Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real
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This whole side of the Web needs to be put down. The algo-feed ad-clearinghouse side. It’s a cesspit.
Ranging from fast fashion sites "going out of business" (whose domain was registered within the last 90 days) to kickstarter campaigns for cloned products to drop-shipped products with slick videos whose discount price is 3x what it costs for the same on Amazon...
Google wins as long as the viewers don't leave.
why do you consider this massively overpriced? 55% of it i believe goes to content creators and they make more from a subscription watch then an ad supported watch.
Because i struggle to imagine the ads i watch would amount to $15/m. So it feels like significant markup.
A flat rate seems either upcharging, or subsidizing. Neither feel good as a consumer.
I rather (and have) quit than pay them $15/m for a handful of ads. They started fighting a month back or w/e and i just stopped watching them for ~2 weeks. When i tried later, the "problem" was gone lol. Not sure what happened.
I'd much rather pay for a platform that gives money to creators more directly. I pay for a fair share of things on Patreon, for example.
edit: I should note, my assumptions on price are based on how little ad views net in value.
55% to creators 45% to platform to host and stream while also supporting a ton of creators who have little to no views.
Seems a better deal then Netflix ect with more ability to control where your dollar goes
I say that primarily because of experience. For example i subscribe to Spotify, and the revenue split there is atrocious and often a point of debate between platforms. Maybe YT is better, but it's not clear to me from the outside if that's true.
Really we need some body like the UK ASA to say "you're liable for all these frauds, Google".
Seems like the internet ad industry wants scale, but doesn't want to solve the problems of scale.
e.g. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/person-s--unknown-a23-1198241...
Enforcement is very limited to "misleading ad must not appear again". Eventually they'll have to do something a bit toothier or we're going to have an all-scam internet.
If advertising providers were de jure and de facto liable for fraud, then that will raise the bar for competing advertising providers, as if Google wasn't enough of a monopoly.
Regulation almost universally benefits established players and stifles competition, which is why a lot of regulation is (secretly) backed by large companies. (Note that I'm not saying that regulation never hurts large companies, and regulation can hurt both large companies and small companies/society.)
Such a weird take.. without regulation we would still have child labor, slave labor, cancer causing shit in basically everything, no seatbelts, even worse corruption in politics and companies, .. list goes on ..
We don't have to be on the side of 100% regulation is good but I hope we can see that a lot of regulation is actually making the world we live in liveable.
(yes, I know content providers can still embed their own promotions into their videos).
For everything else, use SponsorBlock! (Crowdsourced auto-skip YouTube for annoying in-video adverts)
When I dropped cable I started subscribing to dozens of channels and now have a pretty solid subscription list.
Many creators I follow have dabbled in different forms of monetization, and I've preferred to stick with the ones that offer patterns or other methods of supporting them.
I don't think it's fair to criticize googles product offering for the content creators choices
No, it serves the content without adding more ads of its own.
> You can choose to subscribe to authors that do not place ads or sponsored content in their videos.
If not consuming the content I wanted is a solution, I can just solve all the problems by not using youtube. That's not really a solution.
Looks like Google benefits by allowing scammy ads...
I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.
Youtube only got to where it is now by Google plowing billions of dollars from a different monopoly into it. Most of the other major "free" consumer tech products gained their market share by burning way more money than most competitors could afford.
There are YouTube channels i watch, but it's just a fun distraction. If they went away I'm not sure I would care that much. The educational stuff is handy, but that is all out there in different forms on the web anyway.
I'd like to be wrong, but so far the ad model is the best business model for such content.
Au contraire, it's very likely that it's not a coincidence.
The internet is just a medium, and Facebook / YouTube are just mass platforms filled with people who click on these ads.
But YouTube specifically has built-in segmentation that allows to skip this whole cesspit, it is called YouTube Premium. Same way you would skip yellow papers at kiosk and spend money on better press twenty years ago. (afaik Facebook was recently forced to introduce similar [half-baked] subscription model due to local EU regulations.)
There's a reason why a lot of forums went downhill and got replaced by Reddit... moderating them is a constant effort (and Reddit at least takes over the legally mandated stuff like CSAM, piracy and basic anti-spam), admins are tired of skiddies exploiting phpBB or whatever vulnerabilities the very second they get public, you gotta deal with trolls DDoS'ing you for fun, and also users are lazy because they don't want Yet Another Login (not to mention, Reddit centralizes notifications vs a flooded mailbox). And for blogs, the situation is very similar.
Forums died all the time back then because the admin got tired of the mess. People these days would be far less tolerant of joining these small groups and pouring time into them, only to have them disappear a few months later.
So what now, a ban on "mass communication for everyone at scale"? How exactly will that be defined and enforced?
This isn't my problem.
That's a choice, no?
Ads are Google's main businesses, they should be responsible for vetting. Saying it's a scaling issue is a poor excuse, and if that is their legitimate stance then it should be used as evidence that the government needs to step in.
No, that's a choice. If Youtube hired 5k qualified people to vet their ad partners properly the problem would be solved tomorrow. It's "impossible" in the sense that this would eat into their profits rather than outsourcing the misery to the consumer.
Most of us could be more profitable if we decided to act unethically or illegally. Serving scam adverts (and my YouTube and Google adverts appear to be substantially more scam than not) is Alphabet saying they care more about profit than anything else and they should, quite frankly, be punished for it, both through things like fines from advertising standards bodies, and by more people taking matters into their own hands by using Adblock. I personally would also vote for any politician who put laws into place to make executives personally liable if their platforms are found to not do enough to get and combat fraud and scams on their platforms, because these companies actively profit from these scams through advertisement revenue.
Wrong - if Google can't make the money they need on YouTube then it's our problem. They'll need to run more ads and they'll take more draconian measures to ensure you can't block their ads. You can better believe they'll further monetize their efforts by selling the needed tech to other web sites. We all lose in that scenario.
YT is cheap like hell.
It has one of the most diverse high quality content I know.
Way of entry for producers/creators is tremendously low.
YT löst a lot of money for years.
If we are not even able to pay 12$ / month for YT what do you want? Everything for free adfree?
The locally owned newspaper has none of this garbage whereas the "corporate owned" newspaper has ALL of it.
None of these problems will get better until 1) consumers pay for things they want, and waaaaaaay more importantly, 2) producers produce content that consumers are willing to pay for. So, it may just never happen.
- Newspapers end. Any news site, or social media peddling news in disguise, will never stop showing you content. Even if that content is something you won't like, and they know you won't like it, but they must retain you at all costs. They simply let you scroll forever. When I'm done with the paper I move on with my day.
- Newspapers are never written 'for you'. The paper clearly writes for an audience but not me as an individual. Not everything I see will be because an Algorithm or someone in product believes this will drive N% more clicks or revenue from me. I can better understand my own biases.
- Ads are obvious, clearly labeled, distinctly different from content, and often includes who paid for them. Ads are also not animated or obtrusive (if sometimes large), which if you turn off ad-block and go to any site these days is a jarring experience. Even sometimes with ad-block on.
[1]https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/nook-newsstand/newsstand/ne...
Dude, I dream of my YouTube ads are being scams. I get greeted every time by a game ad. Some kind of dwarf dies on an apple being offered or something, and dying sounds like someone is throwing up. Please give me your scam ads.
When did ads stop even attempting to sell me anything? They don't even try anymore. Now they just show me thinly disguised images of dildos.
[1] Typical Example: https://i.imgur.com/sRu8s0I.png
It's Meta/Facebook's and Alphabet/Google's "business model".
If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.
Also, algorithmic feeds, "influencers" and "content".
But I don't think there's that much of a watershed date, more like a slow march that accelerated during the Trump era and then went into overdrive after 2020.
On the other hand I might be able to print out a copy of the AI generated one, hang it at my desk, and enjoy looking at it a few times before it becomes part of the background of my disposable life.
Compared to a "tribal wood carving designed by GPT" a real world piece of wood is, well, real. The novelty of everything wears off eventually so it won't matter if GPT could still show you nearly infinite carving designs. Without that being turned into actual physical objects by people, they are disposable bytes of data with no real meaning.
In the olden times, you could enjoy an account of a story like that on Facebook because it was supposed to be real (it often wasn't, but there was at least a kernel of truth). Now it seems like I can only experience "authentic" stories / content via first or very limited second hand experience (from a select group whom you trust)
I think whether AI content will put people off the web in general will depend on whether it's actually any good or not. 'That looks like an AI made it' is usually an accusation of shoddiness at the moment!
I guess AIs could always be made to emulate that, but it seems it could make legitimately human stuff have higher value. Sharing with your friend a bootleg live recording that you made might be a greater gift.
I could certainly imagine digitally-signed material from human artists, as well. Maybe I'm just old, but when I'm consuming some kind of art, I want to know that thinking, feeling humans were behind it. If I just want to look at pretty pictures, AI is fine.
And I am actually old, because I'm already put off the modern web. :) HN-style websites are just my speed.
ePUB books are basically HTML and CSS, so it's a matter of making a "book browser" instead of a web browser, that can inject links to things mentioned in the book text: such as a name, a place, and especially to another book.
Who knows, maybe AI people _want_ the Web to fill with garbage so people have to ask their creations for information.
The shadow libraries make no money by sharing books, instead the librarians risk prison for doing it. So there is no incentive for them to include AI spam books. There is also very little incentive for creators of AI spam books to try to have them included in the shadow libraries.
That's just one incentive. There are others, like ideological battle (e.g. flood the last good information channels with generated myside propaganda, which then will motivated a counter-flood of otherside propaganda, and the mean of the floods isn't truth).
And in any case, ads make a lot of money, but what exactly is an ad anyway? Is there any particular reason an ad can't take the form of an AI-generated spam book in a "shadow library"?
The taint will follow the users.
Would you be able to flood a physical library with AI-generated books?
About two minutes of googling and testing shows that Library Genesis has an anonymous upload function.
I really doubt a pirate library will have the manpower to fully vet every upload. Especially with generative AI able to generate something that sorta looks right.
> Would you be able to flood a physical library with AI-generated books?
A physical library does not have the same characteristics as an online "shadow library," so the question is moot. For instance: a physical has a budget and staff and orders books to shelve, while a "shadow library" must rely on (illicit) donations.
This is the process of LibGen uploads:
> After successful uploading you need to fill the bibliographic data and submit the form, otherwise the file won't be actually added. The file will be accepted to the collection (and become widely distributed) once it gets necessary positive votes from the librarian team, usually it happens in a few days after uploading.
If it's easy to compromise the shadow libraries with AI generated content, I suggest you go ahead and do it for proof.
There are real people running Reddit too (for instance), including mods. That's not an insurmountable barrier.
The shadow libraries have a particular vulnerability to spam, because AI-generated junk can overwhelm their capacity to moderate, but the natural response to the problem (block uploads) could ultimately kill the site. I imagine the main reason they can keep on top of things now is because there's not much interest in subverting their platform, but if it somehow becomes one of the "last good things" on the internet, I think that will change.
If you're old enough, similar arguments existed about "open / free internet" and we're seeing some of the consequences of having it be controlled by mega corps.
The LLMs don't have any sort of magical way of filtering that out. So if you train an LLM on spam, hoaxes and similar garbage you will get recommendations to drink bleach as a cure for covid. And that applies regardless of whether the bot is trained by a megacorp or someone in their garage using open source network and tools.
Also that information is by definition old. For something it doesn't matter, for many other things, like current news, it very much does.
So while the attraction of having a personal "butler" doing the hard work for you is great, no doubt, it is ultimately no better than getting one's information from Facebook - you have ceded control and get whatever the creators of the system deem you worthy of having. Including political and other agendas. Just look at the censorship the Baidu bot is applying and the entire "jailbreaking" industry around escaping the artificially imposed boundaries on these bots, for good or bad reasons.
And ultimately even ChatGPT and its ilk won't help us any when the web they scrape will be filled with machine-generated spam and crap drowning out all the useful information. Garbage in, garbage out applies even to these robots. They aren't magic.
Though if you're an expert in a subject you ask it about, you can see when it transitions from "knowledge of the subject" to "Your uncle who made a living hustling pool and can tell a story made of nothing but whoppers of lies, sounding like the most honest person you've ever met."
It's reasonable to assume it does the same thing over subjects you know less about.
ChatGPT is essentially an echo chamber between you and ChatGPT.
The point is that if I ask about topics I don't know about, then by definition I can't judge what is or isn't true. That is also the case on HN where I'm reading a discussion about a topic I don't know about, but that on HN there are some signals such as votes and replies to comments, whereas on ChatGPT there are no external signals. Is this perfect? Of course not. Does it usually work kind of okay? I'd say it does.
For books or sites or most things these signals exist too; I can look up what others have said about it.
Even your uncle at a birthday party has some controls because other family members can call him out on hos bullshit, or they can later tell "psst, what Jack told you is a load of rubbish", or whatever.
There is no "generic review" of ChatGPT because it tells every single person someone else. There is no shared content we're both looking at.
ChatGPT very much works in a substantially different way than most other public sources of information.
That's no different from ChatGPT. The control on books at least is a publisher, but that is not really the case for a website. That's why fake news is a real issue.
And your uncle may talk to you in private. Or maybe it's your parents around the family dinner table. There are many sources of dangerous misinformation, not just ChatGPT.
Education and critical thinking is the real solution.
That there are crackpot books out there is besides the point; I can trivially find out which the good books and crackpot books are. With ChatGPT you need to verify every single reply it gives you.
And there is nuance here. Take Horrible Histories. I like Horrible Histories – it's fun, and generally the history is accurate. But it's not perfect and has mistakes, and there's a ton of lists enumerating these mistakes, so you can safely watch the show and then read these lists to ensure you're not believing a mistake.
There is no "historical inaccuracies in ChatGPT" list. It would be impossible to construct such a list. You need to verify every single reply it gives you, and every detail of that not just the general gist.
General critical thinking helps you surprisingly little because many of the signals of reliability that you usually rely on are lacking. Thinking you can trust ChatGPT on topics you're not already fairly knowledgable on and can't be easily empirically tested (e.g. math, programming to some degree) is a good way to get fooled.
Hopefully soon we'll see it reading the story itself, stripping out irrelevant ads/SEO, and summarizing it.
I actually have a dream of one day going back to a flip phone where I'll get an AI call summarizing emails or messages that are important, as well as any relevant news stories where I can ask for more detail if needed.
The Internet is amazing, but honestly I don't know that the degree to which I personally engage with it is the ideal cost/benefit as opposed to using an intermediary.
Do it. Sonim makes some absolute brick chonks of phones these days.
> ...where I'll get an AI call summarizing emails or messages that are important, as well as any relevant news stories where I can ask for more detail if needed.
I just try to not have unimportant emails come in, though eBay can't be convinced to turn off their damned shipping notifications (or I've not found how to do it). The 1st of the year is a very good time to start wrangling your inbox - every email that comes in is either of value, or you figure out how to eliminate it. Unsubscribe from everything you don't really care about.
And news summary emails are a thing. I route them and various Substack newsletters to my Kobo via Pocket.
> The Internet is amazing, but honestly I don't know that the degree to which I personally engage with it is the ideal cost/benefit as opposed to using an intermediary.
You get a lot of the benefits with far less use than most people assume sane.
I check email via mail clients, when my desktop computers are on. It doesn't come to my phone. I'm off instant messengers most evenings. And I turn my cell phone off at night (which also leads to, on the Sonim XP3+, about two weeks of useful battery life).
Just start.
Often referred to as the dead internet theory
For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.
Real question is who pays for 'em?
On the popular subs if you read at least half the posts (not comments) you'll see "Op is a bot that reposts content". They typically have some algorithm that digs up old popular posts that haven't been posted in a while and reposted them. With the number of people complaining they are reposted crap I have my doubts their initial upvotes legit, instead getting enough bot votes to get them on the subs front page which then gains more natural votes.
This may be a bit tangential, but something like 1/8th of surviving classical Greek literature (1000 years!) is attributed in part to Galen. While he was quite prolific, the point is that the entire corpus is extremely small.
We didn't even have the capability to record audio and video until the early 1900s, and certainly not in a mass, centralized, easily-distributable sense until the internet. Having a million monkeys write Shakespeare is pure happenstance, but having a million Shakespeares is inevitable. I abstractly worry that even besides the junk, there will actually be so much PHENOMENALLY GOOD stuff that would-be creators and artisans will be discouraged instead of inspired.
Let's hope that you're right about the real carvings. That at least is not so scalable.
Why should it? 50% of IP traffic is caused by robots, maybe in the future 99% will be. Robot shit viewed by AI robots, SISO. Shit in, shit out.
Luster? Huge portions of the Earth depend on the web as their only info source. News has turned into "somebody ran their mouth on (the symbol formerly known as Twitter)."
Also, utterly false news: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-a... The comments are disturbing "I always suspected Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling were computer generated."
Also, you might not be able to read this, because I might already be shadow / hell / heaven banned. (A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Far too easy to write a script that says if( [user] ) then ( "hide" ).
Also, if you can, we might just live in a ban circle together. Since all news in the future will be personalized based on your tracking pixel and router location. 'ChatGPT, write me a fake nightly news cast for "so and so" location.'
Perhaps AI will finally deliver the message.
But then... What if AI dreams the carvings and then drives the CNC? Would that be interesting? Or is there something special about the human being?
Facebook gets more money the more eyeballs their algorithms decide to show the lie to.
/s
Yes, this has been happening for a long time. This is why fiction literature exists.
If images we know are fake could not move our emotions, nobody would have ever laughed at a cartoon.
The AI clones are a fiction of a fiction.
One thing that I'm increasingly seeing is when you point a fake out to a person, and they just shrug and say, "okay, so this one was fake, but it's still a good illustration of how things are in general, so what's the problem?".
“Okay, I don’t care, I have nothing to hide.”
It's like humans experience something (see an ad) and it makes them feel something (ad uses cute dog) and they remember that feeling the next time they see that brand/ad/initial stimuli. Like seeing something triggers a mini-replay in the brain.
Often though they don't even use any tertiary sources like wikipedia and get some facts very wrong.
edit: They also usually have some AI-generated image with some of histories worst dictators made to look nice and some animated particle or lightning effects.
edit 2: The genie is out of the lamp now. I think the only way to inoculate people against this is to give everyone these capabilities. When people see how easy this it will hopefully make them more discriminating when they see other images.
Sorry, i wasn't clear. Not all of them are using Wikipedia. Them using Wikipedia is usually best case scenario. Often though it's just anecdotal crap.
So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public.
And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the internet.
If you alone feel you also need to duplicate their efforts, you may just have control issues, but if the need is genuine and shared by many then you need to rally the people to get the problem solved. Paying an employee to do nothing while you pick up the slack is a plain waste of resources.
Ideally, the press would actually report on what is happening, but the incentives just aren't there for thorough and accurate reporting. You either get highly partisan press that lies or just omits important parts of what is happening because the ones paying the bills want them to, or you get an anemic press that can't do more than trawl FB or, worse, official declarations for info.
Although that is not nearly as silly as hiring an employee and then doing their job for them. There is no point in hiring anyone if you want to do the job yourself. You go through the employee election process because you recognize that it is more efficient for one person to do the work on your, and your neighbour's, behalf. You are choosing to hand off the work to someone else precisely so you do not have to do it.
2. If you cannot establish enough trust with the employee you are choosing to hire, why are you selecting anyone? If you are going to do the work yourself, why not do the work yourself?
3. As before, there is nothing special about cities and countries when as compared to any other organization. If you have a widget factory, how do you ensure that your hired engineers are designing widgets that meet your expectations and requirements? Do you simply push them aside and design the widgets yourself in case what they designed wasn't up to snuff?
2. Managers typically have a handful of direct reports that they can check and trust. Also, managers can fire their employees on the spot, reduce their pay etc. You have nowhere near that level of control over your representatives, and you have many more representatives than any normal manager has direct reports.
3. While I trust my direct reports and employees, I very much occasionally verify that their work is being done. I don't need to design a widget myself: I can find out if the widget works or not by checking how well it holds up, what the QA department finds and so on.
Then have your worker collect video evidence and information from multiple sources to have on hand when you need greater assurances. You're the boss. They're simply there to relieve you from having to do the job yourself. It is reasonable to expect them to do the job like you would.
> you have many more representatives than any normal manager has direct reports.
Government systems can differ, but typically you hire one employee for any one government that you oversee. It is likely that you are in charge of a few governments (e.g. federal, state, municipal), but unlikely more than a small handful. It would be quite unusual for a manager to have fewer direct reports in an organization of any meaningful size.
> You have nowhere near that level of control over your representatives
You most certainly do as long as you have the rest of the board on your side. Finding consensus with the board may be a challenge, but that's true of any organization. The sitting board at the widget factory isn't bowing to your every wish either.
> While I trust my direct reports and employees, I very much occasionally verify that their work is being done.
So why not do the same with the employee you hire to watch over political matters?
Plus, while it's true that in some government systems you only vote for a specific person, in many others you vote for a political party, and they allocate people as needed and according to the total votes they got. I think this system is far more common than the other one, and it is the system I live in (for parliament and town councils - it's true that for presidential and mayoral elections you vote for a single person).
Finally, having "a board" of some 2 million or 20 million or 200 million people is entirely different from having a board of 10. And then, social media is exactly one of the ways I can collaborate with my other "board members" at this scale.
Already if I'm a board member and not a manager, then much of your metaphors die away: active board members absolutely do more than read reports from their CEO, they read newspapers and watch analysts talk about their business. They don't rely entirely on the CEO for info on how the business is doing. And I have yet to see a company led by 200 co-CEOs, each chosen by a different board - and yet this is how must countries operate. It's almost like democratic countries are a totally different kind of organization than autocratic companies, and require totally different means of interaction.
In addition, CEOs are legally liable if they lie to their boards about the state of the business. Politicians are very much entirely protected for any and all things they say to the public about their activity. Your mayor could publicly tell you that they have paved your own driveway with gold and that they are increasing taxes to pay for the maintenance of that gold that doesn't exist, and it would be completely legal for them to do so.
This year, my town had a referendum on whether to raise taxes to fund a public pool to replace a 70-year-old one that is falling apart. The public conversation was only focused on actual pros and cons of that particular project rather briefly, quickly devolving first into a general fight over development vs lack thereof, and from there to national economic policy, crime etc. And I have a distinct feeling that most people who actually voted ended up being swayed (one way or the other) by those arguments - the partisan alignment of support & opposition at the end was very blatant.
Which means that (in turn) you can’t just “log off” and be rid of the problem since it predates... logging off.
Neo thought he could just “log off” in The Matrix. But then then it turned out that the illusions ran deeper than first thought.
[1] Filter Bubble quacks et al
"Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
But these issues have become internalized, not merely something that the Ministry of Truth or whatever says. I think the introduction to Eclipse of Reason explains it better (published 1947).
In general I think “Truth” died due to Hyperreality. (If I could read French. Or understand Postmodernism.) Orwell’s vision has become too simplistic. I don’t really understand why his memes are so popular. Although perhaps on a meta-level it could be understood.
[1] The propaganda in Animal Farm was mostly delivered through the henchmen who personally berated the animals and gaslit them. It’s harder to resist even that.
The real goal is to get people to give up on finding the truth. At that point, they become easy to manipulate (because there is no outside standard of facts to work around).
While far from perfect, I'm not sure a deluge of generated AI nonsense outside of the vetted channels, complementing people already stirring up nonsense, changes anything.
Rather strained definition of truth there. The truth that matters is a basic not-very-wrong version of what is happening.
Examples: 1) The earth is roughly spheroidal. 2) NASA is a real space agency and landed people on the moon in 1969-1973. 3) The trails behind airplanes are condensation particles, not sprayed chemicals. 4) Vaccines are safe and effective, and the ratio of issues to prevented disease is on the order of millions-to-one, a vast benefit to society, especially those who medically cannot get vaccines. 5) Hijacked airlines and not pre-set explosives brought town the WTC towers in NYC on 9/11/2001. Etc. Etc. Etc....
We do NOT need a doctorate in Geology, selection into NASA Astronaut Corps, graduate astronomic physics course, PhD-level immunology, or a structural engineer's license to understand any of the above to a useful level.
Yet, there is sufficient human-generated noise to convince millions that none of these are true.
And you are claiming that adding industrial-scale AI agents to the public 'conversation' at a scale never seen in history will have zero effect?
Sure, it might completely fizzle. But the normal and prudent expectation when something comes in and "floods the zone with shit" [0], especially when that shit has the potential to be at a volume that is far beyond anything experienced, is to expect that it will have some effect.
What evidence do you have that it will have no effect? In answering, consider another top HN story at the moment "Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real". [1]
[0] Steve Bananon's description of a disinformation tactic
The standard model for electrical current is not true, but it is still useful in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. True and useful are very different things. The conflation here is erroneous.
The average person is never going to understand what is true in any meaningful way, and even those who focus on certain truths are going to be focused on very specific truths, not all truths. There is only so much time in the day. For everything else they have to work with simplified models that may be quite disconnected from reality, but as long as they work for all practical purposes, who cares?
> And you are claiming that adding industrial-scale AI agents to the public 'conversation' at a scale never seen in history will have zero effect?
Conversation only happens when people realize they are working with a faulty model, so if conversation keeps happening then that means people are realizing that the model they currently have doesn't work. What do you think is going to happen with more noise? If people can't find a usable model in a not-so-noisy environment, do you think they will suddenly be able to find one in a noisier environment? That seems quite unlikely. In reality, the outcome is the same either way.
Maybe increased noise will turn more interest to the vetted environments and ignoring the noisy conversations, but if people are already not finding the vetted, the reality is that we are not likely to see change there either.
Agree, but this means we are talking about two different topics. I'm talking at a functional level of truth; a base level of truths commonly understood in a society such that it can maintain cohesion. You're talking about deeply understood truths, like the 2+-hour discussion of quantum effects on the question of "why is the sky blue?" at a PhD's defense presentation.
>> Conversation only happens when people realize they are working with a faulty model...
what about when people actually have a good model, and a disinformation stream replaces that with a bad model, or causes them to just say 'nothing is true'?
For your purposes of deep truth, sure, everyone knows almost nothing except maybe in their own tight discipline, so one noise level or another will make no difference.
But at the level I'm talking about, common understanding of basic truths (the sky is blue, scattering, not a clue abt quantum effects), we are already seeing how increasing the noise level only by removing the Fairness Doctrine in broadcast media — society is significantly more fragmented. Automating and scaling those drivers of untruths is likely to accelerate the fragmentation.
Do they actually have a good model? Or a flawed model with good intentions?
Global warming stands out as a prime example where many accepted the general idea in theory back when it was a novel concept, but under a flawed model, and when the flawed model didn't stand up to practical use the conversations began... There was an attempt to rebrand the idea as climate change to try and reset the clock, so to speak, but in many ways that only confused the issue further.
Separating truth from lies is something every one of us as a human have to do, and that we can't outsource with complete confidence to anybody else. Credentials are one of the last factors that should be weighed when determining truth vs lies.
What will probably (and already is starting to) happen is that people will revert to deriving truth through tribalism rather than evidence.
On a more serious note haven't societies long been based upon common brainwashing? The Bronze Age and before are fuzzier on the details but propaganda certainly existed then as well at a smaller scale.
Technology advancements raise the danger potential almost exponentially when compared to late history, or even recent history.
It doesn't take much to tip the course of history. The bronze age didn't require the same type of risk assessment that we have the burden of managing.
Welcome to 1998's WWW.
I saw one movie group that was spamming the 103rd birthday of Kirk Douglass, this year. 30k comments and 250k likes.
Endless congratulations, without anyone pointing out that Kirk, unfortunately, passed away 3 years ago. He'd turn 107 if he was still alive.
The dead internet theory doesn't sound too outlandish now.
There are a lot of younger generation web users with an entirely misguided belief that seeking approval by ripping, modifying, re-uploading, in the process relabeling content with the user themself as the creator is not only tolerated but encouraged behavior, which is not at all a correct understanding.
Some call this type of criticism "copyright maximalism", as if it's bad. It's good. Copyright is good. It works. It's not going to reduce bandwidth, nor hurt content quality. In fact, some are starting to recognize need to always "put sauce" because it is becoming harder to ease approval craving in today's Web without doing so. Maybe it's time to push it further. Just a bit.
One of the worst parts about social media is image crafting. And it even seeps into real life on occasion where you see people at incredible locations spending all their time trying to craft some perfect pic to put up, instead of just soaking in the location or even really enjoying themselves. If anybody can [literally] image craft anything, then the entire point of online image crafting disappears, because anybody can now trivially fake anything.
The problem is, people don’t look at Facebook as an experience they themselves ought to actively curate - it’s mostly out of obligation at this point. They feel guilty if they don’t remain connected to this relative or that friend of a friend or some celebrity or brand, and so they put up with whatever they’re spammed with, rather than choosing to improve their situation.
The apparent active group of friends you have is no doubt why you haven't seen it. That activity gives Facebook something to work with.
Interesting thought. I just dropped meta in my investment account since I needed the money for a trade. They had a good run, unfortunately I bought before the dip because of metaverse.
A simple solution: #DeleteFacebook
It kind of pisses me off, because every photo ends up looking the same. They all have the same "smooth" look. It gives that uncanny valley effect
Example of Meryl Streep I found after just browsing for 10 seconds: https://i.imgur.com/b4J2iPq.jpg
> I tried to determine if the commenters, too, were bots. The vast majority of them clearly are not. Most commenters I looked into are people who have been judiciously posting family photos, political arguments, and status updates on Facebook for decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are real. There's still an incredible number of Facebook users (especially the older generations) that just scroll through Facebook for hours each day and earnestly interact with things they see.
It's as if Facebook saw what Taboola and Outbrain were doing with their 'one weird trick' style ads, and decided they needed a piece of that themselves.
Eg, someone builds a system that constructs a graph that points images back to the previous references, based on their distances.
The one with the earliest timestamp is considered the original.
Copyright abolitionism is probably the dominant ideological position among AI researchers and thank god for it. Aaron Swartz was a saint.
This also protects the account itself from suspension.
While it is ethically dubious, I don't really care. The pearl-clutching that we're inventing a fake reality can be viewed two different ways. Either it's overblown, as it clearly doesn't matter who is liking what on the internet, not in the grand scheme of things. Or if it is a problem, the ship sailed a decade ago when people started carrying a screen around in their pockets 24/7, and AI art is just another drop in the bucket.
You'll have an account "Amazing science". You follow it and it does post interesting videos. You believe the account provides a valuable service.
In reality, these accounts never credit the original source, and even if they do, in a disconnected way. The actual person that made the content does not get the views, likes, reshares, and follows.
It's all done under the disguise of "fair use" but it's a great injustice that these accounts profiteer from effectively "stealing" content. Or at least stealing exposure.
And yes, AI would be the next evolution to make the production of original content increasingly pointless.
It might seem an odd position to take, but I think Facebook is in the process of dying. I've been expecting it for 20 years; after all, MySpace died (although I hear it's ghost still haunts some people).
/me never had a Facebook account.
"""
...for decades...
The irony of it all considering Kojima was also falsely accused of assassinating the Shinzo Abe just last year.
The Most Profound Moment in Gaming History: https://youtu.be/jIYBod0ge3Y
I doubt "Facebook is being overrun" is an accurate description of this situation.
Next step will be high quality fake vidoes not just images and those will be even more believable for most of people.
AI is a weapon to surpass Metal Gear https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435978
From the platform perspective, this is just a faster way to generate the same crap that's been on these sites for years, with less risk of copyright claims and associated take-down notices.
From the perspective of artists, I think whether or not there's a problem has a lot to do with how much artists have decided to centre their efforts around social media, as opposed to something more intrinsically bad or damaging.
Let's consider the first work that appears in the article, the image of the carving of the dog. The article states:
> The real German Shepherd carving was made by a UK-based professional chainsaw sculptor named Michael Jones, who detailed his work in a series of videos and photos posted over the course of the summer. Jones’ work has since been stolen and turned into endless variations.
First of all, Jones's work has not actually been "stolen". The output of his artistic process in this instance is a wooden carving of a German Shepherd. That carving has not been stolen. What has had actually happened is that a photograph of him posing next to his art has been used to generate other, similar images.
The impact of this image generation and subsequent garbage posting on social media is, according to Jones, that he and his fellow carvers are "missing out on the rightful credit exposure to their work" and that this is "setting unrealistic expectations when it comes to creating chainsaw carving art or any art".
Personally, I am skeptical that exposure to people on Facebook whose appreciation for artistry consists of "your a fantastic artist" is worth very much. And what's the counterfactual here? If these posters were not making these fake image memes, would that traffic be going to his posts instead? That seems far from certain.
The second part of his complaint, that this sets "unrealistic expectations", is closer to the heart of the matter, I think. I don't think qualified buyers of genuine art will pay less for real works of art because they've seen so many AI-generated artworks that they no longer have a realistic understanding of what real art looks like. I think they are, and will continue to be, educated and discerning enough to understand the difference, to appreciate process, and so on.
I do think that people on Facebook who have seen increasingly fantastic "wood carvings" on Facebook may appreciate his genuine wood carving photographs less in the future. This might be a real problem for him, given that it seems like posting on Facebook is something important to him, and might also be important to his business model. In other words, his real problem might boil down to, "Some people are better at making viral posts on Facebook than I am". But how much this qualifies as a genuine problem for the platforms, their users, or society at large, is not all that clear to me.
Most of the garbage I get is innocuous - silly comics, AI generated movie posters of like "what if Wes Anderson made the Marvel movies" that I tend to block. Occasionally it's aggressive right-wing memes (and it's never "personal responsibility" or "low taxes" stuff, always "this is the group we hate today and how stupid and annoying they are").
Still, I occasionally find myself absentmindedly infinite-scrolling, just because I started there looking for news from old friends.
I had to disable and re-enable all my extensions to fix it.
I laughed at this
I have a sample dataset at truthbeam.etc, timestamped at https://explorer.rsk.co/address/0xb4910aa351e7f425369f497230... on Rootstock.
I'm here to spam and answer questions, and I'm running low on spam!
It's not even ads. I don't mind the ads actually. They seem to be the only sane content in comparison aside of course the occasional but rare real content shared by my friends.
I just want to keep all this crap off my timeline please. Show me more ads if you want, but stop with the TikTok like reposts with AI generated drivel overlayed or some "reaction": "What did you think of this brave lad? We think he's great, leave a comment." Next: 5 minutes craft video.
In the past month or so I've noticed an increasing number of videos that use obviously AI-generated images as "proof" for everything from a flat earth to Tartaria and the "mud flood".
All of the videos are getting comments that call this out... but they're never anywhere near the top. Of course, the other comments could well be AI-generated as well - but I don't have enough faith in humanity to believe that's the likely.
I use Facebook only because the town groups are all there. It's the local forum board, and barely anything else for me at this point.
If there's annoying stuff on my feed, it's because of something I did, and can undo (e.g. unfollow someone who posts annoying stuff)
I feel like I must be part of some pilot program to actually show people stuff they want to see. I'm sure it won't be deemed profitable enough.
Lol
Copyright does not work that way.
They need to be sued into bankruptcy for defamation.
AI is a wonderful tool that lets anyone creat beautiful images, and the incumbents in the image-faking field are deeply offended by that.
How about let's not.
This is the logical conclusion if you believe training on some copyrighted works and then generating different enough content would violate the original copyright.
If I remember correctly, just training on a copyrighted image without generating a similar image was argued in court to be copyright infringement.
AI image generators trigger Uncanny Valley effect[1].
Also, ai art has gotten past uncanny valley in a lot of cases, that's why there is concern it's possible to confuse with real images.