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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

There's been a lot of talk on HN about generative AI and how it will be weaponized to scam people and politically for propoganda. That reality got here very quickly.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney, being arrested at a political protest. A half hour later, the official White House X account posted an altered version in which Armstrong’s face was manipulated to make it appear that she was crying.

Wild to see this tech get adopted so fast and so unapologetically used.

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There are people on this site who will still turn out to vote for this administration and their allies in Congress. It's wild.

The number of tech or tech-adjacent people that have completely torched their reputation in the last few weeks is staggering. I hope they get publicly shamed.

Lol the CEO of Palantir said enthusiastically during an investor conference that it's necessary on occasion to kill his enemies, why would you think tech reputations would get torched? If anything it should be a boon when getting hired for big tech. As the government becomes more fascist and more integrated with industry, these contracts will be more and more important and enthusiastically embracing the anti-domestic-terrorist line will improve reputations even more.

Many tech bros have always been racist and misogynist.

They shamed themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsl_sKYywEI

Unfortunately ... it's all of them.

I don't even know what a realistic plan to fix this looks like. How do you cult de-program 40% of the population of the most powerful country on the planet?

Nuremberg-style trials for every single person working under this administration is obviously the base minimum to start to get a handle on this. Anyone who is not pushing for that is not being serious about tackling America's problems. Then what? Extreme anti-trust enforcement and implement wealth caps to prevent the harm from recurring and hope most of the population eventually comes back to planet Earth?

I agree, sadly we do not have any leadership pushing for this yet.

Oh, that's easy. You see people vote like this if they don't advance economically. So what you need is to create a decade or so of economic advancement for >50% of the US.

If that doesn't happen, odds are that even if a democrat president gets elected, they won't be much better. This is still the fallout of the GFC, of the decision to bail out the banks back then.

I know that sounds incredible, and I would have bitten off the head of anyone claiming this when I was 20 ... but it's how the world works.

As a foreigner, I'm super interested but somewhat lacking in knowledge on this subject. Could you expand on this being the repercussions of the bailout? I felt scammed when I read about it and my country wasn't even very heavily affected by the crisis (I was a wee lad back then though).

> How do you cult de-program 40% of the population of the most powerful country on the planet?

If history is any guide, that doesn't happen without a substantial - existential, perhaps - exogenous shock.

My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably, even as the number has risen among the most famous figures in tech.

HN really should conduct a survey, like StackOverflow does. It would be fascinating.

I see that as wishful thinking. HN has always been very much right leaning. I very much doubt much has changed.

Fair enough. All the more reason for HN to conduct a survey. It would be interesting to find out.

HN has been right leaning? That seems an odd take. Most comments I see on here lean more progressive. Or are you talking about the billionaire tech class who are in their own demographic?

Progressive and right-leaning are not in contradiction with each other, in that corner you will find most libertarians.

Wonkish, pro free trade, knows who Murray Rothbard is right leaning, not populist modern right wing.

HN like a lot of SV / VC culture was more libertarian leaning than right leaning. Low taxes, minimal oversight, etc. - true largely of workers and capital alike.

The open embrace of the fascist / nativist right in SV has been more recent, and it has empowered this second Trump administration. The calculation is presumably that they can curry favor and consolidate power.

Industrialists have always benefited from aligning with rightwing authoritarian governments. SV has not shown as a whole to be immune to this. The parallels with historical occurrences is blindingly obvious, down to the speech patterns.

I also notice the commentariat here is progressive, but it seems the silent but pervasive downvote campaigns are dominated by, or more charitably, inadvertently aligned with those MAGA oriented views. I’ve come to think of the right wingers mainly contributing to the community with their downvotes. Perhaps they don’t feel they would fair well if they tried to engage in discussion? But it’s an interesting dynamic that a group of silent individuals only make their presence known through the conspicuousness of the censorship they leave in their wake.

> Perhaps they don’t feel they would fare[sic] well if they tried to engage in discussion?

Most of the time when I do see blatant “rightposting” it’s so misinformed and provocative to be indistinguishable from trolling / baiting, so I can’t even tell if it’s downvotes for disagree vs downvotes for suspected trolling.

The less blatant “rightposting” flies quite a bit under the radar, pretty much by definition, which is what the grandparent comment was probably referring to when they said they interpreted HN as leaning right. More like laissez-faire economics.

Those downvote campaigns could easily come from bots and not real users.

In light of that possibility, HN's voting system is probably too rudimentary, private and zero-cost for the modern world. Now I'm not sure if it's naivete, laziness or meant to allow opaque maligned censorship.

Most downvote bots still appear to be observing US office hours though. There's a marked difference in voting patterns between the hours that Australia wakes up and California wakes up versus the rest of the day.

HN is not perfect, but “right-leaning”? What the actual fuck are you smoking

> HN has always been very much right leaning.

By whose standards? I'm European, so for me the US Democrat party is too far to the *right* to be electable; but by historical American standards, the impression I've had is this site has been centrist.

Conversely, the current standard of the US right wing seems to be that Bush Jr and Cheney were lefty liberal wokes who undermined the US national interest by working with NATO and Europe instead of taking every opportunity to undermine both…

> My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably

What makes you think that? The number of articles that get flagged and the pattern of the flagging and down voting would suggest that not to be true even if the actual comments might have slowed

This is anecdotal, but two things have impressed me:

1) It is no longer the case when I criticize something Trump has said or done, that I instantly get downvoted into oblivion or flagged.

2) Until recently, when someone posted some moderate comment, someone else often replied with a variant of "HN is a liberal echo chamber" I haven't noticed those replies for a while.

Is it particularly wild? There are many possible interpretations of your statement. Do you expect the people on this site to be particularly different from the voters who almost put Trump into office 2016 and actually voted him into office 2024? Or did you mean to express shock that anyone at all would vote for Trump compared to voting for someone like Biden?

Their vulgarity goes beyond tech and are unapologetic about it. They get to do it because mass media fails to call the lies. Over and over.

> mass media fails to call the lies

That can't be all it is: this and other recent, uncontroversially atrocious (when taken out of political context) actions taken by the Trump administration were very widely reported as lies/unconscionable by the vast majority of media outlets large and small.

Hell, we're even only having this discussion because Ars Technica, a publication with ten million readers, did journalism about an event. That's not huge in the grander scheme, but it's not tiny either.

There's certainly many stupid/corrupt things that news media companies should improve. I just don't think "A.P. News isn't calling $thing out" is the problem here.

Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucy aren’t reading Ars Technica. You know where their eyes and ears are glued. Critical reading is reserved for the HN crowd.

It's already got to the point that if I see an interesting video showing a cute animal doing something or a natural disaster my first thought is "Is this AI?"

Makes one wonder what the other, more horrific side of this looks like, and how law enforcement and even begin to separate truth from fiction

In this instance, we've already got law enforcement using fiction to obfuscate fact.

Probably not long before we see sora style videos of a 'new angle' of a controversial event, showing that the protestor / victim did in face have a gun / deserve it

Since many people are primed for this video to confirm their worldview, it doesn't even need to be that good. It will spread like wildfire, and its debunking won't. Technically, there is no reason why this can't be done today.

Only, it's members of the federal government overtly spreading disinformation and laughing about it. It will be a miracle if anything is left of the law enforcement and judiciary that would push back in three years' time.

Remeber my shock, first time reading the following news a couple of years back https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-65757400 where the faces of indian protesters were photoshoped to smile, in order to downplay their protest.

Image GenAi, just triviliazes the work of those in corrupt power.

Not only did they make her cry, they also darkened her skin.

Don't really understand how "AI" ties into this.

This administration has been photoshopping and editing pictures long before AI, here's https://paleofuture.com/nofuture/2019/1/21/president-trump-p... some examples from 2019 where they used shops to make him thin.

Yes of course this could've been done in photoshop. But a convincing Photoshop effort takes someone with years of experience working for likely hours. AI can churn out this kind of image in seconds, operated entirely by someone with zero skill or experience. It lowers the bar significantly, increasing the scope and scale of the output.

For the same reason a fully automatic weapon is substantively different from a bolt action rifle, despite both being guns.

It's also a fundamentally different scenario. Photoshoot-style touchups - likely at the request of the subject himself - for pure vanity, versus doctored images of an unwilling citizen (who presumably hasn't been convicted yet and is therefore considered innocent) as propaganda

This is 100% within my expectations of how long it would take.

If only everyone could have predicted this happen!

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