8 ms·

What’s the actual experiment here?

costco 3y ago
"Experiment" was probably poor word choice, I mostly just want to see if anybody notices them or if they get kicked out of subreddits by mods. So far none have. I saw a bunch of people on HN say that AI was going to create this new wave of spam so I tried to test out that theory. My conclusion is yes it would make content generation for a prospective spammer easier but there still are a bunch of technical things you have to get right (maybe not for Reddit but for platforms with better protections like Instagram) or your accounts will all get banned in waves. Like your TLS fingerprint, order of headers, or making all the analytics requests that the official app does (I don't even attempt to make these so I assume the accounts will eventually be banned). The other reality is that bots for governments and marketing people usually post low reputation links for their propaganda or affiliate purposes so they are likely to be caught that way anyways. I don't think it dramatically changes things in this space to be honest because I'm pretty sure the large scale disinformation/spam operations were already employing poorly paid foreign people to write posts. Maybe I'm wrong.
- prox 3y ago
  I think a reverse experiment would be far more valuable. Try to find patterns of collective clicknets/botnets trying to swing a subreddit in a certain direction for instance.
- dbspin 3y ago
  This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all. It's a classic case of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", and evidences all the shallow fallacies that accompany this kind of thinking. The appeal to hypocrisy, false equivalence, 'whats the harm', etc. Resulting in the kind of amoral, 'look what technically cool and kinda messed up thing I made, but whats the real harm' cynicism that's been used to justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    This would have been more convincing if you'd listed an actual harm like wasting people's time reading AI generated comments.
    - smaudet 3y ago
      I think parent's objection is to exactly this logic - a sort of mental laziness demanding proof before willingness to attempt to grok the potential harm. And then we get stuff like accounts hacked, bank accounts wiped out, people's lives/reputations ruined (social media, poor sec practices, etc.). There are always consequences, just because it's cool and Shiney doesn't make it otherwise.
    - dbspin 3y ago
      Wasting peoples time is a relatively minor harm (in this one case - at scale the waste and diminishment of attention is an enormous issue). Increasing noise to signal ration in online discussions, cultivating a bot net that can be replicated or directly used for nefarious purposes, actively distracting from useful information and authentic relationships, and literally advocating for increasing utility zero spam are all bigger issues.
  - throwawaylinux 3y ago
    Ironically, I find this to be the height of elitism and disconnectedness with humanity, to believe that people need university education in "the humanities" to have a fully developed and grounded moral code and sense of ethics. People who live "primitive" lifestyles who have zero academic education and have never heard of let alone from any "experts in humanities" can have a keen sense of what is fair, just, right, and wrong, empathy, etc. So can "tech people". And students of humanities can be lacking all those things. I have my doubts that studying these things actually changes them significantly in a person, but would be really interested to be proven wrong about that. Certainly it is not necessary or sufficient to be an ethical person though.
    - dbspin 3y ago
      I agree. Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education. You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy online based on freely available resources. You can also do introductory psychology and sociology courses from Ivy League institutions at zero cost - although more advanced work and lab research is harder to replicate without access to an institutional context. Also the curriculums do tend to be quite arbitrary and not so rounded - but that's in common with the US style of multidiciplinary undergraduate degree and specialise later. Here are some resources that link to psych courses online - https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/10-places-to-find-free-psychology-courses/ https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/10-places-to-find-fr... Harvard Business school also offer some ethics courses, but these are quite business focused and don't provide a strong general grounding https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics Edinburgh universities free online MOOC is likely a better and more rounded introduction - https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/philosophy/research/impact/free-online-courses https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/philosophy/research/impact/free-on... To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics. I haven't suggested that studying ethics alone makes one virtuous, or that a lack of academic background precludes ethical behaviour. What I am suggesting - and I think your comment further evidences, is that a lack of interest and education in the (two thousand year long) tradition of thinking formally about ethical problems can ensure that our ethical decision making is arbitrary and reactive rather than rooted in our fundamental values. In other words, thinking and reading into this stuff doesn't replace your value system - it gives you a much richer understanding of how you've arrived at your values and can put them into practice.

"Experiment" was probably poor word choice, I mostly just want to see if anybody notices them or if they get kicked out of subreddits by mods. So far none have. I saw a bunch of people on HN say that AI was going to create this new wave of spam so I tried to test out that theory. My conclusion is yes it would make content generation for a prospective spammer easier but there still are a bunch of technical things you have to get right (maybe not for Reddit but for platforms with better protections like Instagram) or your accounts will all get banned in waves. Like your TLS fingerprint, order of headers, or making all the analytics requests that the official app does (I don't even attempt to make these so I assume the accounts will eventually be banned). The other reality is that bots for governments and marketing people usually post low reputation links for their propaganda or affiliate purposes so they are likely to be caught that way anyways. I don't think it dramatically changes things in this space to be honest because I'm pretty sure the large scale disinformation/spam operations were already employing poorly paid foreign people to write posts. Maybe I'm wrong.

prox 3y ago
I think a reverse experiment would be far more valuable. Try to find patterns of collective clicknets/botnets trying to swing a subreddit in a certain direction for instance.
dbspin 3y ago
This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all. It's a classic case of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", and evidences all the shallow fallacies that accompany this kind of thinking. The appeal to hypocrisy, false equivalence, 'whats the harm', etc. Resulting in the kind of amoral, 'look what technically cool and kinda messed up thing I made, but whats the real harm' cynicism that's been used to justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad.
- concordDance 3y ago
  This would have been more convincing if you'd listed an actual harm like wasting people's time reading AI generated comments.
  - smaudet 3y ago
    I think parent's objection is to exactly this logic - a sort of mental laziness demanding proof before willingness to attempt to grok the potential harm. And then we get stuff like accounts hacked, bank accounts wiped out, people's lives/reputations ruined (social media, poor sec practices, etc.). There are always consequences, just because it's cool and Shiney doesn't make it otherwise.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    Wasting peoples time is a relatively minor harm (in this one case - at scale the waste and diminishment of attention is an enormous issue). Increasing noise to signal ration in online discussions, cultivating a bot net that can be replicated or directly used for nefarious purposes, actively distracting from useful information and authentic relationships, and literally advocating for increasing utility zero spam are all bigger issues.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
  Ironically, I find this to be the height of elitism and disconnectedness with humanity, to believe that people need university education in "the humanities" to have a fully developed and grounded moral code and sense of ethics. People who live "primitive" lifestyles who have zero academic education and have never heard of let alone from any "experts in humanities" can have a keen sense of what is fair, just, right, and wrong, empathy, etc. So can "tech people". And students of humanities can be lacking all those things. I have my doubts that studying these things actually changes them significantly in a person, but would be really interested to be proven wrong about that. Certainly it is not necessary or sufficient to be an ethical person though.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    I agree. Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education. You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy online based on freely available resources. You can also do introductory psychology and sociology courses from Ivy League institutions at zero cost - although more advanced work and lab research is harder to replicate without access to an institutional context. Also the curriculums do tend to be quite arbitrary and not so rounded - but that's in common with the US style of multidiciplinary undergraduate degree and specialise later. Here are some resources that link to psych courses online - https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/10-places-to-find-free-psychology-courses/ https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/10-places-to-find-fr... Harvard Business school also offer some ethics courses, but these are quite business focused and don't provide a strong general grounding https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics Edinburgh universities free online MOOC is likely a better and more rounded introduction - https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/philosophy/research/impact/free-online-courses https://www.ed.ac.uk/ppls/philosophy/research/impact/free-on... To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics. I haven't suggested that studying ethics alone makes one virtuous, or that a lack of academic background precludes ethical behaviour. What I am suggesting - and I think your comment further evidences, is that a lack of interest and education in the (two thousand year long) tradition of thinking formally about ethical problems can ensure that our ethical decision making is arbitrary and reactive rather than rooted in our fundamental values. In other words, thinking and reading into this stuff doesn't replace your value system - it gives you a much richer understanding of how you've arrived at your values and can put them into practice.