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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

211–220 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#211
post #173

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…

a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#212
post #106

Are there any social media sites where AI is effectively banned? I know it's not an easy problem but I haven't seen a site even try yet. There's a ton of things you can do to make it harder for bots, ie analyze image metadata, users' keyboard and mouse actions, etc.

I don't know of any, but my strategy to avoid slop has been to read more long-form content, especially on blogs. When you subscribe over RSS, you've vetted the author as someone who's writing you like, which presumably means they don't post AI slop. If you discover slop, then you unsubscribe. No need for a platform to moderate content for you... as you are in control of the contents of your news feed.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#213
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc. Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if not months. Youtube doesn't pay you out unless you are verified, so ban people posting AI and not disclosing it and the well will run dry quickly.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#214
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc. Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

I said something to a friend about this years ago with AI... We're going to stretch the legal and political system to the point of breaking.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#215
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc. Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if…

The Payoff from AI videos could get someone in the Whitehouse.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#216

I'm not really replying to the article, just going tangentially from the "dead internet theory" topic, but I was thinking about when we might see the equivalent for roads: the dead road theory. In X amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food. I look forwa…

You might like David Mason's short story "Road Stop":

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61309

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the former type is all but obliterated now. Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by…

> Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it. The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL. I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.

Idk most of the people I "met" on the internet happened originally on IRC. I didn't know them till a decade or more later.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#218
post #73

>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former typ…

You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know?

"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#219

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…

It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

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