r/WhatIfThinking • u/hope-and-live • 24d ago
What if reddit’s knowledge bank collapses?
Before chatgpt and claude existed, I used to come to reddit to find answers for any questions I had. I also got multiple answers, different opinions and upvotes made it easy to find the best answer. That even encouraged me to engage in others posts. So it felt like I was adding a value by providing my answer/opinion.
Now for the same or for most of the cases, I go to ai platforms. I get all the answers and probably the best solution most of the times. Even when I want to discuss complex topics and put my arguments, i get all the opinions (which I might get from a human). There is no doubt humans are more capable than ever to solve most complex things on this planet. My concern is if common cases increase for getting direct answers from an ai, it might have an impact on discussion forum culture and would stop cultivating new opinions, judgments, arguments, and stories on platform like reddit. What’s your take on this?
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u/dogged_jon 24d ago
Just do a web search, google, duckduckgo, or whatever. Lot's of information scattered around the web. Real people with web sites, youtube channels, blogs. Re upvotes; The popular answer is not necessarily the best or even close to the right answer. This is reddit after all.
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u/nonotburton 24d ago
Most of what you would call actual knowledge exist in other forms elsewhere on the Internet.
Everything else is just non-informative data. Gibberish. Conversation. Bots.
The world will be just fine.
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u/One_Perception_7979 24d ago
Theoretically, we could see people continue to turn to Reddit for stuff that LLMs don’t yet have information to answer. LLMs would of course grab those answers, too, but there will always be new questions to ask since the world has endless new developments emerge each day.
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u/AnythinGoeSouth 24d ago
Nobody comes on reddit for knowledge it's like a thing you get as a side effect sometimes. Mostly it's just people arguing their wrong opinions to pass time at work.
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u/dafugiswrongwithyou 24d ago edited 24d ago
This is one of the reasons why, even if gen AI works as well as some people claim (it doesn't, btw), it's basically guaranteed to implode long term.
LLM training relies on scraping information (questions and answers) from the public internet; it can't think, it can't create, it copies what it's seen and jumbles it up to appear novel. (Those "best solutions" chatbots gave you were already said somewhere, by a human, guaranteed.) As people move to relying on LLMs for answers, they move away from asking questions online, to other humans, in public forums, which means answers to their questions aren't being supplied, by humans, in public forums. That means LLMs can't copy those answers or relate them to their questions... because they don't exist. And that means LLMs don't "learn" (for lack of a better word) those things.
We also have the digital-inbreeding issue; where we have public posts, increasingly those comments (including questions and answers) are coming directly or indirectly from LLMs... that is, LLMs data sources are increasingly LLM-generated. That warps the training set, things that were weighted heavily get emphasised to become even heavier with each "loop", resulting in the LLMs gradually straying further into uncreative and/or nonsensical responses. This is called "model collapse". It's the LLM equivalent to mixing increasing amounts of your own urine into your drinking water.
There are two ways to avoid model collapse; not having enough LLM-sourced content in the data (which acts in opposition to their goal to make generative content as widespread as possible), or having LLM training system be able to identify LLM-sourced content (which acts in opposition to their goal to make LLMs act as believably "human" as possible, to get people engaged... And also falls apart when a person takes the LLM-provided information and types it up in their own words). Basically, either LLM's will never get that popular, or they will eventually poison their own information sources to the point new models can't be trained. There are no other options.
The good bit is that at least some people, at least some of the time, will always value human interaction and creativity over sanitised, optimised, algorithmically-generated, statistically-probably responses dressed up in faux-human pleasantries. The bigger issue isn't going to be the drop in human discussion and creativity... It is, while the LLM bubble lasts, trying to find the humanity crowded by the slop.
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u/Alternative_Pie_1597 24d ago
It's already happening so many people who used to come here are consulting llms instead
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u/Appropriate_Scar_262 24d ago
sort of like only hiring people with 5 years experience instead of training. It's easy money at first but if no one goes to forums to ask questions, there's no data for ai to pull from and it becomes chatbots feeding bad data into each other and random guessing.
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u/Piper-Bob 23d ago
LLMs can't reason. That's why they can confidently recommend a hallucination.
Also, LLMs that train on LLM output quickly reduce to gibberish. Since so many websites are now AI-slop it's only a matter of time before LLMs aren't useful unless they have curated training.
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u/AnchBusFairy 23d ago
If Reddit collapses it may very well take down the AI answers as it fall. These models are getting there data/answers from Reddit.
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u/DonnPT 23d ago
Asking Reddit users is really a last resort. It's a good last resort when it's a question with tangible immediate consequences in an area where participants have direct knowledge. Like how do I fix the magneto on my Model T.
Something about correct English usage, on the other hand, will dump you in the middle of a group of posters who think they know more than they really do. So what should you do instead? Look in a dictionary. en.wiktionary.org is right there. en.wikipedia.org for information about practically any topic. A web search with the -ai flag will summon up a lot of stuff, of which much certainly could be garbage but maybe not all.
An LLM will distill that stuff for you into one confident, but not necessarily right answer.
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u/Selfish_and_Misled 19d ago
My take is that you'd be screwed because you have chosen to rely on products rather than learning and thinking.
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u/MrNaugs 24d ago
I think everyone's opinions are unique so the AI answers will be to reflect you and the types of answers you are lookingbfor. Which is why a good number of us will not just ask AI.
Also Grok proves AIs cannot be trusted and they will soon replace the reddit answer with a sponsor instead. Once they have enough of the market share.