On the Internet, nobody knows you're an LLM
@rysiek Today I learned about the Dark Forest Hypothesis, according to which all the unknown LLMs on the internet have an incentive to remain unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
Related #smbc comic:
@floppy well the Dark Forest Hypothesis is about intelligent life in the Universe.
LLMs are not life, are not intelligent, and do not have the agency to make decisions to act upon any "incentives".
You don't need anything to make decisions for "incentives" to work: you only need selection pressure based on that-thing-that-could-be-an-incentive and an error-introducing replication mechanism.
In the context of spam generation we have both (we do also have normal incentives acting on humans operating those systems, but even in their absence we'd IMO get similar hill-climbing behaviour).
(I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I don't think the argument works.)
