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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#341

Post by watwut »

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.

Wut? If you listen to what real people say, racism is quite common has all the power right now.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#342

Post by trinix912 »

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 don't think it's doable with the current model of social media but:

1. prohibit all sorts of advertising, explicit and implicit, and actually ban users for it. The reason most people try to get big on SM is so they can land sponsorships outside of the app. But we'd still have the problem of telling whether something is sponsored or not.

2. no global feed, show users what their friends/followers are doing only. You can still have discovery through groups, directories, etc. But it would definitely be worse UX than what we currently have.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#343

Post by snickerer »

The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994.

But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.

The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.

I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.

I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.

Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.

I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#344

Post by mmarq »

lucumo wrote: post #269
fallinditch wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI. Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47342

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Disparition_(roman)

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#345

Post by cjs_ac »

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 (…

> Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

Yes, but its size must be limited by Dunbar's number[0]. This is the maximum size of a group of people where everyone can know everyone else on a personal basis. Beyond this, it becomes impossible to organically enforce social norms, and so abstractions like moderators and administrators and codes of conduct become necessary, and still fail to keep everyone on the same page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#346

Post by popopo73 »

kenty wrote: post #329
fedeb95 wrote: post #327

"you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.

> it's common for people to be bad at a second language Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all. There might also be two effects at play: 1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is…

>is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow?

It makes sense in English, however:

a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising.

b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs)

If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#347

Post by efnx »

padjo wrote: post #331
lukan wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

I’m really hoping that we’re about to see an explosion in critical thinking and skepticism as a response to generative AI. Any day now… right?

One can hope!

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#348

Post by ionwake »

The only way I can tell, is if I see a "structure" to the edit. Usually its a tit for tat , exchange of words in a conversation, with clear spacing, as in too perfect. Followed by the scene, if it looks too oddly perfect ( like a line of foxes waiting to be fed, but all of them are somehow sitting in a line, even if there are differences between them, Ill notice. That is with well decades of age, Im not sure if that helps. But what is clear is even these "tells" will disapear in a few months.

I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#349

Post by josfredo »

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 fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#350

Post by [deleted] »

self_awareness wrote: post #330
mxkopy wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think they did the exact opposite > Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered

Well yes, that's what he wrote, but that's like saying: stealing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the theft to be discovered? Killing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the killing to be discovered? I read it as "producing racist videos can sometimes be used in good faith"?

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