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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#311

Post by lmm »

bandrami wrote: post #292
viccis wrote: 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…

I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.

IRC has many many usability problems which I'm sure you're about to give a "quite trivial curlftpfs" explaination for why they're unimportant - missing messages if you're offline, inconsistent standards for user accounts/authentication, no consensus on how even basic rich text should work much less sending images, inconsistent standards for voice calls that tend to break in the presence of NAT, same thing for file transfers...

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#313

Post by lmm »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #267
WD-42 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a dystopia for me. I’m a cyclist that’s been hit by 3 cars. I believe we will look back at the time when we allowed emotional and easily distracted meat bags behind the wheels of fast moving multiple ton kinetic weapons for what it is: barbarism.

That is not really a defensible position. Most drivers don't ever hit someone with their car. There is nothing "barbaric" about the system we have with cars. Imperfect, sure. But not barbaric.

> Most drivers don't ever hit someone with their car. There is nothing "barbaric" about the system we have with cars. Imperfect, sure. But not barbaric.

Drivers are literally the biggest cause of deaths of young people. We should start applying the same safety standards we do to every other part of life.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#314

Post by bradgessler »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #298
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…

I’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.

What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#315

Post by vurudlxtyt »

HaZeust wrote: post #274
hayleox wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - - .`). T…

Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.

That sounds like a strongly held opinion rather than a fact.

I like em-dashes and will continue to use them.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#316

Post by self_awareness »

neilv wrote: post #253
quantummagic wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hadn't heard that saying. Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive. Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace. In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available. (Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't le…

[flagged]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#317

Post by lukan »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #298
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…

I’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.

"I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth."

Some people, quite some time ago, also came to that conclusion. (And they did not even had AI to blame)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#318

Post by meander_water »

adrian17 wrote: post #310
meander_water wrote: post #294

Not foolproof, but a couple of easy ways to verify if images were AI generated: - OpenAI uses the C2PA standard [0] to add provenance metadata to images, which you can check [1] - Gemini uses SynthId [2] and adds a watermark to the image. The watermark can be removed, but SynthId cannot as it is part of the image. SynthId is used to watermark text as well, and code is open-source [3] [0] https://help.openai.com/en/ar…

I just went to a random OpenAI blog post ("The new ChatGPT Images is here"), right-click saved one of the images (the one from "Text rendering" section), and pasted it to your [1] link - no metadata. I know the metadata is probably easy to strip, maybe even accidentally, but their own promotional content not having it doesn't inspire confidence.

Yeah that's been my experience as well. I think most uploads strip the metadata unfortunately

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#319

Post by actionfromafar »

quantummagic wrote: post #201
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.

That's why this administration is working hard to fill the demand.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#320

Post by wewxjfq »

cal_dent wrote: post #244
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 (…

Exactly. People spend less time thinking about the underlying structure at play here. Scratch enough at the surface and the problem is always the ads model of internet. Until that is broken or is economically pointless the existing problem will persist. Elon Musk cops a lot for the degradation of twitter to people who care about that sort of thing, and he definitely plays a part there, but its the monetisation aspect…

Scratch further and beneath the ad business you'll find more incentives to allow fake engagement. Man is a simple animal and likes to see numbers go up. Internet folklore says the Reddit founders used multiple accounts to get their platform going at the start? If they did, they didn't do that with ad fraud in mind. The incentives are plenty and from the people running the platform to the users to the investors - everyone likes to be fooled. Take the money out and you still have reasons to turn a blind eye to it.

The biggest problem I see is that the Internet has become a brainwashing machine, and even if you have someone running the platform with the integrity of a saint, if the platform can influence public opinion, it's probably impossible to tell how many real users there actually are.

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