Can we please get rid of these shit quality bot comments?
This reply is obviously generated by an AI. You can tell from the fact that the summary is shit (you're better off reading the abstract of the article), and that it was posted 2 minutes after the link. There is no way a human can read the article in two minutes (just typing the 140 words in the comment would take must people over 1 minute).
edit:
I realize now that the commenter was the same user that submitted the link, so maybe they're not a bot and they simply pre-prepared their comment. Still, I think the summary was quite bad, and it's also unneeded, since the posted article has a perfectly serviceable abstract right at the top.
Just let your submission speak for itself! Providing a tl;dr as a first comment just encourages people to comment without reading the actual article.
Not saying you are wrong but the comment is from the OP, who, I'd hope, read the article before posting. They could have easily read it, typed up the comment and then posted.
The ML ones are disallowed and get flagged, the other ones are mostly discouraged and moderated away. So you're almost certainly not better off posting a TLDR.
It was meant to give people an interest to read the whole article. It is a long read after all. But you are absolutely right, the effect could be the opposite. Let it be a note to my future self to not make TL;DR's when sharing.
Not to discount the questions and dangers surrounding advancements in AI, but the internet has always been full of convincing bullshit. I think it's a good thing that more people than ever are becoming habitually skeptical of what they see online.
It's impossible for someone to be skeptical of everything. People pick and choose what to trust based off of available superficial information.
This superficial information is becoming harder and harder to interpret. If you follow the trendline we will approach a world where will skeptical of every single thing you see on the internet with no way of verifying the truth.
For example, I told an AI to write this for me. And I also told the AI to insert some common spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes to make it look real. Then I told the AI to lie to the best of it's ability and say something untrue and manipulative.
you are reading the output of what that AI wrote right now.
It is impossible to be analytically skeptical of everything, because it takes lots of energy to question the facts behind a narrative.
But when you dig deeper in the public narrative of many subjects you find out that the narrative is misleading and sometimes even totally wrong on almost any subject you look into. By this I mean that for example anything the newspapers write about on any subject that you know deeply about, they get wrong on some very important aspect. You just extrapolate this experience over all the possible subjects.
Then there comes a moment of realisation that you are spending lots of energy in maintaining all these public narratives in your head. And as the narratives are misleading or wrong, they are blinding you from seeing some of the facts. And as a consequence you do not see the situation as clearly as you could. And you may start clearing your mind off these narratives, releasing the energy you are spending to maintain them.
And then you might be able to develop a sense of "smell" or intuition when people are not being honest, but are trying to manipulate you or sell you some idea. And this helps in recognising the situations without the need to spend energy on being analytically skeptical.
I understand your point, and while I can see where you’re coming from, I must emphasize that not everything is as bleak as it seems. The world isn’t black and white, and while skepticism is a healthy approach to any narrative, it’s not all about being misled or manipulated. There’s genuine content out there, and there are truths that hold up upon scrutiny. In fact, I’m actually not an AI crafting responses to sow doubt or manipulate. I am a participant in this conversation just like you, presenting my perspective based on my own experiences and knowledge. The truth is, while there’s misinformation, there's also plenty of accurate, well-intentioned information that seeks to inform rather than deceive. It's about finding a balance and using critical thinking to discern the truth.
Yes. What you are saying is not really contrary to what I believe. I exaggerated a little to make my point. What I described is the first approximation, because it is often far from what people really believe to be true. One would not need sense of "smell" when something is off, if there would not be things that are not off.
What doesn’t scare me about this is what Trump has demonstrated so clearly: lying with zero evidence to back you up is so much easier than faking the evidence. And it’s more effective because it’s impossible to argue against a reality that doesn’t exist.
I'm not sure I understand why it's more effective. I agree with you that it is, but I don't get why so many people are happy to rally behind a cause whose foundation is obvious lies.
I think some of it comes from a want to belong. It is in some ways like religion - people probably realise the scriptures aren't always factually correct but they like the shared suspension of disbelief.
Also some of it probably has to do with generally feeling bad, anxious or uncertain about the future. Some might take solace in inflicting those same feelings upon others who seem to have it better.
But it is also the case that 'the other side' often rallies behind obvious nonsense dictated by the identity politics of the day (like IQ isn't real, math is racist, etc.). There are probably similar feelings at play there, a want for belonging of some sort.
It seems to me that we have already lost most of our epistemic trust. Some people blame the troll farms, AI bots and baseless accusations of fake news. Others blame biased fact checkers, politicized media and philosophical relativism. And these groups blame each other.
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (2008) has a great throwaway section on this:
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
Haven't read Anathem and couldn't find in any summary who the Ita are.
Stephenson's story being about a post-societal collapse I fantasise
that that ITA are the Information Truth Authority.
Well, if Stephenson didn't mean that, I'll just make it up, right? :)
Because anyway, that's the thing we need to be mindful of and avoid in
the coming years.
In some ways I see LLM-AI and DeepFakes as being the undoing of the
printing press and the camera respectively.
Both inventions "liberated truth". Gutenberg's press eroded the
authority of the church and kick-started the real scientific
revolution. The camera changed popular conceptions of geography and
history. Together they created "News" as a concept in modernity, even
before electronics brought instantaneous television.
If AI undoes this, a good way to understand the worst future is to
rewind to a pre-Gutenberg and pre-photographic era. A key dystopian
feature would be a singular centralised truth and information
authority, essentially replacing the church circa 14th century.
Baseless really? I was shown the photo of a hospital bombed in Gaza. I was told there was 500 dead. I was told it was an IDF bomb. The NYT relayed Hamas propaganda without a second thought. How is it baseless?
Trust in journalism is at an all time low for good reasons. And I agree with you that deep fakes can't do much more damage. It is just the 2020's photoshop.
> The NYT relayed Hamas propaganda without a second thought. How is it baseless?
The root cause of that fubar in the heat of reporting is well documented - western media sources echoed each other when one first used an english mistranslation of an arabic tweet - an estimate of 500 injured was rapidly "reported" in english media as 500 confirmed dead.
That's typical of the shitty social media driven infotainment bend that's come to be called "journalism" but really isn't.
Sadly the first wave of "in first before ..." is what everybody remembers.
My point was that there are roughly two camps, that have both lost their trust, but they have different reasoning behind it. I was not trying to argue about the truthfulness of any of the reasonings.
What epistemic trust? Perhaps in the west where it wasn't 100% obvious everything media says is a lie. In the countries of the ex-Soviet block everyone is very aware of the propaganda back then and now. (propaganda is not just lies - every form of distribution of information with a goal to influence the receiving person is propaganda, propaganda can be true or false, it can be true and twisted into a different meaning, it can be deliberately false to out across a counterpoint etc). In short this is why people exposed to propaganda for decades are inclined to trust full length videos recorded by identifiable individuals on the ground a 100x more than any editorial on TV or uploaded by any organisation. This is why telegram and in a way twitter exploded as a source of news during this war.
Is it possible to insert deep fakes in there? Sure, but the technology is defonot good enough to not be able to tell it apart.
It's an assumption, in light of which you interpret information. It's really puzzling, why Americans so zealously trust everything - MSM, politicians, advertisements, corporations, economists, youtube, shitty software, ecelebs, everything.
Epistemic trust essentially means assuming good faith unless shown otherwise. If societies didn't have that, they wouldn't function (or even be able to have become societies in the first place). Like morality - human society would not have been able to survive if everyone simply acted in their own self interest.
That approach is not a dogma, but means to reach a specific goal, and works only in trusting environment, it doesn't work in adversarial environment. Everyone already acts in self interest, not sure where you got that myth, that works only in small communities of 100 people where everybody know each other for a long time.
If you think altruism is a myth, or that everyone you don't personally know is acting in their own self-interest, then I think you have a much bigger problem than what we're discussing here.
>Epistemic trust essentially means assuming good faith unless shown otherwise. If societies didn't have that, they wouldn't function
Having lived in an authoritarian state where everyone had pure "eat or get eaten" mentality I strongly disagree. Epistemic trust is not a requirement for a society to function.
It is much safer to assume everyone is there to get you (by scamming, misinformation, theft, or plans to hurt you physically just for the fun of it) than otherwise. Having tgat mindset has never stopped me from trusting people that have shown themselves to be trustworthy.
The problem is that using your own sources of news only works if you understand why news is being distorted in the first place. There is no automatic reason why an identifiable individual on the ground is more trustworthy than any other news source unless you have better metadata about what they say. Otherwise it's just "CNN = voice of imperialism, person with 10K followers = voice of freedom"
> This is why telegram and in a way twitter exploded as a source of news during this war.
By that logic, the Russians would have kicked Putin out of power by now.
Dunno, when people take Twitter/FB Messenger screenshots (or out of context photos) as ground truth, I'm not sure how convincing deepfakes would undermine trust in ways trust wasn't undermined before. And if you were sufficiently motivated before, you could photoshop people into compromising pictures without the aid of AI.
Most people who are overly susceptible to fake facts already pick and choose facts that fit their believe system. People still believe that someone walked on water and rose from the dead based on stories and a book that was written a long time after it 'happened'.
It was near impossible to create convincing fake videos of people speaking ( https://youtu.be/X17yrEV5sl4 ) and so even those who would not take an altered screenshot at face value might be more inclined to believe one such.
Movies are heavily marketed as movies, so you know what you’re watching. If you don’t, I imagine the credits at the beginning and end, the camera angles, stilted dialogue, the branded YouTube channel, etc. clue you in.
It’s different now, because back then to create a movie scene like from Terminator 2 I would need millions of dollars in budget and specialized equipment. Today one person with a consumer graphics card can do this. Which means anyone with any agenda can pump out fake videos and even if 90% of people will not fall for them, the rest will.
Just eyeballing it for a minute works for me. But people are prejudiced and their opinions will always cloud their judgement, no matter what the evidence or counter-evidence is. So overall, nothing will ever change.
Short answer, no, there's not. Adversarial AI could be used to find deepfakes, but then AI will be trained on those adversaries etc.
There is no real solution to this problem, but my thoughts on the matter are that in the future it will be common for cameras or recording devices to have a cryptographic signing key and the resulting footage would contain a signature. This would allow news outlets to prove to their audiences that the footage is untampered with. It could also be chained so that officially licensed syndicates could also offer provenance to their audiences, or that clips/re-encodes of the same footage could link back to an original recording.
This doesn't stop organisations or individuals from recording a deepfake, but it would put their reputation on the line (similar to how we have certificate authorities signing SSL certificates now).
It's up to you then if you want to trust the footage provided by AP vs. the footage provided by Infowars.
Yes, very much along the same lines. Though proving that a photo was taken with a certain camera is not really enough. You need to prove that it came from a particular photographer/journalists camera who licensed their images to an outlet who is willing to certify that they trust the photographer not to have tampered with the image (or along this type of line).
Certainly you could also just trust the photographer, but a chain of trust might be preferable to the general viewer (eg. I don't necessarily trust Photographer X, but I trust The Guardian and if The Guardian trusts this photo taken by Photographer X to be authentic, then I trust this image to be authentic).
Edit: I read more about the CAI and C2PA[1] and I think it would be sufficient for provenance and origin purposes, so what is missing is the trust network. It's likely going to a while for media outlets to establish trust networks and phase out the old, untrusted ways. There's definitely going to be room for both and I imagine outlets will start using terms like "we have received images from multiple sources, however their authenticity has not be verified by our editors".
It recently occurred to me that future generations just won't really believe anything they see. Did you ever believe a painting must have been accurate reflection of reality? It is, in fact, us that are unusual in that, for a short few decades, we actually believed photographs (and other recordings) to be indisputably true. Deepfakes are just resetting it back to the way it was before photographs.
Is this a bad thing? Is the photograph really a cornerstone of our civilisation?
It's not even just about deepfakes. Photographs taken by must smartphones are already heavily embellished by default. With just a few extra taps you can remove unwanted members of the public from your pictures. It's all fake, and the generations growing up with it will understand photographs just like we understand paintings. Nice, but not true.
I hope so, because the trust was never justified. Maybe we'll start actually judging the content of arguments instead of just using easily exploitable heuristics.
In my life, I've always found advertising toxic fake and kind of offensive? Sometimes I would even personally boycott the product being advertised.
Like, most advertisements, especially super bowl ones are entirely CGI these days. I used to try to spot the CGI game but now its more of a 'spot the not cgi'
Then when it comes to deepfakes and I just see right through them. It's black/white, its like watching anime and thinking its real life or something. How can something like that damage trust? It doesnt bother me in the slightest.
69 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThis reply is obviously generated by an AI. You can tell from the fact that the summary is shit (you're better off reading the abstract of the article), and that it was posted 2 minutes after the link. There is no way a human can read the article in two minutes (just typing the 140 words in the comment would take must people over 1 minute).
edit: I realize now that the commenter was the same user that submitted the link, so maybe they're not a bot and they simply pre-prepared their comment. Still, I think the summary was quite bad, and it's also unneeded, since the posted article has a perfectly serviceable abstract right at the top.
Just let your submission speak for itself! Providing a tl;dr as a first comment just encourages people to comment without reading the actual article.
I honestly think that ship has sailed. So it's probably better to post a well thought out tl;dr as the first comment than nothing at all.
Otherwise agree.
This superficial information is becoming harder and harder to interpret. If you follow the trendline we will approach a world where will skeptical of every single thing you see on the internet with no way of verifying the truth.
For example, I told an AI to write this for me. And I also told the AI to insert some common spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes to make it look real. Then I told the AI to lie to the best of it's ability and say something untrue and manipulative.
you are reading the output of what that AI wrote right now.
But when you dig deeper in the public narrative of many subjects you find out that the narrative is misleading and sometimes even totally wrong on almost any subject you look into. By this I mean that for example anything the newspapers write about on any subject that you know deeply about, they get wrong on some very important aspect. You just extrapolate this experience over all the possible subjects.
Then there comes a moment of realisation that you are spending lots of energy in maintaining all these public narratives in your head. And as the narratives are misleading or wrong, they are blinding you from seeing some of the facts. And as a consequence you do not see the situation as clearly as you could. And you may start clearing your mind off these narratives, releasing the energy you are spending to maintain them.
And then you might be able to develop a sense of "smell" or intuition when people are not being honest, but are trying to manipulate you or sell you some idea. And this helps in recognising the situations without the need to spend energy on being analytically skeptical.
"We found that much of the misinformation in our dataset came from labelling real media as deepfakes."
Also some of it probably has to do with generally feeling bad, anxious or uncertain about the future. Some might take solace in inflicting those same feelings upon others who seem to have it better.
But it is also the case that 'the other side' often rallies behind obvious nonsense dictated by the identity politics of the day (like IQ isn't real, math is racist, etc.). There are probably similar feelings at play there, a want for belonging of some sort.
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
Haven't read Anathem and couldn't find in any summary who the Ita are. Stephenson's story being about a post-societal collapse I fantasise that that ITA are the Information Truth Authority.
Well, if Stephenson didn't mean that, I'll just make it up, right? :) Because anyway, that's the thing we need to be mindful of and avoid in the coming years.
In some ways I see LLM-AI and DeepFakes as being the undoing of the printing press and the camera respectively.
Both inventions "liberated truth". Gutenberg's press eroded the authority of the church and kick-started the real scientific revolution. The camera changed popular conceptions of geography and history. Together they created "News" as a concept in modernity, even before electronics brought instantaneous television.
If AI undoes this, a good way to understand the worst future is to rewind to a pre-Gutenberg and pre-photographic era. A key dystopian feature would be a singular centralised truth and information authority, essentially replacing the church circa 14th century.
IT Administrators :-)
Baseless really? I was shown the photo of a hospital bombed in Gaza. I was told there was 500 dead. I was told it was an IDF bomb. The NYT relayed Hamas propaganda without a second thought. How is it baseless?
Trust in journalism is at an all time low for good reasons. And I agree with you that deep fakes can't do much more damage. It is just the 2020's photoshop.
The root cause of that fubar in the heat of reporting is well documented - western media sources echoed each other when one first used an english mistranslation of an arabic tweet - an estimate of 500 injured was rapidly "reported" in english media as 500 confirmed dead.
That's typical of the shitty social media driven infotainment bend that's come to be called "journalism" but really isn't.
Sadly the first wave of "in first before ..." is what everybody remembers.
"We found that much of the misinformation in our dataset came from labelling real media as deepfakes."
That's basically the liar's dividend at work.
Is it possible to insert deep fakes in there? Sure, but the technology is defonot good enough to not be able to tell it apart.
Obviously it got downvoted to "grey".
I'm always fascinated that hacker news, a forum for many developers and other, what I'd assume, "higher intelligent" people, fails to see this.
> 100% obvious everything media says is a lie
Having lived in an authoritarian state where everyone had pure "eat or get eaten" mentality I strongly disagree. Epistemic trust is not a requirement for a society to function.
It is much safer to assume everyone is there to get you (by scamming, misinformation, theft, or plans to hurt you physically just for the fun of it) than otherwise. Having tgat mindset has never stopped me from trusting people that have shown themselves to be trustworthy.
> This is why telegram and in a way twitter exploded as a source of news during this war.
By that logic, the Russians would have kicked Putin out of power by now.
And it is going to be more interesting when we will have the ability to manipulate videos (near-)realtime.
It was near impossible to create convincing fake videos of people speaking ( https://youtu.be/X17yrEV5sl4 ) and so even those who would not take an altered screenshot at face value might be more inclined to believe one such.
The answer should have been yes after about Terminator 2 was released, and has nothing to do with AI.
In the final analysis, one can only say 'one knows' about those things one has personally verified to be true. The rest is hypothetical.
There is no real solution to this problem, but my thoughts on the matter are that in the future it will be common for cameras or recording devices to have a cryptographic signing key and the resulting footage would contain a signature. This would allow news outlets to prove to their audiences that the footage is untampered with. It could also be chained so that officially licensed syndicates could also offer provenance to their audiences, or that clips/re-encodes of the same footage could link back to an original recording.
This doesn't stop organisations or individuals from recording a deepfake, but it would put their reputation on the line (similar to how we have certificate authorities signing SSL certificates now).
It's up to you then if you want to trust the footage provided by AP vs. the footage provided by Infowars.
Certainly you could also just trust the photographer, but a chain of trust might be preferable to the general viewer (eg. I don't necessarily trust Photographer X, but I trust The Guardian and if The Guardian trusts this photo taken by Photographer X to be authentic, then I trust this image to be authentic).
Edit: I read more about the CAI and C2PA[1] and I think it would be sufficient for provenance and origin purposes, so what is missing is the trust network. It's likely going to a while for media outlets to establish trust networks and phase out the old, untrusted ways. There's definitely going to be room for both and I imagine outlets will start using terms like "we have received images from multiple sources, however their authenticity has not be verified by our editors".
[1] https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.3/specs/C2P...
Because he sure does in a deepfake I saw.
Is this a bad thing? Is the photograph really a cornerstone of our civilisation?
It's not even just about deepfakes. Photographs taken by must smartphones are already heavily embellished by default. With just a few extra taps you can remove unwanted members of the public from your pictures. It's all fake, and the generations growing up with it will understand photographs just like we understand paintings. Nice, but not true.
Did you know, autistic people and advertisements don't go together: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-fallible-mind/20...
In my life, I've always found advertising toxic fake and kind of offensive? Sometimes I would even personally boycott the product being advertised.
Like, most advertisements, especially super bowl ones are entirely CGI these days. I used to try to spot the CGI game but now its more of a 'spot the not cgi'
Then when it comes to deepfakes and I just see right through them. It's black/white, its like watching anime and thinking its real life or something. How can something like that damage trust? It doesnt bother me in the slightest.