This scales badly today and will scale even worse in the future. Those without education or time resources will at best manage to read the news. Humanity will need a low effort way to relay reliable information to more of it's members.

> Go to original sources and scientific papers.

Given how much bunk “science” (and I'm talking things completely transparent to someone remotely competent in the field) gets published, especially in psychology, it's difficult to do even that.

You are right. You still have to read critically or find trusted sources, of course.

Primary sources need to be approached with caution https://clas.uiowa.edu/history/teaching-and-writing-center/g...

And so does every other source. You can play that analysis game with any source material. The problem is that the accuracy and detail of the reporting usually fades with each step towards mass media content.

That's what people should do, and that's what you and I will do, but many won't, especially the less educated (no condescension intended). They'll buy into the increased proliferation of fake info. It's because of these people that I think the concerns are valid.

Honestly, I consider myself fairly educated (I have a PhD in CS), but if the topic at hand is sufficiently far from my core competence, then reading the scientific article won't help. I keep reading about p-value hacking, subtle ways of biasing research, etc., and I realize that, to validate a scientific article, you have to be a domain expert and constantly keep up-to-date with today's best standards. Given the increasing number of domains to be an expert in, I fail to see how any single human can achieve that without going insane. :D

I mean, Pfizer could dump their clinical trial reports at me, and I would probably be unable to compute their vaccine's efficiency, let alone find any flaws.

Besides the time scalability aspect highlighted by someone else, I am worried that GPT-3 will have the potential to produce even "fake scientific papers".

Our trust fabric is already quite fragile post-truth. GPT-3 might make it even more fragile.

I wouldn't worry about the science bit. No one worries about the university library getting larger and larger or how its going to confuse or misguide people even though everyone knows there are many books in there, full of errors, outdated information, badly written, boring etc etc etc.

Why? Cause there is always someone on campus who knows something about a subject to guide you to the right stuff.

Most people are not smart enough to do this, and even if they are, they don't have enough time in their day.