AI Trained on 4Chan Becomes ‘Hate Speech Machine’
vice.com
vice.com
In a way, it's the natural consequence of the internet ecosystem shifting, and 4chan usually drawing its userbase from larger communities. Outcasts from sites like SomethingAwful and YTMND became outcasts from smaller forums, which became outcasts from social media.
It's a classic lord of the flies scenario, when something with the best of intentions spirals out of control and then ends up being chaotic, despite the best intentions.
It's also a reflection of human character, online, many people act in a way they would not in person, because there are less to no consequences... Always an interesting debate.
I joke around online at times and am often taken too seriously in those times, and I also am careful in preventing harm with my words at all times, but not flawless, and that to me is normal. There are some memes and things I come across when I am on sites like Reddit and TikTok that do leave me highly concerned when I happen to be able to decipher them... Many of these memes have deep rooted contempt in them that nobody else gets. Memes also completely skirt moderation because of how they're encrypted messages, and that's why AI and moderation simply wont work in countering them and in filtering content from young minds...
We need better ways of talking to each other in real life to counter the hostile online culture, just banning/muting words and people doesn't fix anything. Banning people from social sites also forces them to flock to seedier havens, where deeper mistrust, contempt and hate reside, and that in turn radicalizes people more because those places are often toxic by nature, and this is why things just get worse over time. There is great responsibility in running large platforms, they make vast amounts of money, but shirk responsibility regularly.
The heavy amount of moderation on social media only servs to frustrate people more, and often totally prevents regular/considerate posters from being heard altogether (Because it is abused by many others), which pretty much makes most of the social Internet dull and exclusionary to the point that the best contributors rarely want to use social media any more.
The only plausible ways to get visibility on many social sites and apps these days is either to be already popular, a platform employee or affiliate, a high-paying advertiser, or to be highly controversial in pushing social envelopes... I'm not qualified for nor invested into any of those success routes (I'm just a musician and developer), so I guess I need to learn to be happy with my own web site. If we all went back to personal sites over social media, things would likely get better, because there is more accountability involved without giving your government name and phone number to FaceBook.
Even with heavy moderation by the janitors, what mainstream company would ever risk their banner ad appearing on a page that might feature rather exotic forms of pornography, potentially illegal content, radical political statements from both sides of the spectrum (there's now a /leftypol/), racism, furries, etc.? It's not like Nike or Coca-Cola were exactly beating down his door.
He tried to use 4chan to springboard financial projects when monetization failed, but obviously, they failed, too.
All the Chans I've seen have to rely on self-serve ads from their users, or ads from porn companies that don't care about the controversy, and even that's fading now. It's pretty much an inherently chaotic and edgy format, and that does not appeal to advertisers at all.