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Dead Internet Theory

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#581

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

eudamoniac wrote: post #569
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 think people will eventually learn to not trust any videos or stories they see online. I think the much bigger issue will be what happens when the LLM providers encode "alignment" into the models to insist on certain worldviews, opinions, or even falsehoods. Trust in LLMs and usage of them is increasing. "Great question! No, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can I help with anything else?"

"Eventually" does alot of heavy lifting in your prediction. This is like saying that if you feed poison to panda bears, they will eventually become immune to poison. On what timescale though? 8 million years from now, if the species survived, and if I've been feeding that poison to each and every generation... sure.

If I just feed it to 10 pandas, today, they're all dead.

And I suspect that humanity's position in this analogy is far closer to the latter than the former.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#582

Post by hardlianotion »

zahlman wrote: post #441
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.

Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point. Down with that foul fifth glyph! Down, I say!

second vowel actually.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#583

Post by andyish »

I'm so torn with verification on social media. But i'm surprised companies whose main source of revenue is ads and original content aren't putting something akin to 'verified human' tags on users for all to see. Not just to show authenticity but also to be able to say to ad buyers: your ads have been seen by x real users.

I mean sure, the next step will probably be "your ads have been seen by x real users and here are their names, emails, and mobile numbers" :(

As well as verification there must be teams at Reddit/LinkedIn/Whereever working ways to identify ai content so it can be de-ranked.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#584

Post by projektfu »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #520

I think it's a little bit much to claim that no real human has ever used the phrase "You are absolutely right", it seems more likely that a lot of people have, so much, that the AI got trained to use it when its programming suggested it was the right time to be obsequious.

I have only said it as part of an apology.

"We have been waiting 20 minutes!"

"You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future."

I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion.

OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#585

Post by [deleted] »

hughw wrote: post #574

When I first used my own telescope to view Saturn I had a thought, "they can't fake that!" Photos in a magazine or on television could have been faked. And the moon landing truthers became unhinged about it. I had not appreciated that I subtly and unconsciously held a reservation about the truth of it all. This is the modern epistemic crisis. And wait till Elon implants a brain computer interface in you. You won't ev…

[deleted]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#586

Post by rossdavidh »

So, put together a few things:

1) to satisfy investors, companies require continual growth in engagement and users

2) the population isn't rocketing upwards on a year-over-year basis

3) the % of the population that is online has saturated

4) there are only so many hours in the day

Inevitably, in order to maintain growth in engagement (comments, posts, likes, etc.), it will have to become automated. Are we there already? Maybe. Regardless, any system which requires continual growth has to automate, and the investor expectations for the internet economy require it, and therefore it has or soon will automate.

Not saying it's not bad, just that it's not surprising.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#587

Post by immibis »

input_sh wrote: post #420
raincole wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those subreddits label content wrong all the time. Some of top commentors are trolling (I've seen one cooking video where the most voted comment is "AI, the sauce stops when it hits the plate"... as thick sauce should do.) You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

> Those subreddits label content wrong all the time. Intentionally if I might add. Reddit users aren't particularly interested in providing feedback that will inevitably be used to make AI tools more convincing in the future, nobody's really moderating those subs, and that makes them the perfect target for poisoning via shitposting in the comments.

Also, most Reddit users are AI.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#588

Post by bee_rider »

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.

The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.

But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).

The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#589

Post by zvqcMMV6Zcr »

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #56
lizknope wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the advertisers don't know the difference between a human and a bot then they will still pay money to display the ad.

You’d think they would eventually notice their ROI is terrible…?

There were some dedicated submissions about ad fraud on HN. In long term companies tend to reach equilibrium, where both reducing and increasing ad budget decreases profit. It is a classic prisoners dilemma, giving up on ads with poor ROI would be obvious decision if it wasn't for competitors who will benefit both from some actual conversions and lower bids for domain specific keywords.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#590

Post by fullstop »

patja wrote: post #561
fullstop wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends. The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

Are you using the word tweens in some sense other than its usual definition of pre-teen? My understanding is that discord, like most online services, requires registered users to be 13 years old.

Nope, that's exactly what I meant. That requirement just means that they have to check a box which says that they're 13 or older. Surely no child would ever break the rules, right?
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