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Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

181–190 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#181

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…

No one uses em dashes

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#182

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…

The problem’s gonna be when Google as well is plastered with fake news articles about the same thing. There’s very little to no way you will know whether something is real or not.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#183
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…

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that p…

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs

I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame.

Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet)

Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a particularly nice guy)

Youtube and also Google - because I suspect they might share a censorship architecture... oh, boy. (But we have to remove + from searches! Our social network is called Google+! What do you mean "ruining the internet"?)

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#184
post #128

Sunday evening musings regarding bot comments and HN... I'm sure it's happening, but I don't know how much. Surely some people are running bots on HN to establish sockpuppets for use later, and to manipulate sentiment now, just like on any other influential social media. And some people are probably running bots on HN just for amusement, with no application in mind. And some others, who were advised to have an HN pre…

I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.

31,337 can be the stopping point for active commenting.

32,767 can be the hard max., to permit rare occasional comments after that.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#185
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

Or they are reposting other people's content

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.

To be fair, the alt-input is a generalized system for inputting Unicode characters outside the set keyboard layout. So it's not like they added this input specifically. Still, the em dash really should have an easier input method given how crucial a symbol it is.

It's a generalized system for entering code page glyphs that was extended to support Unicode. 0150 and 0151 only work if you are on CP1252 as those aren't the Unicode code points.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#187

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 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.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#188

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.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#189
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down? You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves,…

No. En-dash doesn't work "just as well" as an em-dash, anymore than a comma works as an apostrophe. They are different punctuation marks. Also, I was a curmudgeon with strong opinions about punctuation before ChatGPT—heck, even before the internet. And I can produce witnesses.

They mean the same thing to 99.999% of the population.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#190

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

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

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