An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

https://theconversation.com/an-83-year-old-short-story-by-borges-portends-a-bleak-future-for-the-internet-242998

by tagawa • 2 years ago

133 102 2 years ago

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.

labster• 2 years ago

The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, The Library of Babel[0], which is a far better read than this article.

[0] https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

guestbest2• 2 years ago

Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.

defrost2• 2 years ago

Perhaps "untreated" would be a better descripter as it evokes untreated wastewater unfit for drinking.

The content being discussed here isn't guarenteed statements direct from trusted sources, it's the recirculated gossip chains of Reddit, Twitter, <media>.commentSections, Clickbait-WebSheets, etc.

guestbest2• 2 years ago

You’d have those rumor mills without the internet through the tabloid sheets. The internet allows someone to publish who is a direct source of rather than having to go through the press.

threeseed• 2 years ago

What makes a story high quality is more than it just being a series of accurate quotes.

It is where there is context and insights about the story.

mcphage• 2 years ago

It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.

Sure, if nobody ever lied.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

You can have BS straight from the source as well if it doesn't show context for example.

MrMcCall• 2 years ago

And not a minute too soon ;-)

William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.

Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.

rezmason2• 2 years ago

I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.

bitwize• 2 years ago

[An ad for Marvel Funko Pops appears, skippable in 5... 4... 3...]

schoen• 2 years ago

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as I understand it is more ambiguous about exactly why Tlön is becoming real in the narrator's world. Although there is a description in the afterword of such a guild having fabricated Tlön and some artifacts from there, the story up to that point seemed to take Tlön's metaphysics (in which the idea of a reality outside of our perceptions is considered absurd and impossible) pretty seriously, and the end of the story presents the situation as though the narrator's world is actually starting to work according to these principles. That could conceivably be for merely social-perception reasons, although according to Tlön's philosophy there couldn't be any such thing as "merely social-perception reasons" because social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality.

One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way.

The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...

rezmason2• 2 years ago

We're two comments in and this is, so far, the most extensive conversation about a good Borges story I've had in my life, so kudos for that :)

whatshisface• 2 years ago

I had always thought that the parts where reality was working according to Tlon rules was evidence that the author was being co-opted. Occasionally this happens in real life when political powers get involved in picking and choosing the outcomes of intellectual disputes - everyone's answers come out to corroborate a fiction, and the real guiding hand is never referred to.

The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was academic support of Nazi "anthropology."

qazxcvbnm• 2 years ago

“The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”

To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.

I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.

EdiX• 2 years ago

[flagged]

laidoffamazon• 2 years ago

Notably, Tlon is the holding company for Urbit - I credit them for having an apt name

heresie-dabord2• 2 years ago

a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive

In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-scale business in assymetric information.[1]

But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the information collapse has returned people into Plato's allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]

The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.

[1] _ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.a...

[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

xarope• 2 years ago

First time I read TUOT, I was thoroughly confused. Both the article and this mention, has inspired me to pick up Borges again for the following few weeks of pre/post christmas reading!

To add to the recommended readings, I shall also mention "On Exactitude in Science"; I use this as an example of project plans where PMS try to be too detailed, and hence become useless.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe.

If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.

gwern3• 2 years ago

Arguably, it doesn't really make a difference, because every possible 800-page sequence exists as a pair of 400-page books from the original Library, and so on and so forth. The 800-page, 1200-page, 1600-page and every greater length Library is as well-defined, complete, and vacuous as the original 400-page version.

flir• 2 years ago

Hi, there's an infinite number of coach drivers outside. They say they booked ahead?

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Borges should have just stopped with a kids ABC book then!

hiatus• 2 years ago

Does the library contain duplicates? Otherwise an 800 page book that is just the same 400 page book concatenated to itself would not be found.

dhaugshs• 2 years ago

But, since there is a finite number of 400 page books, there are only so many permutations before you run out of books.

The most trivial example, you cant make an 800 page concatenation of two identical books because the 400 page library doesn't contain duplicates.

hunter-gatherer• 2 years ago

"A short stay in hell" (Steven Peck) is a fun short read about living in a place. Totally recommend.

Shalah• 2 years ago

misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story.

Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content

You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories.

On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic.

Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism.

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.”

Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. --

Q: Tell a joke on Jesus

chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points!

Q: Tell a joke on Buddha.

chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything!

Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad

chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!

zw123456• 2 years ago

The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?

A4ET8a8uTh06• 2 years ago

So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.

Loughla3• 2 years ago

Tell me about that side project. How does that work? What does it say about me? I find that very interesting.

dTal• 2 years ago

The very worst that would happen is that you make someone's training run slightly less efficient. If your data is truly random garbage, the model won't be able to make any predictions about it and thus it will not distort performance. All training data is noisy to an extent, and you've just fed it pure noise.

However, it has become clear that effective LLM training is in large matter a matter of careful curation of high quality training data. Random gibberish is trivially detectable, by LLMs themselves if nothing else, so it's unlikely that your "honeypot" will ever make it into someone's training run.

Even if you carefully crafted some more subtle poison data, it would still form only a small amount of the training set. The worst case scenario is most likely that the LLM learns to recognize your particular style of poison, and will happily recreate it if prompted appropriately (while otherwise remaining unaffected); more likely, your poison data is simply swamped.

phkahler• 2 years ago

> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.

This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.

alecst• 2 years ago

How can someone tell if a newspaper is biased? What’s the test? Is it the eye test — as in, I can tell it when I see it — or something more?

add-sub-mul-div2• 2 years ago

A demagogue tells you so and then either you believe it or you become suspicious that their manipulation of you is the actual danger.

Loughla3• 2 years ago

Spoiler; every newspaper and media source is biased. They have to be. Starting with what stories they run and don't run and ending with the specific word choice they make inside the articles.

Critical thinking is the only thing you can use to spot bias. Compare and contrast different stories. Then make up your own mind.

Media literacy and virtual l critical reasoning should be the bedrock of modern education, and it is not.

77pt772• 2 years ago

Political I don't know, but in terms of hard science the NYT has an abysmal track record.

lxgr3• 2 years ago

One useful heuristic is to look at a newspaper's reporting in a domain you are deeply familiar with. If it misses the mark by a lot there, you could still take your chances with their remaining reporting under the assumption that that was an outlier and the rest will be much better – but I personally wouldn't.

cduzz• 2 years ago

Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of happynet[1].

For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.

Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].

[1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...

motohagiography• 2 years ago

As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.

I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.

There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]

On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.

[1] 42.

heresie-dabord2• 2 years ago

the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction

If I may apply a regex:

s/polite/lucrative/g

em-bee7• 2 years ago

the belief that AI's are * hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things

i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?

tim3333• 2 years ago

No, I think he's saying that when AIs are better at us at everything we'll deal with it by saying but they hallucinate.

lowbloodsugar2• 2 years ago

It is clear to me that humans “hallucinate” all the time, and I don’t see why this should disqualify AI. One prominent human hallucinated that a hurricane was going to go in a particular direction and kindly updated a map, provided by scientists, with a sharpie.

Loughla3• 2 years ago

There's a difference between that and asking for a basic fact and getting errors.

Google's AI result, when I ask for the spot price of silver, returns the amount in British pounds, but with an American dollar sign in front of it.

That's not a lie, it's just an absolute misinterpretation.

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?

I don't know about caring, but I think that the point of the Turing test is to determine at which point a human can't tell whether it's another human. Also, I've read that it's not a particularly good test, because even pre-LLM you could craft an irritating, misspelling, troll of a chat bot and people would think it was a real teenage edgelord.

PittleyDunkin2• 2 years ago

I think the chinese room thought experiment is another stronger exploration of whether or not computers are conscious (and, I believe, is no longer sufficient). I think people into AI should at least be familiar with its implications (or lack thereof) about human cognition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

mitaphane• 2 years ago

A fun website that depicts said Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/

RunningDroid2• 2 years ago

The server seems to have fallen over, here's an archived copy: https://archive.today/8uvha

lxgr3• 2 years ago

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. [...] To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.

It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.

CatWChainsaw2• 2 years ago

The Machine Stops is also a worthwhile read.

RunningDroid2• 2 years ago

Is that this book?

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL88800W/The_Machine_Stops

CatWChainsaw2• 2 years ago

Yes, and the web page you linked to also includes reference to the PDF version available outside Open Library, so everyone can read it.

jongjong• 2 years ago

The part of the story suggesting that only the rich could afford fact checkers to understand reality is wrong because they won't know which fact checkers are good. At best, you can only hire fact checkers on the basis that they have consensus with some other fact checkers. This doesn't guarantee correctness. Most of the information we see are lies and their opposites, which are mostly lies as well.

The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.

mistermann6• 2 years ago

It isn't possible for you to know these things.

In the event that you disagree, "check" if you can (even consider trying) to generate a flawless proof for each of your facts.

moffkalast3• 2 years ago

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.
The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high.

If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".

fragmede• 2 years ago

I mean, that's the case today, with expensive feeds like the Bloomberg terminal subscription being more than most people pay in rent, pricing it out of reach for the plebes and restricting access to the wealthy. the rest of humanity gets access to notably low-quality, noncurated online content free feeds like Reddit and 4chan.

so I guess there's a historical precedent for that scenario, as well as this "newspaper" thing.

moffkalast3• 2 years ago

Well it depends on the effort required to curate the information divided by the number of people paying for it. Bloomberg is a niche thing that requires a lot of effort to run, so it's gonna be expensive per user. If it's something that everyone wants to read, then it'll be popular enough to be cheap. It's not an altruistic thing either, it just makes sense to price it lower since there's an optimal point where you can extract the most revenue that way.

I think we're not really in a phase where disinformation would be that much of a problem yet, HN and Reddit are arguably still sources of very high quality data if you know where to look, so there's no incentive for most people to pay for anything. Especially when it's where most of ad-driven media copies practically all content from these days anyway.

olddustytrail• 2 years ago

I think you might have your history mixed up.

IIRC, newspapers were a thing where a propagandist, known as the "editor-in-chief" would hire a bunch of bitter, failed novelists to write about the events of the day, but slanted according to the whims of the paper's owner.

I'm pretty sure that was it...

moffkalast3• 2 years ago

Well you're not wrong. As long as there's people in the loop there will be their own opinions injected into their writing. The trick is to find a propagandist or owner that aligns with your views haha. Near impossible these days when Murdoch owns most of them of course.

pessimizer• 2 years ago

I can see this as a bleak future for AI, as it consumes its own output, but any bleak future for information writ large (as conflated here with the "misinformation" industry and the often intentionally deceptive output of the NYT) comes from the suppression of material due to copyright attacks and its locking away in archives.

I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale.

We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk.

Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem.

The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.

sixQuarks• 2 years ago

From the article:

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

What good is winning when people can see on the internet how you did it? History is stories.

An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

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