm seeing talked about where more technical or objective kinds. Like in a car forum there'd be repair manuals or parts lists, fountain pen forums would have loads of images comparing inks side by side for different shades and hues. Those are the sorts of knowledge centers being discussed and reminisced about a lot here.