The communities like AITAH and relationships on reddit are completely cooked. There is so much AI nonsense and as noted, people completely eat it up.
This isn’t particularly noteworthy or concerning, imo. These two communities are probably the least likely to care about authenticity, and also best suited for a system that’s only real success is spinning moderately coherent fictions. They have and will always be most interested in drama, which is easy to fabricate.
The real danger of these systems is shaping public discourse by sheer volume of noise. They can make any opinion seem overwhelmingly supported, or tear apart opposition with distractions and infighting. And they do it with a single-minded focus spread across thousands of voices.
They have and will always be most interested in drama, which is easy to fabricate.
Remember all the Reality Shows ™ that took over because they had no scripting and relatively tiny production crews? They took over because they were cheap.
Looks like AI is about to lower that bar yet again.
Those quickly became scripted and fake reality too, if any of them were ever even not that.
AITAH has been mostly made up rage bait stories long time before AI nonsense. There’s nothing that generates more engagement than someone being wrong on the internet.
The difference now is that the rage bait has become automated.
AITAH for pranking my gf by putting a plastic bag over her head?
So I put a plastic bag over my gf’s head as a joke. She flailed around and punched me in the face. Then she ran off somewhere, looking mad. Why can’t she take a harmless prank? Where has humor gone these days?
The title is usually a bait and switch to get you into the comments.
AITAH for shoving a small child?
There was a bus about to hit them and I saved their life. Their mother cursed me out because the kid got a skinned knee. Half my family thinks I need to apologize. They’re blowing up my phone.
Maybe Elon was on to something when Grok tagged everything with an unrelated diatribe about farmers in south Africa. Perhaps every AI model needs to be an activist about one random topic so we can tell them apart. Or ya know, maybe congress could do stuff to require their output be reverse searchable so we could just match up the output to what people say…
Most of the stories posted on large subreddits were imaginary anyway. Now they are just being hallucinated by an AI. Is there much of a difference?
Back in my day you actually had to be creative to get people to believe your bullshit story.
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I’d prefer anonymous users verified by real identity.
It’d take some thought as to how you properly establish accounts are owned by individuals but it’s not impossible.
My state government recently adopted a digital driver’s licence/i.d. It can be used as proof of age without providing any other identifying information. Could something like that be adopted to prove you’re a real human without any other identifiers?
At the end of the day, most internet forums exist as entertainment. It doesn’t really matter whether the text is from real people or not, what matters to Reddit and other platforms is that real users show up to pump numbers and get served ads. It’s kinda like how pro sports is not latently about athleticism, it’s just another entertainment platform to get butts into seats and eyes onscreen to make a buck.
If bot content gets the eyeballs, so what? Guess the content being fictional doesn’t really matter. People don’t like being lied to, but then nobody is claiming everything you read on the internet is true in the first place.
Anyway, to all the people who imagined humanity’s future would end up looking different than WALL-E: sorry to disappoint. You’ll get a hover recliner, at least.
We could use public libraries to do some kind of “are you a human” confirmation. I.e. you get a digitally signed token proving that you are a human, that you can use on the internet to show that you are human. Only the library has to be trusted by the public …
Could just do MFA checks for all posts, comments, and upvotes. Imagine?
It would cut out the slop about 99%
MFA helps boost security of an account. It would do nothing to prove a user is human or not.
Funny this coming from Twitter. Nothing but Nazi bots left in that cesspool.
Hey that’s not true! There’s still plenty of hentai still there too
Reddit can tell when I make an alternate account to get around a bullshit site wide ban but not when a robot is pretending that they took his wife in the divorce?
If they couldn’t tell, the bots would get banned sometimes.
The thing is that you (probably) made not effort to hide your identity. The people that make the bots, use all of them
For you the process is :They banned one of your accounts. That account last logged in from IP A. Right after that, someone using that IP is making a new account. Probably same person. Banned again
For the bots, at a minimum is: they just banned and account. That account always logs in using a very popular VPN. Their browser is non fingerprintable. We can’t just ban any new accounts created from that VPN. Registration allowed. (Probably show a captcha)
For you the process is :They banned one of your accounts. That account last logged in from IP A. Right after that, someone using that IP is making a new account. Probably same person. Banned again
I’ve waited several weeks and made accounts on different devices on different networks. Still banned.
Those devices may have a fingerprint. A lot devices can be uniquely identified. Here is an example that I read a long time ago so it might be wrong or I might not remember correctly.
Your phone has a gyroscope, compass and accelerometer. Those tools are not perfect. Your compass does not point straight north, so it has to be calibrated. That calibration produces like a 6digits offset (0.739842). If you look at all the calibration numbers for a device you get a number that is basically unique for each phone. So even if you used different networks, they can still know that you used a device that you had previously used or associated with you account somehow. That’s why brave is an important step in what I said.
cooked without better identity mechanisms
And that worked out so well for Facebook… giving up privacy and anonymity is not the solution, watch that last step, it’s a doozy.
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither and will get none.
I don’t think that’s what they meant by identity mechanisms. Or at least I hope not. It’s just not enough to require an e-mail to verify that you are in fact a valid user
