Comment by stavros
2 days ago
Good, people should learn that all the stuff they read online is fake. It's been like that for a few decades, the only thing that's changed is that now lying is cheap enough to be ubiquitous, and thus our collective immune system can finally work.
I'm not sure it's good to sharpen the collective immune system to the point where it becomes allergic to everything. This article decries the stupid blind trust that late 20th century humans still put into AI generated facebook posts. One shouldn't expect more discernment once that audience's trust is fully shattered. More likely is that once someone is scammed enough times to give up their sympathy, any genuine plea for sympathy will be met with distrust.
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.
It’s bad, but it’s been happening for a while now, and it’s absolutely logical to do it on an individual level.
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.
Decades?
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.
The involvement of Saul in the stoning of Stephen is generally seen as an established historical event - AD 34-35 - basically within a couple of years of Christ's bodily resurrection.
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.
And there are still loads of people who swear those "stories" are true, about a billion of them for the first one actually, and billions others for other "stories". The thing is, these stories are qualitiatively different from the slop on social media and the 24 hour news cycle, now those phenomena are new(ish).
That stuff wasn't online until a few decades ago.
You do realize my comment is pointing out „online” is irrelevant. There is no qualitative difference between online or not. If something was written in a book it did not make it true.
1 reply →
[dead]
> all the stuff they read online is fake
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 :)