Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#391

Post by Ronsenshi »

152334H wrote: post #239
pants2 wrote: 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.

in effect, broadly anti-AI communities like bsky succeed by the sheer power of universal hate. Social policing can get you very far without any technology I think

I'm all for that, but how would this realistically work? Given enough effort you can produce AI content which would be impossible to tell if it's human-made or not. And in the same train of thought - is there any way to avoid unwarranted hate towards somebody who produced real human-made content that was mistaken for AI-content?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#392

Post by nkmnz »

self_awareness wrote: post #316
neilv wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Is a video documenting racist behavior a racist or an anti-racist video? Is faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) a racist or an anti-racist video? Is the act of faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) or anti-racist behavior?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#393

Post by Nevermark »

nicbou wrote: post #387
Nevermark wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t wait for my keyboard to start auto-completing “Your” with “are absolutely right!”

In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones. I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator. Very related: https://practicaltypography.com/

Agreed that is useful, despite the unintended consequences of dash meddling.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#394

Post by troupo »

haxiomic wrote: post #356
josfredo wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current situation is not as bad as it can get; this is accelerant on the fire and it can get a lot worse

I've been using "It will get worse before it gets worse" more and more lately

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#395

Post by self_awareness »

mxkopy wrote: post #367
self_awareness wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I think they’re just saying we should interpret this video in a way that’s consistent with known historical facts. On one hand, it’s not depicting events that are strictly untrue, so we shouldn’t discredit it. On the other hand, since the video itself is literally fake, when we discredit it we shouldn’t accidentally also discredit the events it’s depicting.

Are you saying that if there is 1 instance of a true event, then fake videos done in a similar way as this true event is rational and needed?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#396

Post by qludes »

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.

Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#397

Post by blfr »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #380
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.

This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies). In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack…

I agree with grandparent and think you have cause and effect backwards: people really do want to be outraged so Facebook and the like provide rage bait. Sometimes through algos tuning themselves to that need, sometimes deliberately.

But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.

I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.

The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@gossip.goblin

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#398

Post by andyouwont »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #162
LexiMax wrote: post #129

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.

And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.

And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#399

Post by lucumo »

agoodusername63 wrote: post #305
eks391 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.

Bet they asked an AI to make the bit work /s

:-D

I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".

It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#400

Post by dragonwriter »

root_axis wrote: post #171
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…

The audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.

Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)
Post reply on HN