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On October 12 2025 03:02 Uldridge wrote:
Oh man you don't even know how bad it already is.
Academia is apparently inundated wtih AI papers
There are these AI "news sites" that pump out low level mis/disinformation at a dazzling pace and they are now also picked up by LLMs as training data. So you have slop training slop.
This combined with the active mis/disinfo landscape is actually making me extremely distrustful from almost literally anything I see or hear nowadays. And the problem is that I can't know what's true any longer. It doesn't really matter in the end, because if I can still see the sky is blue I won't be gaslit into thinking it's actually brown, no matter how persuasive that shit gets. Exactly, instead of AI scraping the internet blindly regurgitating human answers its going to regurgitate other AI answers who themselves got their answers from some AI bullshit ect.
We're basically watching the 'dead internet theory' go from crazy conspiracy to likely reality right before our eyes.
Kind of amazing if not for the very real damage its going to society.
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This is terrible because the easiest solution is demanding government or bank issued IDs and that will be extremely harmful to the freedom of expression in the internet.
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Is freedom of expression in the internet valuable though?
A lot of the recent shootings have been at least in part been blamed on someone getting radicalized on some strange corner of the internet... obviously I'd rather not have my government looking over my shoulder as I browse the internet, but surely there's a line somewhere?
What specifically are you afraid of, out of curiosity?
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It doesn't matter if the government is looking or not. It's probably not looking but just because it can people will act like it is looking 24/7 and this will turn the internet into a soulless, vapid place full of fake emotions and manipulation many of us experience daily in our professional environments.
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A global information stream is just too much for humanity to handle. We've been absolutely cooking ourselves for the past 20 years.
It started out frivolous, but the insidious tentacles followed much faster than we could anticipate. Before we knew it these tech giants established themselves and secured all the private data people gave up for free for the exchange of just a little but more attention. They soon understood this attention was the actual currency people cared about and secured it in their data fortresses, only to be used for malicious purposes. I always felt like the world made a significant shift since 2012. Just more of everything, folded into itself and won't let anything escape or evolve. It's just more and the same and over and over.
Unironically, the West has only a few (not a handful people, but a sliver of the population) serious figures left who are willing to fight for its cause. Everyone and everything else serves in its own self interest. But maybe that's always been the case and I'm just alive to watch one epoch turn into another.
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United States43505 Posts
On October 12 2025 04:18 Sent. wrote:
This is terrible because the easiest solution is demanding government or bank issued IDs and that will be extremely harmful to the freedom of expression in the internet.
A sufficiently motivated doxxer can generally find the name of a given “anonymous” poster.
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On October 12 2025 04:29 Fleetfeet wrote:
Is freedom of expression in the internet valuable though?
A lot of the recent shootings have been at least in part been blamed on someone getting radicalized on some strange corner of the internet... obviously I'd rather not have my government looking over my shoulder as I browse the internet, but surely there's a line somewhere?
What specifically are you afraid of, out of curiosity? Social media has played a significant role in revolutions, like for example Egypt during the Arab Spring.
without anonymity anyone trying to organise people for protests is quickly disappeared by dictatorial government.
I'm not saying the bad might not be outweighing the good at this point, just offering an example I can think of off the top of my head.
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yea i used to scroll facebook out of boredom but i am inundated now with fake/false AI ‘news’ and fake AI videos for like every other post and i can not be bothered to have to look up if what i just read was true. it’s finally dead to me.
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On October 12 2025 04:18 Sent. wrote:
This is terrible because the easiest solution is demanding government or bank issued IDs and that will be extremely harmful to the freedom of expression in the internet.
Yes and no. I used to be super opposed to IDs, but I've been coming around. And it's not just AI, it's also just generally people behaving like absolute pigs on the internet. Not all awful behavior is going to improve if anonymity is removed, but a good amount of it will. Catfishing, cyber bullying, whatever 4chan is, etc. will improve. Misinformation will be easier to identify. It won't go away. Alex Jones is an obvious example of someone willfully spouting all the shit into the world without anonymity. Same for AI usage. Just because someone used AI to generate a bunch of slop doesn't mean they won't if they can't be anonymous in this. There's plenty of AI slop in all manner of genres for sale by real people who are happy to publish it under their own name in order to make a quick buck. Academic AI slop still has real "scientists" names on the articles: that's the whole point of trying to publish the slop in the first place. But it'll help people trying to hold others accountable. And it'll reduce the worst of it.
That said, you're wrong on it being easy.
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On October 12 2025 04:56 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On October 12 2025 04:29 Fleetfeet wrote:
Is freedom of expression in the internet valuable though?
A lot of the recent shootings have been at least in part been blamed on someone getting radicalized on some strange corner of the internet... obviously I'd rather not have my government looking over my shoulder as I browse the internet, but surely there's a line somewhere?
What specifically are you afraid of, out of curiosity? Social media has played a significant role in revolutions, like for example Egypt during the Arab Spring. without anonymity anyone trying to organise people for protests is quickly disappeared by dictatorial government. I'm not saying the bad might not be outweighing the good at this point, just offering an example I can think of off the top of my head.
We‘ll reach the point where AI can fully emulate a person so ID is a no-brainer unless you want some chosen few to control armies of bots like is already the case.
Anything more heavily encrypted is already fully dependent on US cooperation and the country’s been rather unstable lately.
At a technical level, the world is already terrifying.
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United States24753 Posts
Who is responsible for safeguarding my ID information when I provide it to use the internet?
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On October 12 2025 04:54 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On October 12 2025 04:18 Sent. wrote:
This is terrible because the easiest solution is demanding government or bank issued IDs and that will be extremely harmful to the freedom of expression in the internet. A sufficiently motivated doxxer can generally find the name of a given “anonymous” poster.
And a modivated group can find the location where almost any picture or video is taken in a relatively short period of time.
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On October 12 2025 07:59 micronesia wrote:
Who is responsible for safeguarding my ID information when I provide it to use the internet? Didnt Discord recently start
Requiring ID in certain places only to immediately get hacked and have them stolen?
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On October 12 2025 07:59 micronesia wrote:
Who is responsible for safeguarding my ID information when I provide it to use the internet?
Most of Europe already has centralized online identification for doing bureaucratic things. Banks have similar systems. Heck, oauth is probably a fine protocol for this. Any of those could be leveraged in a broader context. The technology for secure online identification exists.
The challenge isn't in creating the identification. It's in setting up a framework so that it's actually required. The internet runs on protocols, and these are not built with user identification in mind. Building identification into a website is something each website/app does for themselves. If you don't want users to identify themselves you can choose not to. Let's take TL as an example: to post you need an account. That account can be created with an email. Using 10minutemail I can generate am infinite number of emails, all burners and all anonymous. That means any "ID" on tl.net is not useful for the purpose we're discussing. So we'd need something to ensure tl.net uses our new ID system. But who enforces that? TL.net is probably a reasonable and law-abiding website so when the Dutch government requires all Dutch websites to use the new global ID protocol for account verification, it will. But that requires (1) willingness and (2) active development.
A further problem is that we don't actually want people to see each others' full identity. If I am Acrofales, the sometimes SC2 player and frequent politics poster, it should be enough to know that I am a male in my 40s residing in Spain. It might sometimes be necessary to accredite further stuff, like if I am a journalist, then whatever journalistic outlet I work for should be able to give me credentials to use (right now the onus is the reverse. I can go on Twitter and claim I'm a journalist for the New York Times, and then the NYT would have to contact X and tell them that no, that person spewing hateful misinformation is not a journalist for them and please ban them, which X may or may not do). Similarly for other professions (university professors, government employees, medical professionals, etc.) where professional accreditation could help others decide whether the person they're talking to has any expertise on the topic or they're just bullshitting.
However, we obviously don't want everyone to know all the time who exactly we are. We don't get that info from striking up a conversation in a bar, so why should we on tl.net. And the use of professional accreditation should be optional: the same way a doctor doesn't represent their medical practice when they strike up a conversation with a stranger about how frustrating delays are, when their train is late. Or they're cross dressing and going out on the town. A similar social protocol would need to give similar levels of "identification" on the internet. At a minimum it'd identify you as a unique human being, of a certain age range and location.
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On October 12 2025 07:59 micronesia wrote:
Who is responsible for safeguarding my ID information when I provide it to use the internet?
Oneself and the pentagon.
Probably. I‘m not too savvy.
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On October 12 2025 07:59 micronesia wrote:
Who is responsible for safeguarding my ID information when I provide it to use the internet?
In the EU this is part of the GDPR - Everyone asking for your data must safeguard it to industry best practice, if they found to be lax with information security - they pay up to 4% of revenue in fines - per case.
In theory because there is only one data-protection officer per 500.000 companies and they don't get the ressources to actually hold companies accountable.
Usually in germany the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) keeps us safe.
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On October 12 2025 01:31 LightSpectra wrote:
You went on a rabbit hole into the misinformation vortex.
I don't disagree but specifically which parts?
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On October 12 2025 02:42 Sent. wrote:
I get irrationally angry whenever chat GPT says I just asked a great question (which is always). You can even ask it why it keeps doing that and it gives you some bullshit answer about encouraging the user to ask questions freely because it's good to ask the bot even the dumbest or the most controversial questions in safe environment.
This is annoying to me but I think it would be okay if the bots were a bit smarter and/or assertive instead of giving the user the answers they want to see. One of the best examples I can list is that random naive probably Russian dude that shows up in the Ukraine thread once in a while with his chat GPT results. He lives in his misinformation bubble but is kind of aware there are people who disagree with his accepted story. Unfortunately the bot is unable to explain to him that he should rethink some important things in his life instead of helping to spread the misinfo in the human part of the internet.
The internet is going to become hell in the next 5-10 years because sooner or later we won't be able to tell if we're reading human or AI generated content we certainly shoudn't trust.
GPT3.5 or 4 or something was a lot better as a reference and tool. Mine has 3 terrible issues: Interpreting things obviously wrong and then correcting me while being wrong itself, constantly telling me and itself that we are both doing a great job, and giving me things I didn't ask for and suggesting further things that I don't want, and in fact promising things it can't deliver (ex. If you want, I can make an extensive list of 100+, I say okay, it gives me a list of 30 and when I ask what's going on it says "you're right, I only found 50." I don't mind the lack of capability by itself, what's time wasting is that it pretends to be able to do things and then craps out constantly.) It also contradicts itself but I don't view that as a huge issue, I view that as a consequence of the incompleteness of the world and the model trying to sort it, and that's why there is a human in the loop. That's all fine but the most inconvenient thing is it doesn't adapt to the instructions I give it to make my use of it more efficient. When you open Britannica half the page isn't saying "You really turned to a great page here." Grok is also inclined to overspam with walls of text.
I honestly think the models are getting less efficient/worse on purpose, in order to artificially boost engagement, in order to artificially inflate demand for investment, and therefore GPUs. Google is the same. It'd obviously be faster and more efficient if I could turn off Google's asinine AI summary when it attempts to summarize things that it has no idea what they are, but here we are.
If ChatGPT gave you what you asked for the first time, you might do something other than keep using ChatGPT. And the worse Google's searches are, the more ads they get to expose you to.
There is a possibility people view chatbots, having personalities, and especially the more human the personality seems, as more authoritative than just Google or the TV or the newspaper or whatever. But I'm reminded of the irate guy who went into a phone shop with his phone saying the cost to fix it was a scam because someone told him he could just put it in rice. If you watch the video he's completely serious and consumed with righteousness, and that was pre AI. + Show Spoiler +The first time I legitimately got tricked for a minute was watching a goat protect a cat from a bald eagle attack. Which sounds stupid but there's an actual genre of like ring cameras and CCTV of domesticated animals getting attacked by wild animals, like the rooster fighting a hawk one, or the pig vs bear, pretty much anything vs bear, and those are inherently lower video quality cameras and stuff, so the AI versions are more believable.
The optimist idea with technology is that its adoption is only asymmetrical in terms of luddite vs. modernist. Like there is an equal opportunity for everyone to use it, so the ratio of propaganda, the distribution of propaganda or misinformation or whatever you want to call it, should stay the same regardless. Like say the propagation of TV was dominated by liberal or left leaning editorializing. But the universe didn't start with the invention of the TV. What happened is this: Really people moved from radio to TV over decades, and at some point conservatives then gained the advantage in radio after TV went more liberal. I haven't measured exactly. But my presumptive belief is just that the chips will fall where they may, and where they would fall anyway with or without the invention of any specific technology, because it depends on the human beings who are in control of dropping the chips. And the technology is just a tool.
That's for propaganda anyway. For fraud and criminal evidence I'm more worried. If there were some technical solution that you could legally mandate a digital signature in AI videos/audio. Like we have region locked DVDs and DVD players. It doesn't stop piracy and there's ways around it, but it's something.
Middle/high schools basically need to incorporate AI deeply in their media literacy/research skills classes starting yesterday. To at least help the coming generations not be cooked.
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On October 13 2025 00:08 oBlade wrote:
Middle/high schools basically need to incorporate AI deeply in their media literacy/research skills classes starting yesterday. To at least help the coming generations not be cooked.
100% agree. I think media literacy classes are only requirement in a few (maybe half?) states as it is, and new subjects/curricula typically need several years to iron out the kinks... and that's without factoring in the reality that AI is emerging-and-constantly-updating technology that can very quickly make the previous year's approaches outdated every single year for the foreseeable future. This isn't the kind of thing that we can bury our head in the sand over.
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Primary schools start with intro's to media literacy, like whaf are scams and whatnot, probably ai stuff as well. So I hope we're trying to slingshot our educatuon back into caught up, but I'm not sure they have the time/knowledge to actually pass it all on without skipping relevant parts. We'll see in the next few years I guess!
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EPT
