Deep Bullshit

LOL, I guess it is actually an "I love living in the future" kind of thing, where it increasingly looks like the next major topic I will be dilettanting - after cognitive science & theories of mind; then economics & MMT - will be ... bullshit! Starting from "AI" bullshit, but moving to the topic of bullshit in general.

My daughter Erica Heinz, a most excellent design expert, has been exploring "AI" LLM technology, most recently focusing on "AI" and ethics. Her latest post pointed me at the blog of Gary Marcus, "Marcus on AI".

I subscribed to his RSS feed [substack seems to be very oriented to signing up to mailing lists - I far prefer RSS feeds???]. NewsBlur, my RSS reader, gives you the last few months of posts from a site when you add it to your list.

This 1 of Marcus', from 2025-02-03, caught my attention:

Deep Research, Deep Bullshit, and the potential (model) collapse of science

Clearly great minds running in the same direction:

• "Deep Bullshit" sounds like my "Bullshit All The Way Down".
• "The potential (model) collapse of science" clearly would be part of the general Bullshit Apocalypse.

Marcus discusses OpenAI's recently released Deep Research: a bullshit generator for scientific articles! What a great idea! [sarcasm] As part of the discussion we learn about more AI crap:

“Model collapse”, aka “model autophagy disorder”, is what happens when AI models chase their own tails.

leading to this conclusion:

And it’s not just the models that will be infected, but the scientific literature itself.

Because Deep Research lowers the effort, making it trivial to write legit-sounding articles, paper mill factories (there is already such a thing, designed to game citation counts, “an illegitimate, yet lucrative business“ that is growing) will massively ramp up production, choking the peer review process and saturating the market with hard-to-find, hard-to-rectify errors.

When — not if — Deep Research begins to flood the medical zone with shite, we are all in trouble.

A new term for bullshit, "shite", nice! So many variations, so many possibilities, so many new words to describe ... bullshit. We are going to need lots of those - kind of like Kate Bush's "50 Words for Snow".

Again, at this point, I do not think my term, Bullshit Apocalypse, is much of an exaggeration or hyperbole.

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The Marcus post starts with this quote:

As Harry Frankfurt observed, “The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what he or she says is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded.“

Frankfurt wrote the book "On Bullshit", published in 2005, based on a 1996 essay. Wow, I buy the book, (eBook version), it's only 26 pages, 8k words, for $9.99?!?!? Is this like, a self-parody, or ??? Clearly, there should be more bullshit about bullshit. ;->

I think we need more books On Bullshit! What fun coming up with the titles!