241–250 of 320 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did do something: they blocked people using adblockers. Really we need some body like the UK ASA to say "you're liable for all these frauds, Google".
Really? So the advertising agency would have an Investigation Unit that makes sure the companies aren't scams before allowing them to advertise?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>It has never been realistic for people to find the truth, Rather strained definition of truth there. The truth that matters is a basic not-very-wrong version of what is happening. Examples: 1) The earth is roughly spheroidal. 2) NASA is a real space agency and landed people on the moon in 1969-1973. 3) The trails behind airplanes are condensation particles, not sprayed chemicals. 4) Vaccines are safe and effective,…
> to understand any of the above to a useful level. The standard model for electrical current is not true, but it is still useful in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. True and useful are very different things. The conflation here is erroneous. The average person is never going to understand what is true in any meaningful way, and even those who focus on certain truths are going to be focused on very specific tr…
Agree, but this means we are talking about two different topics. I'm talking at a functional level of truth; a base level of truths commonly understood in a society such that it can maintain cohesion. You're talking about deeply understood truths, like the 2+-hour discussion of quantum effects on the question of "why is the sky blue?" at a PhD's defense presentation.
>> Conversation only happens when people realize they are working with a faulty model...
what about when people actually have a good model, and a disinformation stream replaces that with a bad model, or causes them to just say 'nothing is true'?
For your purposes of deep truth, sure, everyone knows almost nothing except maybe in their own tight discipline, so one noise level or another will make no difference.
But at the level I'm talking about, common understanding of basic truths (the sky is blue, scattering, not a clue abt quantum effects), we are already seeing how increasing the noise level only by removing the Fairness Doctrine in broadcast media — society is significantly more fragmented. Automating and scaling those drivers of untruths is likely to accelerate the fragmentation.
While this may be a particularly dangerous way of thinking[1], it might be good that everything on the internet is becoming obviously fake, AI-generated junk. So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public. And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the…
I'm more worried about the lower tail end of the bell curve that doesn't get the memo, and they become increasingly deranged. When 1/4 of the public is essentially brainwashed, your society is in deep trouble.
On a more serious note haven't societies long been based upon common brainwashing? The Bronze Age and before are fuzzier on the details but propaganda certainly existed then as well at a smaller scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the "ad-free" service features videos with inline ads, it's not really ad-free.
It serves the authors content ad-free. You can choose to subscribe to authors that do not place ads or sponsored content in their videos. When I dropped cable I started subscribing to dozens of channels and now have a pretty solid subscription list. Many creators I follow have dabbled in different forms of monetization, and I've preferred to stick with the ones that offer patterns or other methods of supporting them.…
No, it serves the content without adding more ads of its own.
> You can choose to subscribe to authors that do not place ads or sponsored content in their videos.
If not consuming the content I wanted is a solution, I can just solve all the problems by not using youtube. That's not really a solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the "ad-free" service features videos with inline ads, it's not really ad-free.
The inline ads are part of the content you're watching, not injected by YouTube. You may not like them, but there's a distinction.
Here's one thing I don't get; why did the content farms bother creating all those AI-generated variations when they could have just as easily just used the real photo? Does Facebook have some kind of repost detector that this circumvents?
Maybe it's time to deprecate reposts, altogether. One of reasons real users don't care about image authenticity is because it's de facto "ok" in English web to steal and repost content ad infinitum. There are a lot of younger generation web users with an entirely misguided belief that seeking approval by ripping, modifying, re-uploading, in the process relabeling content with the user themself as the creator is not o…