I put my heart and soul into this AI but nobody cares
newslttrs.com
newslttrs.com
Maybe a better way of saying this is: Bad currency drives out good. And if the currency is empathy and sympathy itself, then we are racing toward a society that will no longer be able to cast itself into anyone else's shoes.
That's the second time I've read this phrase on HN this week (earlier, it was in reference to the ad-supported Internet).
The race-to-the-bottom of zeroing out people's empathy to grab fractions of a penny (at scale) also reminds me of the Malthusian trap (aka "rats on the island") in slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch". Whatever little nooks exist where some micro-pennies can still be found, will be farmed (at scale).
> It hijacks their moral framework, because they have invested a lifetime in believing certain tropes and terms and what (I as an atheist) would call sappy horseshit, which nonetheless imbues meaning into all aspects of their daily life. They don't suspect that the attack on their dignity will come disguised as an appeal to their faith.
Being human: allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.
Also being human: the wolves among us will find such humans and prey upon them.
We really are animals, after all.
We do have a collective immune system, and it functions based on a collective understanding of reality. The hijacking of individual empathy for a few pennies at a time, using fake stories that trick and humiliate the targets, is like a retrovirus. It attacks the collective immune system that normally allows people to feel empathy for one another, by dissolving the sense that anyone else out there is real or honest.
Most of the smart people who I followed on Twitter, stopped sharing their thoughts in the public in the past 5 years. Responses to them usually didn’t add anything, but took their time.
Smart people in my bubble started to inform themselves less and less over time. It’s pointless. We know what will happen in a general sense for 1-2 decades in the future, and we can’t do anything, and more information just makes us more anxious.
All of the social media has more and more obvious disinformation, not even just misinformation. And with AI, this increased greatly. The cost of real information multiplied several times. It takes simply too much time. This is especially true when something more important shift happens: start of Ukraine war, start of genocide in Gaza, start of Trump second term. But even between these, for example about every second post about Trump was a lie last year on the popular/all page of Reddit. Even when lie is not necessary at all.
Main stream media started to dig their own grave with clearly brainless Zionism, and making Trump appear more sane than he really is, and many times just believing obvious lies. They were not just gullible, they actively tried to shift public opinion without good reasons (and probably with only bad reasons).
So yes, we know that it’s bad for the society, but on individual level more distrust is the logical option. This shift is clearly happening. Also game theory tells us, that this won’t stop, and things will be really-really bad. Middle Ages level zero sum game bad. In short: war.
Any other option is just pure luck, like how it was with Cold War.
It isn't though? But the stuff that is fake has a corrosive effect on out ability to interact with that which isn't.
For example the fine article.. reading it, it didn't seem off to me, at all. Then I see a lot of people in the comments saying it "feels generated". The author is also in the comments saying it's not generated.
> So braindead and stereotypical are these comments that you might think they are themselves AI generated. But, picking a few at random, I checked out their profiles and they seem genuine.
Maybe I don't read enough LLM slop, but that doesn't read like LLM slop to me. I have a hard time imagining the prompt that would create it, I have an easy time seeing a human write it, so to me "it doesn't feel generated". But that's all just us "feeling" something. Like in that well known Carl Sagan quote: "unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true"
Can I or the author prove that it's not generated? No, so that is enough to cast anything into doubt. And I don't think that destroying all trust between humans would make them super-resilient and rational and experts in spotting disinfo. I think it could isolate people completely, not even cut the bonds between them but singe the ability to even make bonds, and that might be to the horrors that the rootlessness of industrialized mass societies gave birth to what blindness is to darkness. Without the village it takes to raise a child, and also to "make" a mind, and a heart, there might be no more hearts and minds as we understand and cherish them.
When I talk to some old folks I know and they insist on "knowing" something from Facebook, and have to step on egg shells to not hurt their feelings, while my alarms are tingling because of what they tell me, and all of that without "AI" crap involved... man, there's so many vulnerable people out there, who are lonely enough as is. They will learn nothing from being assaulted like this, it will just make life more painful and confusing and misleading for them. All because their "engagement" is worth a few cents to someone. As if the brains and lifespans of people are just fruit to squeeze juice and pulp from.
Do I seem down on LLM slop? Because I'm super down on it and I want that to come across :)
You know there is a story about virgin giving birth, guy coming from death after 3 days.
Not starting about dude throwing thunders or yet another one having a hammer only worthy can pick up.
There were loads of people who would swear by those stories to be true.
Many others were killed during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero (54–68 AD), well within the lifetime of the 500+ eyewitnesses of Christ being around for 40 days after his crucifixion. They could have recanted if they knew it was false, but they knew it was true.
To add on the point above: the whole panic is overblown. Majority of people have always been susceptible to blatant lies and manipulation. In my country there was an internet meme "Capital's sewer system as a tool of Judaism and quackery aimed at destroying the farming industry and extermination of local population". The thing is, that's a title of an actual essay printed 100 years ago. Someone genuinely believed this. In my father's village local peasants burnt down one guy's house because he used a scythe instead of a sickle on his own field, believing that this would lead to some curse or whatever.
The point is, people are stupid, have always been, and finding yet another way of generating obvious lies won't change anything in the big scheme of things. Reminds me of a South Park quote that goes along like this:
- I'm worried that you won't like me anymore
- We never liked you in the first place
- So... nothing changes?
- Nothing changes.
I mostly believe the psychology studies that suggest that humans are generally empathetic by default. But then it seems to be fragile. Like you say, stress and culture can inhibit it. And that's without mentioning inborn cognitive biases like tribalism, which I guess works great if you're part of a desperate tribe fighting to survive and where the goal is winning Darwinism, and not so great when you're in a multicultural society at peace and there are a million and one problems to blame on others.
> The point is, people are stupid, have always been, and finding yet another way of generating obvious lies won't change anything in the big scheme of things.
But as we get more advanced levels of delusion (it can always get worse, when the metacognition kicks in), more powerful ways of influencing others, and bigger problems for society to confront, that means all the less capability to address those problems. Although I guess our lack of capability has not changed in the grand scheme of things...
https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/
It is mainly driven by get rich quick YouTube influencers, many from India and the Philippines.
Unsurprisingly it is not a great way to actually make money.
But then I've also seen a far larger number of channels which use text-to-speech to make audiobooks from public domain works. I recently listened to a couple of Plato's works on a channel like this. The text-to-speech did a fairly convincing reading, with Socrates and his companions each having their own distinct voices. These videos had tens of thousands of views, which might not be great, but if you can put out a few hundred videos like that in less than a year it might be worth it to the right person.
I also suspect most of the film summary channels have been using AI in similar ways since before it was even popular. Those videos get into the millions of views and in my opinion they are not bad as far as low-effort content goes.
As a result, life revolves around Facebook. All day, every day. It's how you shop, you contact each other, you 'google things', it's everything. And being rather high unemployment areas, people tend to spend all day there.
So given that you've essentially captured an entire demographic with little to no money that spend all their time on your platform, it's no surprise that's where the scams come from, whether it's outright or through such slop. Who can blame them?
And FB doesn't care, they just report 10 million user growth, without telling the actual truth that they're in a roundabout way, paying those users.
Here are a couple articles describing it in PH[1 and 2].
It's not some limited access thing, it's literally unlimited data. Video calls, watching movies via FB, etc.
AFAICT it's still a thing, though it's not clear to me if FB is still sponsoring it or it's some carrier marketing[3].
1 - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/09/how-facebooks-free-i...
2 - https://technology.inquirer.net/30705/globe-telecom-to-offer...
I can't put my finger on why this bugs me--and my wife thinks I'm being a pedantic when I comment that they're fake ("it's a nice picture, they like it, let them be")--but I think it has to do with the targeting of folks that absolutely would like that photo to be real.
It is like these "life hack" cooking recipes that don't work. They are wasting kids enthusiasm in cooking and trust in people.
I've seen similar things happen in Western countries (e.g. when Reddit identified the wrong guy as the Boston Marathon bomber, local Facebook groups where seniors jump at their own shadow, etc), but I've only ever heard of it resulting in an actual death in non-western countries, and the common vector seems to be WhatsApp.
My working theory is that unmoderated peer-to-peer platforms like this are naturally conducive to witch-hunting (e.g. 4chan used to have a real problem with it), and that perhaps the groups being comparatively private might prevent law enforcement from becoming aware of the issue before it gets out of control.
But the other factor here is that these are all areas of the world where the rule of law is not particularly effective when compared to western countries, so WhatsApp might just be the means by which an old problem is manifesting, rather than being the cause of the problem itself.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/john-oliver-tackl...
Propaganda spreads faster and affects more people in denser and larger population sizes. And when propaganda affects more people it starts feeling less like propaganda and starts feeling believable.
- filter people that can be scammed, you can see that people commenting on these posts and congratulating whatever AI slop you have in the picture are targeted by bots that try to tell them they won something or getting them to buy various useless stuff online
- gather real likes and people in groups and for pages that later turn up to promote certain political candidates (see the recent annulled Romanian elections) or just change their names from "Beautiful Romania" to "Calin Georgescu for president"
Oh i love this one !
There is no way to verify that. Until a method exists to discern real from AI-generated content, we should probably assume it's generated (for our safety).
Sadly, that's the world we live in now. It was kind of like that before, but it's even more so now.
The powerful stuff will play your little mind like a piano. One glance and you're lost.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-det...
Now I'm confused, was it AI-generated or not?
This is an accessibility thing that seems to be very popular on Mastodon and I guess the author put it in the prose directly instead of as mouseover text.
It helps for people using screen readers, people who are in text browsers, people who don't load images by default, and funny enough, AI scrapers.
It's all, 100%, crap.
Seriously though, I completely understand. AI slop tends to have a "when you see it, you can't unsee it" issue, but on first glance they're pretty compelling. Only when writing this did I notice how uncanny the 42 year old woman's thumbs were.
FB is functionally dead for many people, unlikely to meaningfully grow. So they’re trying to reduce costs and make sure new platforms and ones that still have some growth potential get the effort instead. I’d rather work on the Threads or Instagram Reels teams than the FB one. And who knows, maybe the VR revolution Zuck wants really will happen.
It is kind of interesting how the incentive to profit leads to an outcome of lessened potential for profit. Someone who lives paycheck to paycheck is economically useless in the eyes of the capitalist: they have no money to part with essentially as whatever they are paid flows right out of their hands. What happens to capitalism when the numbers of paycheck to paycheck people continue to rise? A lot of the economic success of this country since WWII relative to other countries has depended on americans having more available disposable income to spend on consumer products than any other population in the world. We see that changing now. Strange times ahead.
I have with my own eyes seen a motorbike-taxi driver on a Bangkok street using a cheap VR device. I think you over-estimate how much these things have to cost, and under-estimate how willing people are to pay for gadgets: 34% of Nigerians and 34% of Indonesians own tablets[0]. These are obviously not _identical_ items, but feels close enough to be a counter-point to me.
0: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1452567/share-of-tablet-o...
At first I thought they want to raise the engagement of some accounts and gather a following. But looking at the accounts, they doesn't seem to sell or promote anything.
Are they just sad trolls with a mission to amplify the amount of sadness in the world?
This is even present in fandom communities where young artists from low cost countries charge a lot less than their high cost country counterparts, leading to popularity and exposure on top of just revenue.
The arts have so few barriers to competition that it's quite hard to compete unless your art is just that novel. Most artists that make a living do it by outputting boring things like commercial voiceovers, corporate illustrations, or headshot photography.
But when I re-read it with "did AI write this?" in mind, there's plenty of stuff in there that I would find it rather difficult to get an LLM to write if I tried.
I went back to the video and checked the channel. It has 7.4 million subscribers. It uploads 4 or 5 times a day. At least two 3 hours videos, and a couple short ones. All videos are generated with a voice over. All those that I have checked have comments with real people in them. This battle is already lost.
FWIW, I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat-earthers to try and understand what the appeal is (spoiler: it's often some variant of "if the Earth were a ball hurtling through space, that would be too terrifying")... maybe I should just stay away from this one :D
If we teach kids critical thinking, they will not only be able to recognise scam, they will also stop being religious, which is another good thing.
I wonder why we still don't have critical thinking in schools.
I struggle to explain, but I feel like our data-obssessed society has completely thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to these things. No one labels themselves with a religion or political party because there is a flaw in each one and anything with a flaw can't be correct, scientifically, so we just don't believe in any grand purpose to our lives, don't believe in any world leaders, don't believe in any shared tenets, and basically are all lonely and weak (because we abandon every group with a flaw).
The result of critical thinking shouldn't be a worse off society...
Like many people, you may have been indoctrinated into believing that only religion is capable of fulfilling these needs, providing community, a moral framework or a sense of purpose or value to life, but that isn't true, it's part of the propaganda of theism.
They don't, though. This is a commonly believed fallacy, rooted in the presumption that atheists are essentially hypocrites or blind to religious belief being immutably ingrained into human behavior. But the way atheists approach these "ideologies" is nothing like the way religious people approach religion.
>Perhaps it provides comfort and a feeling of security, or provides a purpose when pure pragmatism would reveal that there's no point in living.
Another commonly believed fallacy, that atheism means "pure pragmatism" and that only religion can provide a sense of meaning to life.
Atheists are actually capable of emotions, and empathy, and morality, and finding value in the world and their own lives, just like anyone else. They aren't insects or Vulcans or sociopaths. To quote Douglas Adams, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
>Maybe people with other higher purposes don't take to it so readily but not everyone has the luxury of, say, a successful career.
This is a new one. Atheism is a luxury of wealthy elites? No, atheists exist at every point of the social and economic ladder, and there are even atheists in foxholes, despite the quip.
>You might have been brainwashed into believing that religion is caused by brainwashing.
I'm not going to call it brainwashing but the knee-jerk animosity from a lot of theists towards the very concept of a life not centered around and entirely defined by belief certainly seems like fear of committing thoughtcrime.
Can you prove, in a way distinguished from how you claim religion has no proof, that there is any value in the world or in your or any of our lives? Objective value, not just something you make up or feel in your heart.
There's no evidence of any objective source of value or meaning in our lives. All indications are that we're the product of random chance and unthinking laws of physics. Gather a huge amount of hydrogen and eventually it turns into people.
What would it look like to live as if it were true? I still have the emotions and drives that evolution and culture baked into me. I fear death, not because I think my life has some inherent objective value, but because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to fear death had better odds of reproducing. I care about my family and work to make their lives better not because I believe their lives have some objective value, but because their lives have value to _me_, and that's because my ancestors who were genetically predisposed to value other people had better odds of passing along those genes. What do you think I should be doing differently given my beliefs?
If you believed this to be true, you would overcome your evolutionarily drives and emotions, like we do when we don't procreate and have kids at the age of puberty because we know it will disadvantage us in society. Or like we do when we don't cheat on our spouses to procreate more for the same reason.
We suppress all sorts of evolutionarily better behaviors for the sake of our society.
But no one who believes there is no value or meaning in our lives just wastes away and dies, nor do the ardent supporters of this view just end their lives to prove to us how seriously they take it.
> care about my family and work to make their lives better not because I believe their lives have some objective value, but because their lives have value to _me_,
A value you made up in your head which isn't real and which you have faith in, despite knowing it isn't provable.
Why?
It may be hard for a religious person to say "Pretending to believe in God is more important than actually believing." so you may get the feeling that if you don't believe, it's not for you. But I think it kind of is like that. It's a useful lie that everyone silently agrees to perpetuate because it actually works better than anything truthful.
But I completely agree, because it's so vague and all-encompassing, it can effectively be a placeholder answer to anything and everything without actually providing any insight.
The only place for any purpose or plan would be in the creation of that early universe. In what sense could there be said to be a purpose or plan if it has had no visible effects for a dozen billion years or more?
If we’re going to talk about people practicing what they preach, let’s talk about all the Christians who are sure they’re going to heaven and yet fear death. All the Christians who are certain their loved ones have gone to heaven and yet still grieve for them.
I mean, the idea of a "higher" purpose implies it is "higher" than our reasoning faculties right? If it was clear to us the purpose or the plan, it would not be "higher".
So again, no evidence for either. And both sides don't practice what they preach. Why is it "logical" to believe one and not the other?
I posit that there's an elephant in your living room. You can't detect it because it's invisible and doesn't interact with ordinary matter so you can't feel it. But it's there. Is it equally logical to believe my claim as it is to believe that there is, in fact, no elephant present?
This is a tiresome argument. Nobody thinks this way until you start talking about gods and then suddenly you turn basic reasoning on its head. "Some incomprehensible entity has a purpose and a plan for the universe but you can't detect it" OK and why should I take this claim seriously?
They aren't mutually exclusive beliefs.
> there's an elephant in your living room
As you realize later on, when it comes to only one claim do we really start entertaining that there might be more than we can objectively measure: the purpose of our lives.
> "Some incomprehensible entity has a purpose and a plan for the universe but you can't detect it" OK and why should I take this claim seriously?
Because the alternative is nihilism. And even the fiercest proponents of it do not seriously live as if their lives are meaningless
I see failure to understand this in all sorts of critical thinkers.
math is communication, and the deeper you go, the more fluent you become, and the more open ended your application gets because you are problem solving, which is a direct consequence of applying critical thinking skills -- you have to consider your solution against a set of possible solutions, and determine pros, cons, and also attempt to disprove your own ideas.
wild statement.
It is ironic that an article railing against people doing all they can for engagement ends with... a call to engage. Sign up for my newsletter.
However, they also share the road with you, help decide what content/messaging gets spread, and vote with their dollar (and political vote), just like you.
While I agree with your opinion, although it may be their fault, it easily can spread to become everyone's problem.
Ye it is pure toxic and made me stop using Facebook.
At some point in time a was fed "people falling and hurting them self a bit" videos. And I hovered over them and tried to find the blacklist button. So Facebook started to feed me more of those! And a hate those kind of videos.
It's also just plain ol' ad revenue as well. Not such thing as bad engagement.
>And then there are opportunities to sell "guest posts" to other spam merchants who want to get their content in front of gullible eyeballs.
Yeah, that too. get ad revenue, then become the ad yourself.
and... the article ends. Well that was a lot more fluff than I anticipated. Yes, not much will change until the people themsevles start rejecting this content en masse. But there will be people falling for it. There are still people falling for old school email spam, so it's sadly not shocking AI works for the non-discerning viewer.
I recently discovered how to make very realistic images - you simply ask for your image, then you use the follow-up prompt "make it more realistic" and, most shockingly, it actually works. I never thought of doing it before because it's so stupid.
My reaction is “why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?”.
I don’t care if it’s real, the only reason I visited the website is to check if the local market’s on this week, and maybe see if anyone I know has posted anything (increasingly unlikely). I think in the modern age it's healthy to have a much wider cynicism - what is this crap, I didn't ask for it, f### off.
I don’t really get why Facebook tries so hard to get me to look at this rubbish. The more of this shit-shovelling there is, the less often I go and the fewer friend posts there are. It’s becoming a dead platform.
I fully understand that "stop using the service" is an option.
The article makes the point that a lot of people are easily fooled into interacting with fake AI stuff. My wider point is that regardless of how 'real' the images are, someone's trying to get you to look at bullshit for profit reasons, either the platform's or their own, therefore it's all best ignored.
Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? What will its final form look like?
What do the scifi prophets say?
(This vast irresistible mind-control machinery serves the billionaires of course)
Poverty is probably your best shield. Because then you can't afford a phone. Someday the universal suicide order will drop and the only people left will be monks and beggars.
I am betting on relationships with people, and avoiding public Internet, except for shitposting on here.
This can be modelled as the back half of a whalefall. The Internet used to be a magic place where you could just stumble into community, useful information, etc. Now it's been over-exploited and game is becoming scarce.
The information is saturated with crap and mass media was never a substitute for friendships. Even though it's the hardest thing I've ever done, I'll have to make real friends.
What you wrote sounds a bit "out there", but, like Margaret Atwood's work, it's actually not too far away.
> Who is vulnerable? Who is immune?
I'm reminded of Hiro Protagonist (living in a storage unit), or Ready Player One protagonist (living in some impoverished mobile home stack) -- these are the "vulnerable".
As for "immune", it's the people who "control the supply":
https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out...
P.S. Like all real-world examples, we have an exception -- Felon Husk, who gets high on his own supply, making him simultaneously victim and perpetrator.