There's another story (I assume of many) over at the NY Times with the headline "Facebook Discovers Fake AI-Generated Profiles". I rather like the "People Who Do Not Exist" in this headline.
[deleted]
People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
61–70 of 162 posts
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#62I was forwarded Sacha Baron Cohen's facebook critique (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/22/sacha-bar...) by a friend, as an argument to outlaw facebook. I brought up how Bush swiftboated Kerry and won the election. Media has always been used as a political weapon, it seems. Is FB much worse?
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#63To blend in with humans, these fake profiles could take advantages of AI progress on the Turing test to converse with real people, ultimately befriending (some high fraction of) us. The persuasive effects of these fake friends on (political) advertising are terrifying.
I have a couple fake profiles I setup. Pretty easy to do!
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world has gone full Philip K Dick
I occasionally think about the end of The Man in the High Castle, when the characters realize they are living in a fictional alternate history.
!!! SPOILER ALERT ABOVE !!!
Hopefully you saw this before reading the above comment.
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#65On Facebook you would mostly encounter such people if someone you know shares their posts. Comments are buried too deep to have a widespread impact. If a fake person writes the post and your friend shares it, or a guy named "Joe the Plumber" writes it, does it really make a difference? It is also in the realm of possibility that a group of folks is "false flagging" these profiles to make the other side look disingenu…
Sure, in fact there’s a term for that called Ratfucking.
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#66Fake people reading and writing fake news on fake websites? If this keeps up, we'll end up with a fake President. Don't give me negative points, for this is a fake reply.
In Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" he proposes a distant alternate-history future where a priest-like cult of technical experts set themselves up to do effective human-aided Google searches which were necessary because the Internet was full of machine-generated disinformation. I genuinely thought this was an implausible, hokey premise when I read the book in 2008. I felt similarly about Orson Scott Card's plot in "Ender'…
I tried a few times to explain how Ender's Game was different as they got into "moderated political debates in the higher class nets", but...it's not. We had the 2016 Presidential Debate.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De...
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#67On Facebook you would mostly encounter such people if someone you know shares their posts. Comments are buried too deep to have a widespread impact. If a fake person writes the post and your friend shares it, or a guy named "Joe the Plumber" writes it, does it really make a difference? It is also in the realm of possibility that a group of folks is "false flagging" these profiles to make the other side look disingenu…
Sure, in fact there’s a term for that called Ratfucking.
... what?
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#68Fake people reading and writing fake news on fake websites? If this keeps up, we'll end up with a fake President. Don't give me negative points, for this is a fake reply.
In Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" he proposes a distant alternate-history future where a priest-like cult of technical experts set themselves up to do effective human-aided Google searches which were necessary because the Internet was full of machine-generated disinformation. I genuinely thought this was an implausible, hokey premise when I read the book in 2008. I felt similarly about Orson Scott Card's plot in "Ender'…
The thing that worries me is that every year, I find the premise of Neil Schusterman's "Unwind" less far-fetched.
It still seems improbable, but no longer utterly inconceivable.
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#69It doesn’t matter how autonomous and free thinking you are or any other individual is— social media is transforming us into a collective. Like ants excreting pheromones, our actions in aggregate are more powerful than any individual, the result being whatever results from this untested cocktail of biology, language and global connection. It’s unprecedented and borderline unpredictable. Nobody is in a position to dire…
> social media is transforming us into a collective Or said another way: if you play, you lose. Your best bet is not to play. Quit social media. It’s actually not hard.
It really isn’t hard, and by leaving you make social media less valuable to the leftovers. I left Facebook and people started messaging and inviting me to events over other means. People value relationships over platforms, a fact the “how am I supposed to engage with my family/friends/events/groups/photos”-excuse crowd often overlooks.
Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I occasionally think about the end of The Man in the High Castle, when the characters realize they are living in a fictional alternate history.
WTF man? Not everyone has read everything already...
It’s been out for decades, surely spoilers are expired now by any reasonable time limit