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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#201

Post by quantummagic »

seiferteric wrote: post #116

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…

As they say, the demand for racism far outstrips the supply. It's hard to spend all day outraged if you rely on reality to supply enough fodder.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#202

Post by susam »

kimixa wrote: post #188
makingstuffs wrote: post #120

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…

As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side. I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.

Came here to confirm this. I grew up learning BrE and indeed in BrE, we were taught to use en-dash. I don't think we were ever taught em-dash at all. My first encounter with em-dash was with LaTeX's '---' as an adult.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#203

Post by 8organicbits »

GMoromisato wrote: post #153

Most of this is caused by incentives: YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content. LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort. Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups. Is it possible to create a social network (…

I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment?

Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#204

Post by Duanemclemore »

fsckboy wrote: post #168
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3. Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the i…

The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#205

Post by schrodinger »

fuzzer371 wrote: post #181
fsckboy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the i…

No one uses em dashes

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#206

Post by vinyl7 »

lizknope wrote: post #5

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted. The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that. The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which i…

> So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#208

Post by BLKNSLVR »

crimony wrote: post #200
fuzzer371 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one uses em dashes

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#209

Post by dragonwriter »

fuzzer371 wrote: post #181
fsckboy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the i…

No one uses em dashes

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.
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