This right here is why we adblock. Google needs to wake up and do something if they really want to stop people from using adblocks on Youtube, or their other properties.
It's a sign that mass-communication-for-everyone-at-scale isn't a great idea after all. We can just go back to small forums and private group chats. Let human-scale social norms rule instead of algorithmically-amplified grey goo.
Most of the facebook ads shown to me for the last few years were scams of varying sorts.
Ranging from fast fashion sites "going out of business" (whose domain was registered within the last 90 days) to kickstarter campaigns for cloned products to drop-shipped products with slick videos whose discount price is 3x what it costs for the same on Amazon...
This is why I refuse to turn off my adblocker on YouTube, and never will. I'm not rewarding YouTube with my money (for YT Premium) for being absolutely useless at vetting their advertisers. I'd rather just not use YouTube at all if it comes to it.
Dude, I dream of my YouTube ads are being scams. I get greeted every time by a game ad. Some kind of dwarf dies on an apple being offered or something, and dying sounds like someone is throwing up. Please give me your scam ads.
I definitely think authenticity or at least perceived authenticity will become more important in the future. There's a reason vacuum tubes are still produced industrially for guitarists and HiFi enthusiasts despite being over half a century obsolete and it's because despite digital modelling being just better from an engineering perspective people value the perceived authenticity of the real thing. I'm drawing up plans to build a valve amp myself, despite the fact it'll be worse at being an audio amplifier than one I can buy for a tenth of the price of the parts I value the gently glowing glass and straightforward analogue approach to amplifying sound.
I think whether AI content will put people off the web in general will depend on whether it's actually any good or not. 'That looks like an AI made it' is usually an accusation of shoddiness at the moment!
Luster? Huge portions of the Earth depend on the web as their only info source. News has turned into "somebody ran their mouth on (the symbol formerly known as Twitter)."
Also, you might not be able to read this, because I might already be shadow / hell / heaven banned. (A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Far too easy to write a script that says if( [user] ) then ( "hide" ).
Also, if you can, we might just live in a ban circle together. Since all news in the future will be personalized based on your tracking pixel and router location. 'ChatGPT, write me a fake nightly news cast for "so and so" location.'
I'm not even sure you need to invoke AI for saturation of the web, at least for things that don't have to do with current events -- our collective archives just keep getting bigger and bigger.
This may be a bit tangential, but something like 1/8th of surviving classical Greek literature (1000 years!) is attributed in part to Galen. While he was quite prolific, the point is that the entire corpus is extremely small.
We didn't even have the capability to record audio and video until the early 1900s, and certainly not in a mass, centralized, easily-distributable sense until the internet. Having a million monkeys write Shakespeare is pure happenstance, but having a million Shakespeares is inevitable. I abstractly worry that even besides the junk, there will actually be so much PHENOMENALLY GOOD stuff that would-be creators and artisans will be discouraged instead of inspired.
Let's hope that you're right about the real carvings. That at least is not so scalable.
For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.
Don't worry, the shadow libraries have about 20 million books and 100 million scientific papers available, always increasing. There is little risk of AI spam seeping in there, since piracy is a certain threshold for quality. Who'd risk going to jail for pirating generated spam?
ePUB books are basically HTML and CSS, so it's a matter of making a "book browser" instead of a web browser, that can inject links to things mentioned in the book text: such as a name, a place, and especially to another book.
The financial incentives encourage this. All FB cares about is the monthly and daily active users don't dip, and they get more ad impressions. They don't care if the content is fake, so long as it gets eyeballs on the page or in the app.
It saddens me to no end that this constitutes "daily activity". I want to see a day where the non critical internet is unplugged, just to hear crowds rejoy in new found mental space and energy
This was one of the most obvious outcomes anyone could have and should have predicted. Even when people know an image is fake, it still seems to be able to sway them. The effect we've seen over the past few years is simply likely to become worse: more polarization, more extremism, more inter-group hostility, and more BS online.
The comments are probably generated too so it balances out!
Youtube shorts are also ruined with tons of "facts" videos that are just generated images and some hilariously bad text to speech readings of wikis.
Often though they don't even use any tertiary sources like wikipedia and get some facts very wrong.
edit:
They also usually have some AI-generated image with some of histories worst dictators made to look nice and some animated particle or lightning effects.
edit 2:
The genie is out of the lamp now. I think the only way to inoculate people against this is to give everyone these capabilities. When people see how easy this it will hopefully make them more discriminating when they see other images.
That wiki's fault. Not sure why we put blind trust that wikipedia facts are accurate that we blame people who reuse the content when the wiki editors are create the disinformation.
While this may be a particularly dangerous way of thinking[1], it might be good that everything on the internet is becoming obviously fake, AI-generated junk.
So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public.
And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the internet.
I'm seeing AI-gen images of obviously (to me) bad nature themed images that sooo many people think are legit and make comments like "Nature is beautiful", "Amazing", "Proof of God", etc. These images don't even need to be stolen... they're just so easy to generate and then posted for clicks.
Maybe it's time to deprecate reposts, altogether. One of reasons real users don't care about image authenticity is because it's de facto "ok" in English web to steal and repost content ad infinitum.
There are a lot of younger generation web users with an entirely misguided belief that seeking approval by ripping, modifying, re-uploading, in the process relabeling content with the user themself as the creator is not only tolerated but encouraged behavior, which is not at all a correct understanding.
Some call this type of criticism "copyright maximalism", as if it's bad. It's good. Copyright is good. It works. It's not going to reduce bandwidth, nor hurt content quality. In fact, some are starting to recognize need to always "put sauce" because it is becoming harder to ease approval craving in today's Web without doing so. Maybe it's time to push it further. Just a bit.
One of the worst parts about social media is image crafting. And it even seeps into real life on occasion where you see people at incredible locations spending all their time trying to craft some perfect pic to put up, instead of just soaking in the location or even really enjoying themselves. If anybody can [literally] image craft anything, then the entire point of online image crafting disappears, because anybody can now trivially fake anything.
Believe it or not, there is a high brow Facebook where this is not a problem. I spend a lot of time on FB with my older friends where literature, film, poetry and science are topics and never see fake stuff. It's called out. That said, I can believe it's a problem on low brow Facebook, I just haven't seen it.
It is the same people that exercise no discernment when sharing fake news that share these obviously fake AI images. I’ve been seeing it for most of this year and it is concerning that people can’t spot obvious fakes at current AI tech levels.
I've noticed that for the past month or two, FB has been absolutely deluged with AI-generated photos of otherwise "real" photos. Looks like a combination of up-scaling, and some GAN model trying to recreate photos.
It kind of pisses me off, because every photo ends up looking the same. They all have the same "smooth" look. It gives that uncanny valley effect
I signed into Instagram for the first time in many months; it was unbelievable how many of ads are using AI images of celebrities and politicians. One was of the comedian/TV host Howie Mandel being led away in handcuffs for who knows what.
It's as if Facebook saw what Taboola and Outbrain were doing with their 'one weird trick' style ads, and decided they needed a piece of that themselves.
Here's one thing I don't get; why did the content farms bother creating all those AI-generated variations when they could have just as easily just used the real photo? Does Facebook have some kind of repost detector that this circumvents?
Meme pages and other "aggregate" accounts reveal a flaw in the internet in that credit is rarely attributed to the original content owner. This is unrelated to AI specifically.
You'll have an account "Amazing science". You follow it and it does post interesting videos. You believe the account provides a valuable service.
In reality, these accounts never credit the original source, and even if they do, in a disconnected way. The actual person that made the content does not get the views, likes, reshares, and follows.
It's all done under the disguise of "fair use" but it's a great injustice that these accounts profiteer from effectively "stealing" content. Or at least stealing exposure.
And yes, AI would be the next evolution to make the production of original content increasingly pointless.
[+] [-] wharvle|2 years ago|reply
This whole side of the Web needs to be put down. The algo-feed ad-clearinghouse side. It’s a cesspit.
[+] [-] miah_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_snooze|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RajT88|2 years ago|reply
Ranging from fast fashion sites "going out of business" (whose domain was registered within the last 90 days) to kickstarter campaigns for cloned products to drop-shipped products with slick videos whose discount price is 3x what it costs for the same on Amazon...
[+] [-] edf13|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dissident_coder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akomtu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memish|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
It's Meta/Facebook's and Alphabet/Google's "business model".
[+] [-] Beijinger|2 years ago|reply
Dude, I dream of my YouTube ads are being scams. I get greeted every time by a game ad. Some kind of dwarf dies on an apple being offered or something, and dying sounds like someone is throwing up. Please give me your scam ads.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] holoduke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacecadet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philomath_mn|2 years ago|reply
If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.
[+] [-] BoxOfRain|2 years ago|reply
I think whether AI content will put people off the web in general will depend on whether it's actually any good or not. 'That looks like an AI made it' is usually an accusation of shoddiness at the moment!
[+] [-] araes|2 years ago|reply
Luster? Huge portions of the Earth depend on the web as their only info source. News has turned into "somebody ran their mouth on (the symbol formerly known as Twitter)."
Also, utterly false news: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/these-ai-generated-news-a... The comments are disturbing "I always suspected Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling were computer generated."
Also, you might not be able to read this, because I might already be shadow / hell / heaven banned. (A 2012 update to Hacker News introduced a system of "hellbanning") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning Far too easy to write a script that says if( [user] ) then ( "hide" ).
Also, if you can, we might just live in a ban circle together. Since all news in the future will be personalized based on your tracking pixel and router location. 'ChatGPT, write me a fake nightly news cast for "so and so" location.'
[+] [-] nestes|2 years ago|reply
This may be a bit tangential, but something like 1/8th of surviving classical Greek literature (1000 years!) is attributed in part to Galen. While he was quite prolific, the point is that the entire corpus is extremely small.
We didn't even have the capability to record audio and video until the early 1900s, and certainly not in a mass, centralized, easily-distributable sense until the internet. Having a million monkeys write Shakespeare is pure happenstance, but having a million Shakespeares is inevitable. I abstractly worry that even besides the junk, there will actually be so much PHENOMENALLY GOOD stuff that would-be creators and artisans will be discouraged instead of inspired.
Let's hope that you're right about the real carvings. That at least is not so scalable.
[+] [-] reustle|2 years ago|reply
Often referred to as the dead internet theory
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bushbaba|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDarcy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beijinger|2 years ago|reply
Why should it? 50% of IP traffic is caused by robots, maybe in the future 99% will be. Robot shit viewed by AI robots, SISO. Shit in, shit out.
[+] [-] memish|2 years ago|reply
For instance, how many Reddit comments are bots? With the extreme groupthink present there, it wouldn't be a huge shock if it already makes up over half of the comments in popular subs.
[+] [-] carlosjobim|2 years ago|reply
ePUB books are basically HTML and CSS, so it's a matter of making a "book browser" instead of a web browser, that can inject links to things mentioned in the book text: such as a name, a place, and especially to another book.
[+] [-] dbtc|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps AI will finally deliver the message.
But then... What if AI dreams the carvings and then drives the CNC? Would that be interesting? Or is there something special about the human being?
[+] [-] justapassenger|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smitty1110|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] none_to_remain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justapassenger|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] everdrive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawlessone|2 years ago|reply
Often though they don't even use any tertiary sources like wikipedia and get some facts very wrong.
edit: They also usually have some AI-generated image with some of histories worst dictators made to look nice and some animated particle or lightning effects.
edit 2: The genie is out of the lamp now. I think the only way to inoculate people against this is to give everyone these capabilities. When people see how easy this it will hopefully make them more discriminating when they see other images.
[+] [-] ipaddr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goles|2 years ago|reply
So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public.
And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the internet.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
[+] [-] werdnapk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|2 years ago|reply
There are a lot of younger generation web users with an entirely misguided belief that seeking approval by ripping, modifying, re-uploading, in the process relabeling content with the user themself as the creator is not only tolerated but encouraged behavior, which is not at all a correct understanding.
Some call this type of criticism "copyright maximalism", as if it's bad. It's good. Copyright is good. It works. It's not going to reduce bandwidth, nor hurt content quality. In fact, some are starting to recognize need to always "put sauce" because it is becoming harder to ease approval craving in today's Web without doing so. Maybe it's time to push it further. Just a bit.
[+] [-] somenameforme|2 years ago|reply
One of the worst parts about social media is image crafting. And it even seeps into real life on occasion where you see people at incredible locations spending all their time trying to craft some perfect pic to put up, instead of just soaking in the location or even really enjoying themselves. If anybody can [literally] image craft anything, then the entire point of online image crafting disappears, because anybody can now trivially fake anything.
[+] [-] labrador|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unnamed76ri|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RajT88|2 years ago|reply
A simple solution: #DeleteFacebook
[+] [-] TrackerFF|2 years ago|reply
It kind of pisses me off, because every photo ends up looking the same. They all have the same "smooth" look. It gives that uncanny valley effect
Example of Meryl Streep I found after just browsing for 10 seconds: https://i.imgur.com/b4J2iPq.jpg
[+] [-] cabirum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
It's as if Facebook saw what Taboola and Outbrain were doing with their 'one weird trick' style ads, and decided they needed a piece of that themselves.
[+] [-] tarr11|2 years ago|reply
Eg, someone builds a system that constructs a graph that points images back to the previous references, based on their distances.
The one with the earliest timestamp is considered the original.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iteratethis|2 years ago|reply
You'll have an account "Amazing science". You follow it and it does post interesting videos. You believe the account provides a valuable service.
In reality, these accounts never credit the original source, and even if they do, in a disconnected way. The actual person that made the content does not get the views, likes, reshares, and follows.
It's all done under the disguise of "fair use" but it's a great injustice that these accounts profiteer from effectively "stealing" content. Or at least stealing exposure.
And yes, AI would be the next evolution to make the production of original content increasingly pointless.