I'm a little curious as to why this is even an article. It's inevitable and has no bearing on 99.99999% of people.
I get that it's low hanging fruit from a reporting / research perspective (sort of like the 'Twitter users blah blah blah' articles), but outside of the 'publish or die' mindset of churning out content this is pointless and continues to make 4-chan and these people seem much more relevant than they are.
I need a reminder from time to time that the internet has become a dumpster fire. These add fuel to the internal debate I am always having as to whether we ought to just toss the whole stinking thing away and go back to a world dominated by radio [1].
[1] (Not that I have of course any means to do that ... but I can drop out I suppose.)
What we need to do is build a progressive political orientation into all layers of the network, from site content moderation to actual packet routing. To quote Drew Devault, "no Nazis" is a better policy than "no politics".
Somehow, at this moment, industry having massive influence on government policy is not fascist but a guy in the UK teaching his dog to salute like a Nazi is.
> To quote Drew Devault, "no Nazis" is a better policy than "no politics".
I have a lot of respect for Drew, but I can't take absolutist opinions like this seriously from someone who reputedly blocks people over any minor disagreement or perceived sleight.
Regardless, "No Nazis" is a great policy until someone decides they don't like you and labels you as one. The most prevailing anti-Ukraine sentiment is based on the claim that they are Nazis.
As distasteful as memes can be; the slow, steady, and ever more complete of government and corporate control is just as sad to me. Maybe even worse because a lot of the distasteful stuff is made by people with bad taste while the plasticising of the internet is done for profit or influence. The Eternal September, done deliberately.
There is an interview between Mike Wallace and the Chinese leader in the 90s where Wallace asks the leader why they censor the internet. He specifically says, "don't you think your people are smart enough to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions?" So it goes, now the entire world is treated the same way.
> I need a reminder from time to time that the internet has become a dumpster fire
The internet was always a dumpster fire. 4chan is old, toxic forums are even older. That is part of the package.
What made it cool was the freeness and gems, and the little adequately moderated niche communities. I would argue the bigger problem is that the internet became siloed, bland, soullessly moderated by corporations who don't care, and excessively spammy.
Most of the internet is not like this, and most people using AI aren't using it in this way. Sensationalism sells, and media outlets have a financial interest in blowing these things out of proportion to get readers riled up.
As far as I'm aware, nobody got physically hurt from Gamergate, ie. ignoring casual hate would have completely removed its impact. Though you could argue that that was impossible.
Do you have evidence for your claim that ignoring casual hate caused either of those things? My baseless theory is that suppressing and excluding these people from the mainstream is what riled them up in the first place; it certainly didn't feel like they were being ignored even after that. But I am open to contradicting evidence.
People losing trust in and feeling ignored by politicians is what brought us Trump. Some people voted for him because they liked that he wasn't a typical "politician", other people voted for him out of protest.
The news cycle essentially is 'publish or die' and race topics get clicks. It's also bad PR and pressures the AI monopoly to bake shitlib orthodoxy into their models, to make them less transparent and hint regulation. Etc.
Kind of silly to ask Stability AI to block offensive use of Stable Diffusion. It's not like they have any control over what models people load into their own instances of it. The base model that they distribute is pretty clean, but even then how are you supposed to stop people from photoshopping hateful messages into them?
Revisted 4chan the other day for the first time in years and it was awash in anti-semitic shit. Caricatures of jews with red eyes. It was interesting to see some of the threads taken over by AI generated cats killing nazis so the 4chan silliness was still there.
In today's news: 4chan users who spam racist garbage, not because they are racist, but because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction, get a reaction.
This is like writing newspaper articles about toilet graffiti. You're making the artist's day.
I know it brings you comfort to think they're just doing it for the lolz but unfortunately the reality is that a good chunk of them actually believe those things.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
If your goal is to be seen as a racist, and to provoke a response from people who are offended by racists, and you do all of the things that racists do to that end, spending time on racist forums spreading racist memes and hate speech, then the distinction between you being an "actual" racist and your racism being mere performance is one without a difference.
Because being racist as a hobby isn't really something non-racists tend to do.
Meh, be racist in an on-the-nose and obviously dumb way, like 4chan is doing here (whether intentional or not), and you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.
In the end some will think it's satire, some won't but will still laugh because it's stupid, and some will get mad.
Actual racists lost, 4chan got a laugh, and outrage culture got played again.
>you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.
In general I find myself agreeing with your comments in this thread but here I disagree.
It's tempting to find the overall societal benefit from those actions but I don't think there is one. Or it's much more subtle than this.
I also think that it's mainly done to create chaos and get a reaction and not so much to spread x opinions. But just randomly throwing shit into the world *mostly* makes everyone get used to the smell of shit while they hate you for it. But in my experience it *usually* leads to more shit and not less shit.
> and you get the opposite result: You make racists look bad.
doubt it.
won't change the beliefs of anyone looking at it one way or another.
the people participating in it, though, after years of spewing out racist garbage risk without any self-reflection risk going down the spiral of "hey, this one actually makes a valid point".
and i suspect that most of them are just flat out racist and not just memeing for the lulz.
The difference is, if you stopped giving them attention, one of those two would also stop being a goatfucker, but people obviously want more things to be outraged about, not less.
These people would clearly still be virulent racists getting excuses made for them by people who desperately don’t want to believe that posting racist memes and hanging out on Stormfront make you a bad person.
Yes, but they wouldn't be getting a free marketing campaign that draws more people to their communities and their ideology if it weren't for all these professional victims being outraged by them.
Instant downvote, “Professional victim”, “outraged”… yeah, it seem like it’ll be super productive to have a conversation with you.
It’s certainly impossible that people hurt by, say, racism might have legitimate concerns about the virulent spread of more racism by actual, literal racists on 4chan. No, it’s actually black people, for instance, who dislike racism, or Jews who think anti-demotion is bad, who are to blame.
Yes, they are to blame. The whole point of edgy humor is to imagine the person behind the screen fuming at the bait that you posted. By giving them what they want, you have become the punchline that they were seeking, hence encouraging them to continue posting bait and getting you outraged.
It really baffles me how people think "people who genuinely believes black people are an inferiors species" and "people who try to get a rise out of people fur teh lulz" are really literally exactly the same.
They're obviously not. You may have the same moral judgement about these people, and that's fine, but that's not the same as reality.
And it ABSOLUTELY matters, because if you want to do something about this then you need to actually understand the problem on a meaningful level, which includes people's motivations. You're never going to solve anything you don't understand (except, maybe, by accident).
A prime minister who fucks a goat because he's being blackmailed to do so is not the same as someone who does so for pleasure (who is different still from someone who does it for sadistic reasons). To describe all these as "simply a goatfucker" would be silly, even idiotic.
It's one of those nice-sounding one-liners that falls over with even the most superficial and casual of scrutiny.
> It's clearly intended to offend and get a reaction - that's the main goal. Whether it's done by actual racists is secondary.
No, you're completely off the mark here. It's done because they feel these things deep down and can't talk about them with people in real life to avoid being ostracized by what few friends they have left (or maybe they're super popular, I don't know). Yes, perhaps the _absolute_ most extreme things that are said there are not serious. However, the least extreme sentiments there (which would be considered extremely offensive in polite society) are 100% genuine.
Don't you think doing it for a joke would have gotten old by now? No one really talks about 4chan and no one goes there that doesn't already know what to expect. Ergo, no one is really shocked by any of these things anymore.
Again, I know this is a hard pill to swallow and I can see that you're trying really hard to avoid it but most of the racist sentiments on 4chan are genuine.
> (...) but unfortunately the reality is that a good chunk of them actually believe those things.
I'm sure that a good chunk of people who hang out on Facebook and Reddit also believe in those things, but that somehow never leads to blanket accusations targeting everyone with a Facebook of Reddit account.
FB and Reddit are tightly bound by mainstream advertising money so they have to keep the racists quiet. I'm not sure how that's relevant here. If you're offended by my accusation because you're one of the 4chan users who posts racist things but isn't really racist, then you have my sincerest apologies, and you get a gold star sticker too.
He's (rightfully) calling you dishonest because, if a guy who posts on Facebook or Reddit did this, you wouldn't be saying "Facebook this X" or "Reddit did X", you would say "This guy did X". Yet, for some reason, when a person on 4chan does something, it's not "This guy did X", but rather "4chan did X".
> 4chan users who spam racist garbage, not because they are racist, but because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction, get a reaction.
No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
Now, its true, that people who are racist and also attention seekers might be motivated more by the latter than the former in doing that, but that’s a different issue.
And the source article from 404 Media is very much about how this is happening despite the Bing tool that they conclude is being used for much of it itself being largely crippled to prevent “harmful” images, and explicitly calls out the point that the result is that non-harmful use is being sacrificed, with no meaningful impact on harmful use. Which, I would think, would be a message that someone who sees the 4chan use as of no more negative significance than “toilet graffiti” would fully back, since crippling tools to ineffectively prevent “toilet graffiti” is even more problematic than doing though in a (failed) attempt to prevent something that might be more important to prevent.
> No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
That's a bold statement and clearly untrue. A boatload of people gets their kicks out of pretending to hold any number of offensive views just to get a rise out of people online.
When I was a dumb 16 year old that was one of my favorite past times. Only works on people who don't believe anyone would do such a thing...
It speaks to your character that you wouldn't even immediately consider it.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't do that, and please avoid tit-for-tat spats, regardless of how wrong or provocative someone else is being or you feel they are.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't do that, and please avoid tit-for-tat spats, regardless of how wrong or provocative someone else is being or you feel they are.
But do they really not hold those views? I know a lot of kids who do things to get a reaction, but I've seen one actually take an ideological perspective that they don't believe in to get one. They just broadcast ideological perspectives they do believe, which they think will get a reaction.
What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?
When I was young I could entertain myself by arguing for the flat earth theory. I never for a second believed it to be true. I simply found it entertaining to frustrate people with stupid opinions. I dont know why I found this entertaining, and I dont know why I changed when I got older. Perhaps I hadn't fully developed my empathy at that young age, so I didn't see frustration in others as something bad. But this is just speculation. The only thing I know for certain is what I actually did, which was to pretend to hold stupid opinions.
Lost of people do that. I suspect that half of the "zomg look at these stupid flat earthers!!11" images on reddit and such is basically one troll posting something outlandish and then another troll replying with something slightly more outlandish. Also see the history of trolls on e.g. Conservapedia and such.
It’s a generational thing. Thanks to social media, zoomers and boomers see the internet as an extension of real life. That plus years of extremely heavy-handed moderation being the norm, and they literally don’t comprehend that somebody might deliberately misrepresent themselves online.
This is an old-school view of the internet. The reality now is that the Internet is a pressure valve for various groups of people expressing perceived grievances they feel are being inflicted upon them by a nameless entity. Of course people say things in jest, but the neoreactionary movement isn't just a huge ironic troll and it has roots on certain image boards.
The "head in the sand" approach doesn't work here.
That’s a load of nonsense that smacks of “I’m really smart and enlightened and everyone else is dumb and incapable of rational thought.”
The idea that all of these people are “just harmless trolls” is unsupportable nonsense. It’s wild how many people want to jump to the defense of these morally repugnant people, though.
> No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
Sure they do: they're called "trolls". That's not to imply that no 4chan users are racist, but the claim that "no one" would do it without being racist is absurd.
Counter Arguments has a fantastic video about this.
Maybe most are not earnestly textbook racist, but many are "based" to the extreme and end up earnestly supporting racist policy (even if they don't see it that way).
I mostly ignore these AI tools, so will just ask. Is there a risk of spamming racist memes causing non-racist prompts to return racist memes? Like the early Microsoft bot that 4chan made parrot their content.
> Is there a risk of spamming racist memes causing non-racist prompts to return racist memes?
It is conceivable, if a naive self-improvement feedback system is implemented. (This wouldn’t have to touch the base model at all, as there are ways of externally imposing qualitative guidance based on feedback.) But it is highly unlikely that any of the major online image generators are implemented in a way which would be vulnerable to this.
In some ways this feels like not news.4chan does 4chan. This could even be outrage troll if that’s still the meta.
But it does make me think about a few things.
- The Prime Minister of my little home country auto popping up as I typed in GIPHY memes the day she resigned.
- Politicians and would-be politicians and religious leaders using race baiting and meme language (woke and pulled) in the lead up to the coming election.
- I remember 8chan being the place that people supporting these same racist ideologies organized to carry out direct action in the form of murder and terrorism.
- In the month but I was a beta tester for the Dall-E3 it never once Struck me to use this tool To create images to spread Hate or some other ideological instrumental use.
There is such a vast wide latent Space of images and pixels to explore with these text to image generators. How boring it is to make raciest or conspiracy imagery. And in the same thread the human mind is capable of such vast space of neural configurations, how boring it is to use it to be a racist.
- I immediately suspect anybody of Arguing for uncensored or nonaligned AI to be provided to them to be a closet racist or troll
- I’m glad Dalle and SDXL is not hosted for general use without a filter. But I’m also very glad that all it takes is commenting out one line and re-uploading the model to be able to use it uncensored myself.
The cost of freedom is people using that freedom in ways you find distasteful. We are all better off with uncensored unaligned systems because it allows us the widest and freest expression.
Yep. No one should care what generative AI can produce, much as we shouldn't require airnail manufacturers to be responsible for how how people use or misuse their products. If DALL-E were used to make neo-Nazi posters or to promote an insurrection, the responsibility lies with the causive person(s), not with the tools they happened to use, i.e., their internet provider, Adobe Photoshop, or OpenAI. Even in the extreme cases of generative deepfake porn of real people for profit or generative child-abuse, criminal and civil responsibility lies with the human(s) who orchestrated it.
Creating an aligned diffusion model is like trying to create an aligned axe. At the end of the day it's just a dumb tool with no real understanding. It doesn't have the ability to be "aligned".
I was dumbstruck to learn that Hiroyuki Nishimura, the owner of 4chan, is a hero in Japan, with a wide range of activities, including YouTube, television, magazines, and books.
87 comments
[ 24.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI'm a little curious as to why this is even an article. It's inevitable and has no bearing on 99.99999% of people.
I get that it's low hanging fruit from a reporting / research perspective (sort of like the 'Twitter users blah blah blah' articles), but outside of the 'publish or die' mindset of churning out content this is pointless and continues to make 4-chan and these people seem much more relevant than they are.
I dunno about that. 4chan memes and attitudes have diffused out into wider US politics.
Not that I disagree with the jist of it. "Oh no, internet dwellers are posting something horrible... I am shocked!"
Keyword _have_. 4chan hasn't been culturally relevant for like a decade.
[1] (Not that I have of course any means to do that ... but I can drop out I suppose.)
I have a lot of respect for Drew, but I can't take absolutist opinions like this seriously from someone who reputedly blocks people over any minor disagreement or perceived sleight.
Regardless, "No Nazis" is a great policy until someone decides they don't like you and labels you as one. The most prevailing anti-Ukraine sentiment is based on the claim that they are Nazis.
There is an interview between Mike Wallace and the Chinese leader in the 90s where Wallace asks the leader why they censor the internet. He specifically says, "don't you think your people are smart enough to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions?" So it goes, now the entire world is treated the same way.
The internet was always a dumpster fire. 4chan is old, toxic forums are even older. That is part of the package.
What made it cool was the freeness and gems, and the little adequately moderated niche communities. I would argue the bigger problem is that the internet became siloed, bland, soullessly moderated by corporations who don't care, and excessively spammy.
Lest we forget that a favorite pastime during the aughts was tricking your friends or strangers into visiting vile "shock" websites.
Do you have evidence for your claim that ignoring casual hate caused either of those things? My baseless theory is that suppressing and excluding these people from the mainstream is what riled them up in the first place; it certainly didn't feel like they were being ignored even after that. But I am open to contradicting evidence.
This is also the default for Stable Diffusion XL.
It was submitted 8 hours ago, although it didn't get much notice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779810
https://www.404media.co/4chan-uses-bing-to-flood-the-interne...
This is like writing newspaper articles about toilet graffiti. You're making the artist's day.
Though maybe there's some that actually are, because of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
Ask yourself why an actual racist without any intention to cause chaos would engage in this behavior though.
It's clearly intended to offend and get a reaction - that's the main goal. Whether it's done by actual racists is secondary.
Because being racist as a hobby isn't really something non-racists tend to do.
In the end some will think it's satire, some won't but will still laugh because it's stupid, and some will get mad.
Actual racists lost, 4chan got a laugh, and outrage culture got played again.
In general I find myself agreeing with your comments in this thread but here I disagree.
It's tempting to find the overall societal benefit from those actions but I don't think there is one. Or it's much more subtle than this.
I also think that it's mainly done to create chaos and get a reaction and not so much to spread x opinions. But just randomly throwing shit into the world *mostly* makes everyone get used to the smell of shit while they hate you for it. But in my experience it *usually* leads to more shit and not less shit.
doubt it.
won't change the beliefs of anyone looking at it one way or another.
the people participating in it, though, after years of spewing out racist garbage risk without any self-reflection risk going down the spiral of "hey, this one actually makes a valid point".
and i suspect that most of them are just flat out racist and not just memeing for the lulz.
And then fucking a goat ironically looks an awful lot like fucking a goat.
It’s certainly impossible that people hurt by, say, racism might have legitimate concerns about the virulent spread of more racism by actual, literal racists on 4chan. No, it’s actually black people, for instance, who dislike racism, or Jews who think anti-demotion is bad, who are to blame.
Brilliant.
They're obviously not. You may have the same moral judgement about these people, and that's fine, but that's not the same as reality.
And it ABSOLUTELY matters, because if you want to do something about this then you need to actually understand the problem on a meaningful level, which includes people's motivations. You're never going to solve anything you don't understand (except, maybe, by accident).
A prime minister who fucks a goat because he's being blackmailed to do so is not the same as someone who does so for pleasure (who is different still from someone who does it for sadistic reasons). To describe all these as "simply a goatfucker" would be silly, even idiotic.
It's one of those nice-sounding one-liners that falls over with even the most superficial and casual of scrutiny.
No, you're completely off the mark here. It's done because they feel these things deep down and can't talk about them with people in real life to avoid being ostracized by what few friends they have left (or maybe they're super popular, I don't know). Yes, perhaps the _absolute_ most extreme things that are said there are not serious. However, the least extreme sentiments there (which would be considered extremely offensive in polite society) are 100% genuine.
Don't you think doing it for a joke would have gotten old by now? No one really talks about 4chan and no one goes there that doesn't already know what to expect. Ergo, no one is really shocked by any of these things anymore.
Again, I know this is a hard pill to swallow and I can see that you're trying really hard to avoid it but most of the racist sentiments on 4chan are genuine.
It would if it didn't keep getting results, like we see with the above news article.
I'm sure that a good chunk of people who hang out on Facebook and Reddit also believe in those things, but that somehow never leads to blanket accusations targeting everyone with a Facebook of Reddit account.
No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
Now, its true, that people who are racist and also attention seekers might be motivated more by the latter than the former in doing that, but that’s a different issue.
And the source article from 404 Media is very much about how this is happening despite the Bing tool that they conclude is being used for much of it itself being largely crippled to prevent “harmful” images, and explicitly calls out the point that the result is that non-harmful use is being sacrificed, with no meaningful impact on harmful use. Which, I would think, would be a message that someone who sees the 4chan use as of no more negative significance than “toilet graffiti” would fully back, since crippling tools to ineffectively prevent “toilet graffiti” is even more problematic than doing though in a (failed) attempt to prevent something that might be more important to prevent.
That's a bold statement and clearly untrue. A boatload of people gets their kicks out of pretending to hold any number of offensive views just to get a rise out of people online.
When I was a dumb 16 year old that was one of my favorite past times. Only works on people who don't believe anyone would do such a thing...
It speaks to your character that you wouldn't even immediately consider it.
Such cheap attacks don't have to be tolerated and it's perfectly fair to point them out for what they are.
I didn't seek out a random comment to take a potshot at - you directly replied to me with a comment that contains nothing but a mean-spirited dig.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?
Whatever I knew would get a rise out of my audience.
The "head in the sand" approach doesn't work here.
The idea that all of these people are “just harmless trolls” is unsupportable nonsense. It’s wild how many people want to jump to the defense of these morally repugnant people, though.
But I refer you to "Popehat's law of goats". He who spams racist garbage...
Sure they do: they're called "trolls". That's not to imply that no 4chan users are racist, but the claim that "no one" would do it without being racist is absurd.
Counter Arguments has a fantastic video about this.
https://youtu.be/unnh0kPbLi8
It is conceivable, if a naive self-improvement feedback system is implemented. (This wouldn’t have to touch the base model at all, as there are ways of externally imposing qualitative guidance based on feedback.) But it is highly unlikely that any of the major online image generators are implemented in a way which would be vulnerable to this.
- The Prime Minister of my little home country auto popping up as I typed in GIPHY memes the day she resigned.
- Politicians and would-be politicians and religious leaders using race baiting and meme language (woke and pulled) in the lead up to the coming election.
- I remember 8chan being the place that people supporting these same racist ideologies organized to carry out direct action in the form of murder and terrorism.
- In the month but I was a beta tester for the Dall-E3 it never once Struck me to use this tool To create images to spread Hate or some other ideological instrumental use. There is such a vast wide latent Space of images and pixels to explore with these text to image generators. How boring it is to make raciest or conspiracy imagery. And in the same thread the human mind is capable of such vast space of neural configurations, how boring it is to use it to be a racist.
- I immediately suspect anybody of Arguing for uncensored or nonaligned AI to be provided to them to be a closet racist or troll
- I’m glad Dalle and SDXL is not hosted for general use without a filter. But I’m also very glad that all it takes is commenting out one line and re-uploading the model to be able to use it uncensored myself.