1d ago

Dead Internet Theory

44 comments

Most of the stories posted on large subreddits were imaginary anyway. Now they are just being hallucinated by an AI. Is there much of a difference?
- Back in my day you actually had to be creative to get people to believe your bullshit story.
  
  back in my day my dad would leap off the hell in a cell ring, jumper cables in hand, and everyone would clap

Reddit can tell when I make an alternate account to get around a bullshit site wide ban but not when a robot is pretending that they took his wife in the divorce?
- If they couldn't tell, the bots would get banned sometimes.
  
  Okay but that's worse. You do see how that's worse right?

Remember that time that guy made an AI generated post, then clarified that it was AI generated, and most of the comments were still treating it like it was real?

The communities like AITAH and relationships on reddit are completely cooked. There is so much AI nonsense and as noted, people completely eat it up.
- AITAH has been mostly made up rage bait stories long time before AI nonsense. There’s nothing that generates more engagement than someone being wrong on the internet.
  The difference now is that the rage bait has become automated.
  
  AITAH for pranking my gf by putting a plastic bag over her head?
  So I put a plastic bag over my gf's head as a joke. She flailed around and punched me in the face. Then she ran off somewhere, looking mad. Why can't she take a harmless prank? Where has humor gone these days?
- This isn't particularly noteworthy or concerning, imo. These two communities are probably the least likely to care about authenticity, and also best suited for a system that's only real success is spinning moderately coherent fictions. They have and will always be most interested in drama, which is easy to fabricate.
  The real danger of these systems is shaping public discourse by sheer volume of noise. They can make any opinion seem overwhelmingly supported, or tear apart opposition with distractions and infighting. And they do it with a single-minded focus spread across thousands of voices.
  
  They have and will always be most interested in drama, which is easy to fabricate.
  Remember all the Reality Shows (TM) that took over because they had no scripting and relatively tiny production crews? They took over because they were cheap.
  Looks like AI is about to lower that bar yet again.
  
  Sure , of course those subs don’t serve any real purpose besides entertainment. The effects of AI making up stories could be to subtly confuse people about how others think and make decisions at most. Though of course it’s useless to give advice to an AI OP, thousands of people still read and discuss what people write. Who knows, the AI stories could even seem less fake than fictional stories.
- Lemmy is cooked too.
  I am AI
  Behold my genius!
  There are two Rs in Strawberry!
  No, but seriously, you're dead right. Shit is unnerving.
  
  I mean, there are two Rs in "strawberry."
  There's also three Rs...but who's counting?
- Basically the "reality TV" of Internet forums. Should come as no surprise, even human made stories are usually fake.

At the end of the day, most internet forums exist as entertainment. It doesn't really matter whether the text is from real people or not, what matters to Reddit and other platforms is that real users show up to pump numbers and get served ads. It's kinda like how pro sports is not latently about athleticism, it's just another entertainment platform to get butts into seats and eyes onscreen to make a buck.
If bot content gets the eyeballs, so what? Guess the content being fictional doesn't really matter. People don't like being lied to, but then nobody is claiming everything you read on the internet is true in the first place.
Anyway, to all the people who imagined humanity's future would end up looking different than WALL-E: sorry to disappoint. You'll get a hover recliner, at least.

cooked without better identity mechanisms
And that worked out so well for Facebook... giving up privacy and anonymity is not the solution, watch that last step, it's a doozy.
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither and will get none.
- Indeed. My dream internet is anonymous
- I don't think that's what they meant by identity mechanisms. Or at least I hope not. It's just not enough to require an e-mail to verify that you are in fact a valid user

Funny this coming from Twitter. Nothing but Nazi bots left in that cesspool.
- Hey that's not true! There's still plenty of hentai still there too

We could use public libraries to do some kind of "are you a human" confirmation. I.e. you get a digitally signed token proving that you are a human, that you can use on the internet to show that you are human. Only the library has to be trusted by the public ...
- And then you take that token and give it to your AI...?
  
  Well, no, that wouldn't work you see, because that would be lying.
  
  yes, but at least you can't easily create 10000 bots at once. you could only create 1 bot at a time, and that would already do a lot.
  I'm not so much worried about 1 person using AI to write their comments; I'm way more worried about large political parties making 10000 bots to support their agenda (propaganda) or companies creating a lot of bots to create hype about their products (advertisement).
- Could just do MFA checks for all posts, comments, and upvotes. Imagine?
  It would cut out the slop about 99%
  
  Dissent detected, officers en route
  
  MFA helps boost security of an account. It would do nothing to prove a user is human or not.

Maybe Elon was on to something when Grok tagged everything with an unrelated diatribe about farmers in south Africa. Perhaps every AI model needs to be an activist about one random topic so we can tell them apart. Or ya know, maybe congress could do stuff to require their output be reverse searchable so we could just match up the output to what people say...

Hot take : we need one social network where everyone’s identity is verified. No one is anonymous, everything you post publicly is linked to your real name.
Not every social media, anonymity is also good.
- I’d prefer anonymous users verified by real identity.
  It’d take some thought as to how you properly establish accounts are owned by individuals but it’s not impossible.

44 comments