4 ms·

Fake news and AI generated news are kinda all over the place for a good amount of time. It's faster and cheaper to have AI write news from a press release. My

Fake news and AI generated news are kinda all over the place for a good amount of time. It's faster and cheaper to have AI write news from a press release. My prediction is that in the next 10y we will really struggle to determine between fake-people and real-human. There will be an explosion of fake-identities posting more and more human-like. But I'm not Nostradamus so I could be very very off here.

shon 4y ago
You’re probably right but it will be an arms race with ever more sophisticated mitigation techniques being deployed to filter. I’d say Neil Stephenson has a pretty good take on what this might look like in his recent book: Fall, where in everyone has a “feed” and those that or more savvy/wealthy have better editors (AI, etc) of their feed.
- NoMAD76 4y ago
  It's all about having the right tools, but I wonder how long can we "beat the machine" :)
paganel 4y ago
It depends. On forums like this it would basically take a machine that would pass the Turing test in order not to be seen as an AI in any "meaningful" conversation that it might join (so, not just a comment posted as a reply here and there). And even if the powers that be manage to get those future AI bots to post stuff that will very much resemble what we now post in here, it is my belief that the uncanny valley will be, in the end, impossible to pass (in fact that's one of the main motifs of many of Asimov's books when it comes to robots).
jerf 4y ago
I'm not particularly convinced by the Dead Internet Theory [1] as of 2022, in the sense that it is completely true right now. But I am convinced it is building around us, and even now, the correct frame for the question isn't whether it is true, but how true it is. There is too many entities with too much reason to build it for it not to be happening. And the nature of it is such that it doesn't need to be one entity doing it for one unified reason; dozens, hundreds can all be participating & fighting with each other on different levels and the sum total of all that is to put it together that much more quickly. You know, the PGP web of trust idea may yet take off all these decades later, not because we need a web of trust to send 100.0000000% safely encrypted messages to each other to protect from governments, but because we need a web of trust just to know who the real humans are. [1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
- datadata 4y ago
  Curious to what degree and how you think web of trust idea could help here? Assume you could use it to prove whether an article was signed or not by a real person. I think this would solve the problem of articles being published with a false author attribution. However, it would not work to prevent actual people from publishing AI written articles using their own identity. It would also not (directly) do anything to establish if the facts in an article are correct or not.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Specifically, a web of trust designed for exactly that assertion: This person is a real human. Signatures here serve to assert what identity something came from. There would be some of the usual web of trust problems, e.g., trying to explain to Joe Q. Public that you only sign for people you know, beyond doubt, are human. Preferably in person. Many other problems, too. I guess you could say, my thought here isn't that this would solve the problems. The problems at this point are somewhat well known. What has been missing is any benefit significant enough to motivate us to get past those problems. If there is, it's obviously many years away. Wouldn't exactly suggest building a startup around this idea right now, if you get my drift. We still need to go through a phase of the problem getting larger before we even get to the phase where people start to realize this is a problem and start demanding that people online prove they are actually people, and goodness knows "I'm a human" is merely the lowest of low bars itself, not the solution to all trust problems.
- agar 4y ago
  I love the idea but hate that I'm so cynical about the likely outcome.

shon 4y ago

You’re probably right but it will be an arms race with ever more sophisticated mitigation techniques being deployed to filter. I’d say Neil Stephenson has a pretty good take on what this might look like in his recent book: Fall, where in everyone has a “feed” and those that or more savvy/wealthy have better editors (AI, etc) of their feed.

NoMAD76 4y ago
It's all about having the right tools, but I wonder how long can we "beat the machine" :)

paganel 4y ago

It depends. On forums like this it would basically take a machine that would pass the Turing test in order not to be seen as an AI in any "meaningful" conversation that it might join (so, not just a comment posted as a reply here and there). And even if the powers that be manage to get those future AI bots to post stuff that will very much resemble what we now post in here, it is my belief that the uncanny valley will be, in the end, impossible to pass (in fact that's one of the main motifs of many of Asimov's books when it comes to robots).

jerf 4y ago

I'm not particularly convinced by the Dead Internet Theory [1] as of 2022, in the sense that it is completely true right now. But I am convinced it is building around us, and even now, the correct frame for the question isn't whether it is true, but how true it is. There is too many entities with too much reason to build it for it not to be happening. And the nature of it is such that it doesn't need to be one entity doing it for one unified reason; dozens, hundreds can all be participating & fighting with each other on different levels and the sum total of all that is to put it together that much more quickly. You know, the PGP web of trust idea may yet take off all these decades later, not because we need a web of trust to send 100.0000000% safely encrypted messages to each other to protect from governments, but because we need a web of trust just to know who the real humans are. [1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

datadata 4y ago
Curious to what degree and how you think web of trust idea could help here? Assume you could use it to prove whether an article was signed or not by a real person. I think this would solve the problem of articles being published with a false author attribution. However, it would not work to prevent actual people from publishing AI written articles using their own identity. It would also not (directly) do anything to establish if the facts in an article are correct or not.
- jerf 4y ago
  Specifically, a web of trust designed for exactly that assertion: This person is a real human. Signatures here serve to assert what identity something came from. There would be some of the usual web of trust problems, e.g., trying to explain to Joe Q. Public that you only sign for people you know, beyond doubt, are human. Preferably in person. Many other problems, too. I guess you could say, my thought here isn't that this would solve the problems. The problems at this point are somewhat well known. What has been missing is any benefit significant enough to motivate us to get past those problems. If there is, it's obviously many years away. Wouldn't exactly suggest building a startup around this idea right now, if you get my drift. We still need to go through a phase of the problem getting larger before we even get to the phase where people start to realize this is a problem and start demanding that people online prove they are actually people, and goodness knows "I'm a human" is merely the lowest of low bars itself, not the solution to all trust problems.
agar 4y ago
I love the idea but hate that I'm so cynical about the likely outcome.