Live data from Hacker News

Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

461–470 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#461
post #187

Earlier 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.

It's not a band-aid at all. In fact, recognition is nearly always algorithmically easier than creation. Which would mean fake-AI detectors could have an inherent advantage over fake-AI creators.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#463

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…

You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!

No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:

* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.

* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.

* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#464

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…

It's sad, yeah. And exhausting. The fact that you felt something was off and took the time to verify already puts you ahead of the curve, but it's depressing that this level of vigilance is becoming the baseline just to consume media safely

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#465

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…

If there are ad incentives, assume all content is fake by default.

On the actual open decentralized internet, which still exists, mastodon, IRC, matrix... bots are rare.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#466

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…

When that baseline erodes, even normal human quirks start looking suspicious

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#467

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…

There are top posts daily of either 100% false images or very doctored images to portray a narrative (usually political or social) on reddit.

Then the comments are all usually not critical of the image but to portray the people supporting the [fake] image as being in a cult. It's wild!

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#468

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 (…

Private groups work because reputation is local and memory is long. You can't farm engagement from people you'll talk to again next week. That might be the key

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#469

In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account. In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak…

But that’s not the Turing Test. The human who can be fooled in the Turing test was explicitly called the “interrogator”. To pass the Turing test the AI would have to be indistinguishable from a human to the person interrogating it in a back and forth conversation. Simply being fooled by some generated content does not count (if it did, this was passed decades ago). No LLM/AI system today can pass the Turing test.

I've encountered people who seem to understand properly how the test works, and still think that current LLM passes it easily.

Most of them come across to me like they would think ELIZA passes it, if they weren't told up front that they were testing ELIZA.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#470

I enjoyed this post, but I do find myself disagreeing that someone sharing their source code is somehow morally or ethically obligated to post some kind of AI-involvement statement on their work. Not only is it impossible to adjudicate or police, I feel like this will absolutely have a chilling effect on people wanting to share their projects. After all, who wants to deal with an internet mob demanding that you dispr…

Maybe the healthier framing is cultural rather than ethical
Post reply on HN