semi relatedly i stumbled upon Dead Planet Theory a while back and it stasy rent free in my head. https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory
Dead Internet Theory
361–370 of 735 posts
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#362Earlier 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?
I think the broader response and re-evaluation is going to take a lot longer. Children of today are growing up in an obviously hostile information environment whereas older folk are trying to re-calibrate in an environment that's changing faster than they are.
If the next generation can weather the slop storm, they may have a chance to re-establish new forms of authentic communication, though probably on a completely different scale and in different forms to the Web and current social media platforms.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#363Earlier 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.
It really isn’t that slop didn’t exist before. It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop. There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up. And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment fo…
True for videos, but not true for any type of "text claim", which were already plenty 10 years ago and they were already hard to fight (think: misquoting people, strangely referring to science article, dubiously interpreting facts, etc.).
But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.
If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#364Most 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 think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment? Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader…
Monetization isn't the only possible incentive for non-genuine content though CV-stuffing is another that is likely to affect blogs - and there have been plenty obviously AI-generated/"enhanced" blogs posted here.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#365Earlier 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"?
There is significant differences between how the information world and the physical world operate.
Creating all kinds of meta-levels of falsity is a real thing, with multiple lines of objective (if nefarious) motivation, in the information arena.
But even physical crimes can have meta information purposes. Putin for instance is fond of instigating crimes in a way that his fingerprints will inevitably be found, because that is an effective form of intimidation and power projection.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#366"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…
It's a valid English phrase but it's also not unlikely that someone states something as a fact and then goes immediately to "you are absolutely right" when told it's wrong - but AI does that all the time.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#367Earlier 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"?
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.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#368I hope that when all online content is entirely AI generated, humanity will put their phone aside and re-discover reality because we realize that the social networks have become entirely worthless.
To some degree there’s something like this happening. The old saying “pics or it didn’t happen” used to mean young people needed to take their phones out for everything. Now any photo can be faked, so the only photos to take are ones that you want yourself for memories.
That's not what that saying means/meant.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#369Earlier 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…
I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats.
Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
Re: Dead Internet Theory
#370Earlier 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.
> eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content
You get it wrong. Real-world content will become indistinguishable from "AI" content because that's what people will consider normal.