4chan users manipulate AI tools to unleash torrent of racist images
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It was submitted 8 hours ago, although it didn't get much notice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779810
I'm a little curious as to why this is even an article. It's inevitable and has no bearing on 99.99999% of people.
I get that it's low hanging fruit from a reporting / research perspective (sort of like the 'Twitter users blah blah blah' articles), but outside of the 'publish or die' mindset of churning out content this is pointless and continues to make 4-chan and these people seem much more relevant than they are.
I dunno about that. 4chan memes and attitudes have diffused out into wider US politics.
Not that I disagree with the jist of it. "Oh no, internet dwellers are posting something horrible... I am shocked!"
Keyword _have_. 4chan hasn't been culturally relevant for like a decade.
[1] (Not that I have of course any means to do that ... but I can drop out I suppose.)
I have a lot of respect for Drew, but I can't take absolutist opinions like this seriously from someone who reputedly blocks people over any minor disagreement or perceived sleight.
Regardless, "No Nazis" is a great policy until someone decides they don't like you and labels you as one. The most prevailing anti-Ukraine sentiment is based on the claim that they are Nazis.
There is an interview between Mike Wallace and the Chinese leader in the 90s where Wallace asks the leader why they censor the internet. He specifically says, "don't you think your people are smart enough to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions?" So it goes, now the entire world is treated the same way.
The internet was always a dumpster fire. 4chan is old, toxic forums are even older. That is part of the package.
What made it cool was the freeness and gems, and the little adequately moderated niche communities. I would argue the bigger problem is that the internet became siloed, bland, soullessly moderated by corporations who don't care, and excessively spammy.
Lest we forget that a favorite pastime during the aughts was tricking your friends or strangers into visiting vile "shock" websites.
Do you have evidence for your claim that ignoring casual hate caused either of those things? My baseless theory is that suppressing and excluding these people from the mainstream is what riled them up in the first place; it certainly didn't feel like they were being ignored even after that. But I am open to contradicting evidence.
This is also the default for Stable Diffusion XL.
- The Prime Minister of my little home country auto popping up as I typed in GIPHY memes the day she resigned.
- Politicians and would-be politicians and religious leaders using race baiting and meme language (woke and pulled) in the lead up to the coming election.
- I remember 8chan being the place that people supporting these same racist ideologies organized to carry out direct action in the form of murder and terrorism.
- In the month but I was a beta tester for the Dall-E3 it never once Struck me to use this tool To create images to spread Hate or some other ideological instrumental use. There is such a vast wide latent Space of images and pixels to explore with these text to image generators. How boring it is to make raciest or conspiracy imagery. And in the same thread the human mind is capable of such vast space of neural configurations, how boring it is to use it to be a racist.
- I immediately suspect anybody of Arguing for uncensored or nonaligned AI to be provided to them to be a closet racist or troll
- I’m glad Dalle and SDXL is not hosted for general use without a filter. But I’m also very glad that all it takes is commenting out one line and re-uploading the model to be able to use it uncensored myself.
https://www.404media.co/4chan-uses-bing-to-flood-the-interne...
It is conceivable, if a naive self-improvement feedback system is implemented. (This wouldn’t have to touch the base model at all, as there are ways of externally imposing qualitative guidance based on feedback.) But it is highly unlikely that any of the major online image generators are implemented in a way which would be vulnerable to this.
This is like writing newspaper articles about toilet graffiti. You're making the artist's day.
Though maybe there's some that actually are, because of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
Ask yourself why an actual racist without any intention to cause chaos would engage in this behavior though.
It's clearly intended to offend and get a reaction - that's the main goal. Whether it's done by actual racists is secondary.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
Because being racist as a hobby isn't really something non-racists tend to do.
In the end some will think it's satire, some won't but will still laugh because it's stupid, and some will get mad.
Actual racists lost, 4chan got a laugh, and outrage culture got played again.
In general I find myself agreeing with your comments in this thread but here I disagree.
It's tempting to find the overall societal benefit from those actions but I don't think there is one. Or it's much more subtle than this.
I also think that it's mainly done to create chaos and get a reaction and not so much to spread x opinions. But just randomly throwing shit into the world *mostly* makes everyone get used to the smell of shit while they hate you for it. But in my experience it *usually* leads to more shit and not less shit.
doubt it.
won't change the beliefs of anyone looking at it one way or another.
the people participating in it, though, after years of spewing out racist garbage risk without any self-reflection risk going down the spiral of "hey, this one actually makes a valid point".
and i suspect that most of them are just flat out racist and not just memeing for the lulz.
And then fucking a goat ironically looks an awful lot like fucking a goat.
It’s certainly impossible that people hurt by, say, racism might have legitimate concerns about the virulent spread of more racism by actual, literal racists on 4chan. No, it’s actually black people, for instance, who dislike racism, or Jews who think anti-demotion is bad, who are to blame.
Brilliant.
They're obviously not. You may have the same moral judgement about these people, and that's fine, but that's not the same as reality.
And it ABSOLUTELY matters, because if you want to do something about this then you need to actually understand the problem on a meaningful level, which includes people's motivations. You're never going to solve anything you don't understand (except, maybe, by accident).
A prime minister who fucks a goat because he's being blackmailed to do so is not the same as someone who does so for pleasure (who is different still from someone who does it for sadistic reasons). To describe all these as "simply a goatfucker" would be silly, even idiotic.
It's one of those nice-sounding one-liners that falls over with even the most superficial and casual of scrutiny.
No, you're completely off the mark here. It's done because they feel these things deep down and can't talk about them with people in real life to avoid being ostracized by what few friends they have left (or maybe they're super popular, I don't know). Yes, perhaps the _absolute_ most extreme things that are said there are not serious. However, the least extreme sentiments there (which would be considered extremely offensive in polite society) are 100% genuine.
Don't you think doing it for a joke would have gotten old by now? No one really talks about 4chan and no one goes there that doesn't already know what to expect. Ergo, no one is really shocked by any of these things anymore.
Again, I know this is a hard pill to swallow and I can see that you're trying really hard to avoid it but most of the racist sentiments on 4chan are genuine.
It would if it didn't keep getting results, like we see with the above news article.
I'm sure that a good chunk of people who hang out on Facebook and Reddit also believe in those things, but that somehow never leads to blanket accusations targeting everyone with a Facebook of Reddit account.
No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
Now, its true, that people who are racist and also attention seekers might be motivated more by the latter than the former in doing that, but that’s a different issue.
And the source article from 404 Media is very much about how this is happening despite the Bing tool that they conclude is being used for much of it itself being largely crippled to prevent “harmful” images, and explicitly calls out the point that the result is that non-harmful use is being sacrificed, with no meaningful impact on harmful use. Which, I would think, would be a message that someone who sees the 4chan use as of no more negative significance than “toilet graffiti” would fully back, since crippling tools to ineffectively prevent “toilet graffiti” is even more problematic than doing though in a (failed) attempt to prevent something that might be more important to prevent.
That's a bold statement and clearly untrue. A boatload of people gets their kicks out of pretending to hold any number of offensive views just to get a rise out of people online.
When I was a dumb 16 year old that was one of my favorite past times. Only works on people who don't believe anyone would do such a thing...
It speaks to your character that you wouldn't even immediately consider it.
What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?
Whatever I knew would get a rise out of my audience.
The "head in the sand" approach doesn't work here.
The idea that all of these people are “just harmless trolls” is unsupportable nonsense. It’s wild how many people want to jump to the defense of these morally repugnant people, though.
But I refer you to "Popehat's law of goats". He who spams racist garbage...
Sure they do: they're called "trolls". That's not to imply that no 4chan users are racist, but the claim that "no one" would do it without being racist is absurd.
Counter Arguments has a fantastic video about this.