11 ms·

I put my heart and soul into this AI but nobody cares

270 points by spzb 2y ago

pmg101 2y ago
It's kind of stupidity farming isn't it. Is there anything wrong with that? The stupid people get to do some engaging, which is after all what their brain evolved to enjoy, everyone's a winner? Maybe?
swayvil 2y ago
The technology of mind-control is advancing at a furious pace. These AI generated images and videos are just the latest evolution. Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? What will its final form look like? What do the scifi prophets say? (This vast irresistible mind-control machinery serves the billionaires of course) Poverty is probably your best shield. Because then you can't afford a phone. Someday the universal suicide order will drop and the only people left will be monks and beggars.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  > Poverty is probably your best shield. I am betting on relationships with people, and avoiding public Internet, except for shitposting on here. This can be modelled as the back half of a whalefall. The Internet used to be a magic place where you could just stumble into community, useful information, etc. Now it's been over-exploited and game is becoming scarce. The information is saturated with crap and mass media was never a substitute for friendships. Even though it's the hardest thing I've ever done, I'll have to make real friends.
- disqard 2y ago
  I upvoted you. What you wrote sounds a bit "out there", but, like Margaret Atwood's work, it's actually not too far away. > Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? I'm reminded of Hiro Protagonist (living in a storage unit), or Ready Player One protagonist (living in some impoverished mobile home stack) -- these are the "vulnerable". As for "immune", it's the people who "control the supply": https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out-about-this-insane-zuckerberg-vr-photo/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out... P.S. Like all real-world examples, we have an exception -- Felon Husk, who gets high on his own supply, making him simultaneously victim and perpetrator.
hyperhello 2y ago
Those worthless posts on Facebook are all bot engagement farms. You can recognize them for having nothing to do with anything, and the commenters are all bots as well. You can click on their profile because it has to be public. If you look at their friends, they won't be mostly from someplace like real friends would, they'll be from all over. Each one of them will have a cover photo that is a low quality picture of...some people, doing nothing. Their posts will all be bot engagement, with a few nothing pictures (such as a sunset with the caption "Nice sunset.") It's all, 100%, crap.
- hackit2 2y ago
  You've basically summed up most social media users habits and profiles.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  And they make money. Zuck makes money because he can claim users. Facebook ad metrics (what they report as clicks) were always inflated to begin with and now its just ai slop.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
> The article you've just read is one such example. There is no way to verify that. Until a method exists to discern real from AI-generated content, we should probably assume it's generated (for our safety). Sadly, that's the world we live in now. It was kind of like that before, but it's even more so now.
- swayvil 2y ago
  I don't think it matters whether it was created by an AI or an advertising agency or a dude in his basement. What matters is how powerful it is. The powerful stuff will play your little mind like a piano. One glance and you're lost.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    I agree. It doesn't matter. Even if a human wrote it, how does that change anything? It certainly doesn't make it more true or a more honest reflection of somebody's feelings. These people who keep worrying about AI generated content don't seem to realize the rubbish that humans create is not better.
  - NitpickLawyer 2y ago
    Hard agree. Kony2012 was human made (or at least human started) and then it went on and spread like wildfire by using useful idiots along the way...
- andrewinardeer 2y ago
  Deepfake Detector by Mozilla can assist https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-detector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-det...
  - gs17 2y ago
    How well does that actually work in practice? I was using the demo on Fakespot's site and verbatim output from ChatGPT seems to get detected pretty well, but random HN comments got a lot of (presumably) false positives. "AI detectors" are kind of a crapshoot in my opinion, but I'm curious.
totetsu 2y ago
Wow amazing article
kadir1234 2y ago
hard to put a finger on it, but i do think you should give humanity a little credit... it's actually somewhat easy to spot the "AI" when it does appear in these situations? or maybe i'm just deluded.
- iamthemonster 2y ago
  I can only imagine that the "AI" look must be somehow intentional. I recently discovered how to make very realistic images - you simply ask for your image, then you use the follow-up prompt "make it more realistic" and, most shockingly, it actually works. I never thought of doing it before because it's so stupid.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    It's probably like how scam emails often have obvious misspellings in order to intentionally filter out anyone incredulous enough to notice.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Critical thinking needs to be taught in schools. Either that or the society of the future is going to be hugely screwed. If we teach kids critical thinking, they will not only be able to recognise scam, they will also stop being religious, which is another good thing. I wonder why we still don't have critical thinking in schools.
- swayvil 2y ago
  Critical thinking won't save you. Emotion trumps rationality. This stuff plays on emotions.
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    ...which critical thinking skills help you to notice, so that you are less likely to fall prey to it.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      The point, perhaps, is that you can't use reason to convince someone to be more reasonable. Humans are fundamentally emotional animals, and if you want to get them to start valuing reason, you have to use emotional arguments to do so, by definition.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Critical thinking doesn't make people less religious nor should less religious people be a goal in society. I struggle to explain, but I feel like our data-obssessed society has completely thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to these things. No one labels themselves with a religion or political party because there is a flaw in each one and anything with a flaw can't be correct, scientifically, so we just don't believe in any grand purpose to our lives, don't believe in any world leaders, don't believe in any shared tenets, and basically are all lonely and weak (because we abandon every group with a flaw). The result of critical thinking shouldn't be a worse off society...
  - 2y ago
jp42 2y ago
In recent India's general election. A deepfake video of a leading politician costed a massive vote shift and they almost lost an election. The damage was done by the time they have clarified it is fake.
- lurk2 2y ago
  I've heard the social media landscape is a lot different in India because so much of it passes through the comparatively-opaque WhatsApp rumor mill.
  - kennyloginz 2y ago
    Compared to?
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      Most of the West? WhatsApp groups in South Asia seem to work like Telegram groups in Russia, and I don’t know that I’m aware of a European or American equivalent
      - seattle_spring 2y ago
        Do you just mean because the lies shared on WhatsApp are hidden within groups, whereas the lies on X and FB are more public?
        lurk2 2y ago
        That was what I was getting at. I've read of a few (literal) witch hunting stories from India and Africa, and they all seem to start on WhatsApp groups. A similar phenomenon occurs in South America, as well, though in that case the killings tend to resemble lynch mobs hunting down suspected killers. I've seen similar things happen in Western countries (e.g. when Reddit identified the wrong guy as the Boston Marathon bomber, local Facebook groups where seniors jump at their own shadow, etc), but I've only ever heard of it resulting in an actual death in non-western countries, and the common vector seems to be WhatsApp. My working theory is that unmoderated peer-to-peer platforms like this are naturally conducive to witch-hunting (e.g. 4chan used to have a real problem with it), and that perhaps the groups being comparatively private might prevent law enforcement from becoming aware of the issue before it gets out of control. But the other factor here is that these are all areas of the world where the rule of law is not particularly effective when compared to western countries, so WhatsApp might just be the means by which an old problem is manifesting, rather than being the cause of the problem itself.
unraveller 2y ago
Letting algorithms bring you slop of any kind is your own fault. wontfix.
- beeflet 2y ago
  My poor grandmother spent her entire weekend baking this AI slop and no one went to her birthday
- gaudystead 2y ago
  I fear your opinion is one that most casual content consumers don't even realize is happening. They just want to consume content... However, they also share the road with you, help decide what content/messaging gets spread, and vote with their dollar (and political vote), just like you. While I agree with your opinion, although it may be their fault, it easily can spread to become everyone's problem.
- zeofig 2y ago
  but couldfix? noyoucouldntlol
bestouff 2y ago
> They did also all seem to be active churchgoers but that must be some kind of coincidence... Oh i love this one !
k-i-r-t-h-i 2y ago
Easy to hate on this, but the existence of these kinds of things is so fascinating. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of people are out there generating AI click bait because people or system somewhere allows / encourages / pays for this market to exist
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  That’s not what’s happening here. The get-rich-quick grifters started selling AI slop manuals. It’s like saying brands that spend a lot on ads are successful. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  And the feedback loop means we’re doing fuzzing on the human brain! If we can just take the human out of the loop and let the AI post and use a genetic algorithm to tweak its content, we’ll all be getting rooted in no time.
- theamk 2y ago
  They are fascinating in the same sense road accidents or fatal diseases are - some people might like to watch them, but overall there is nothing good about this.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>Bizarre as it may seem, some people actually send real money to these "creators" It's also just plain ol' ad revenue as well. Not such thing as bad engagement. >And then there are opportunities to sell "guest posts" to other spam merchants who want to get their content in front of gullible eyeballs. Yeah, that too. get ad revenue, then become the ad yourself. and... the article ends. Well that was a lot more fluff than I anticipated. Yes, not much will change until the people themsevles start rejecting this content en masse. But there will be people falling for it. There are still people falling for old school email spam, so it's sadly not shocking AI works for the non-discerning viewer.
simonw 2y ago
404media have by far the best coverage of the epidemic of AI generated spam images on Facebook: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ It is mainly driven by get rich quick YouTube influencers, many from India and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly it is not a great way to actually make money.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- chii 2y ago
  a very small amount of US dollars paid out to these people could be considered a "significant" amount of income when converted to those lower cost of living places.
- lurk2 2y ago
  Some are better than others. About three months ago I started seeing channels that were clearly stealing content from other channels and splicing it over a text-to-speech narration. I knew they were doing this because I had seen the original videos they were stealing from. But then I've also seen a far larger number of channels which use text-to-speech to make audiobooks from public domain works. I recently listened to a couple of Plato's works on a channel like this. The text-to-speech did a fairly convincing reading, with Socrates and his companions each having their own distinct voices. These videos had tens of thousands of views, which might not be great, but if you can put out a few hundred videos like that in less than a year it might be worth it to the right person. I also suspect most of the film summary channels have been using AI in similar ways since before it was even popular. Those videos get into the millions of views and in my opinion they are not bad as far as low-effort content goes.
- silisili 2y ago
  I can't read the whole article, but one important point is that Facebook subsidizes users from these areas. It's cheaper to get 'Facebook data' than regular data. As a result, life revolves around Facebook. All day, every day. It's how you shop, you contact each other, you 'google things', it's everything. And being rather high unemployment areas, people tend to spend all day there. So given that you've essentially captured an entire demographic with little to no money that spend all their time on your platform, it's no surprise that's where the scams come from, whether it's outright or through such slop. Who can blame them? And FB doesn't care, they just report 10 million user growth, without telling the actual truth that they're in a roundabout way, paying those users.
rendaw 2y ago
What social media has microtransaction stars?
- raziel2p 2y ago
  Facebook, apparently: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/347766223948126 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/347766223948126
- kennyloginz 2y ago
  Twitter?
- areyourllySorry 2y ago
  telegram also has stars, and reddit wanted to let you cash out gold, not sure what happened with that. let's also not forget tiktok's gifts. i believe instagram also has some kind of gifts but i can't find them
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  Twitch and twitch bits. YouTube has something similar.
Nursie 2y ago
When it comes to images like those in the article, “Is this real?” is not really part of my reaction. Neither is “poor thing” or “wow that’s impressive” or whatever else. My reaction is “why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?”. I don’t care if it’s real, the only reason I visited the website is to check if the local market’s on this week, and maybe see if anyone I know has posted anything (increasingly unlikely). I think in the modern age it's healthy to have a much wider cynicism - what is this crap, I didn't ask for it, f### off. I don’t really get why Facebook tries so hard to get me to look at this rubbish. The more of this shit-shovelling there is, the less often I go and the fewer friend posts there are. It’s becoming a dead platform.
- b3lvedere 2y ago
  “why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?” Because you allow it to.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    That's not really a useful answer. I'm looking for the motive, which (when it's something you're not directly looking for) is usually money. I fully understand that "stop using the service" is an option.
    - b3lvedere 2y ago
      Fair enough. Let me rephrase it: Because "they" don't care on what kind of method they can use to extracting money from everything that makes you you. The algorithms have a simple task: Try and shove as much possible methods in your systems to get you to spend money.
      - Nursie 2y ago
        Right, and given this is usually the answer to "why is this being shoved in my face", my initial point stands - it doesn't matter if it's AI slop or not. The article makes the point that a lot of people are easily fooled into interacting with fake AI stuff. My wider point is that regardless of how 'real' the images are, someone's trying to get you to look at bullshit for profit reasons, either the platform's or their own, therefore it's all best ignored.
dexwiz 2y ago
Could this be some sort of meta training activity? Meta allows this kind of content and uses engagement as a measure of value for future training material.
gamedever 2y ago
I adopted this panda. Could really use some help but he brings me joy https://civitai.com/posts/12371259 https://civitai.com/posts/12371259
anshumankmr 2y ago
Damn two of those would have fooled me too if I wasn't looking too carefully.. the one like the one with the old lady and her cake and the kittens one.
- AndrewOMartin 2y ago
  The one where the cake is decorated with the phrase "Happy Birthday Bithiday"? Maybe that's her name. Seriously though, I completely understand. AI slop tends to have a "when you see it, you can't unsee it" issue, but on first glance they're pretty compelling. Only when writing this did I notice how uncanny the 42 year old woman's thumbs were.
  - anshumankmr 2y ago
    Yeah the two Birthday's gave it away. If it had some name, I would have believed it . Even the ones with the statue thing, the rose one looks realistic whereas the other two with the wooden lady is too perfect for a wooden statue (though I am no carpenter ) and the one with the sheep in the background, they just seem a little too small Idk why.
    - Gormo 2y ago
      It doesn't say "birthday" twice. It says "Happy Birthday Bithiday". The second word is gibberish.
  - fullshark 2y ago
    And no one is carefully vetting their content feeds, if anything their brains are completely shut off as they scroll.
noduerme 2y ago
There's a saddening effect that this kind of garbage foists onto society, and onto individual humans, that costs drastically more than the money the content itself scrapes up. On a societal level, you have the net effect of millions of individuals being duped into throwing their empathy at something absurdly false. That is a recipe for wild and random backlashes as people become convinced that the world is something it isn't. On an individual level, liking some fake bullshit, then realizing it's fake, causes people to feel humiliated. Ultimately, being humiliated by giving away your empathy to the wrong subject causes people to become angry and reject their natural empathy towards legitimate other people, having been fooled so many times already. Maybe a better way of saying this is: Bad currency drives out good. And if the currency is empathy and sympathy itself, then we are racing toward a society that will no longer be able to cast itself into anyone else's shoes.
- disqard 2y ago
  > Bad currency drives out good That's the second time I've read this phrase on HN this week (earlier, it was in reference to the ad-supported Internet). The race-to-the-bottom of zeroing out people's empathy to grab fractions of a penny (at scale) also reminds me of the Malthusian trap (aka "rats on the island") in slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch". Whatever little nooks exist where some micro-pennies can still be found, will be farmed (at scale).
  - noduerme 2y ago
    Empathy farming is what people with a religious or moral framework would call wicked. The reason the writer here observed that most of the suckers writing sympathy notes appear to be religious is not that religious people are stupid, it's that religious people are the last to completely abandon the notion that other people are real and need their support. They are the last to realize when a false messiah or a fake 105 year old woman baking fake cakes needs their help. It hijacks their moral framework, because they have invested a lifetime in believing certain tropes and terms and what (I as an atheist) would call sappy horseshit, which nonetheless imbues meaning into all aspects of their daily life. They don't suspect that the attack on their dignity will come disguised as an appeal to their faith.
firefoxd 2y ago
I was sent a YouTube video that was blatantly fake. Five seconds in I closed it and moved on. But I got curious. I went back to the video and checked the channel. It has 7.4 million subscribers. It uploads 4 or 5 times a day. At least two 3 hours videos, and a couple short ones. All videos are generated with a voice over. All those that I have checked have comments with real people in them. This battle is already lost.
- disqard 2y ago
  Morbid curiosity: would you be willing to share a link to that channel? FWIW, I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat-earthers to try and understand what the appeal is (spoiler: it's often some variant of "if the Earth were a ball hurtling through space, that would be too terrifying")... maybe I should just stay away from this one :D
  - firefoxd 2y ago
    I didn't really want to link them. But here @sympa_fr on youtube. Note it's in french.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    I was trolling as flat earther a little bit in my youth when the internet was more innocent. I thought it was mostly trolls and some strange people?
LVB 2y ago
A form that is particularly annoying to me is where official-sounding accounts are posting about plausible scientific advances or discoveries. Just yesterday, I saw some "James Webb Space Telescope" account gushing about new photos that dropped. They were beautiful, though obviously a little too nice, and of course NASA/JPL had released no such photos. I can't put my finger on why this bugs me--and my wife thinks I'm being a pedantic when I comment that they're fake ("it's a nice picture, they like it, let them be")--but I think it has to do with the targeting of folks that absolutely would like that photo to be real.
- never_inline 2y ago
  I concur, I have seen videos of "Honda Unicorn 160 2025" motorcycle models which looked too much like high-end cruiser motorcycles then realized it was AI generated.
- ramon156 2y ago
  Disinformation is a very real thing to get angry about. At the same time it's a blessing, because it gives away if people fact check the stuff they see
  - onionisafruit 2y ago
    On the other hand, without dis/misinformation, it wouldn’t be so important to know whether people fact check the stuff they see.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  It bugs you becouse it is a lie and fools people I guess? It is like these "life hack" cooking recipes that don't work. They are wasting kids enthusiasm in cooking and trust in people.
  - nasmorn 2y ago
    Or any recipe in existence that will pretend you can caramelize onions in 10 minutes so they don’t have to admit their recipe is actually taking as long as anyone who knows how to cook knows it will. All prep time will also assume you have the worlds best knife skills so cutting 300g of carrots julienne will be like 2min tops
kennyloginz 2y ago
Maybe this an effect from ai, but this article reads like straight up ai
- furyofantares 2y ago
  There is plenty of human in the article. I suspect your ai-detector senses are heightened due to the content, and the writing style is mostly straightforward with a few needless flowery words, which makes it ripe for false detection. But when I re-read it with "did AI write this?" in mind, there's plenty of stuff in there that I would find it rather difficult to get an LLM to write if I tried.
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
What’s the end game here for Facebook? Surely people will just stop going to these platforms or is the thinking Ai + the algorithm will be even more effective… shutter at the thought
- petesergeant 2y ago
  > What’s the end game here for Facebook? FB is functionally dead for many people, unlikely to meaningfully grow. So they’re trying to reduce costs and make sure new platforms and ones that still have some growth potential get the effort instead. I’d rather work on the Threads or Instagram Reels teams than the FB one. And who knows, maybe the VR revolution Zuck wants really will happen.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    VR revolution lacks the physics for it to ever happen. People need both time to plug into the vr and also money to buy the vr device and subscription. Two things that every business in the world wants from people which are in short supply these days due to how many hands want a finger in the finite pie of the consumers available time and money. Not to mention how the pie is generally shrinking due to increases to cost of living and wage depression. It is kind of interesting how the incentive to profit leads to an outcome of lessened potential for profit. Someone who lives paycheck to paycheck is economically useless in the eyes of the capitalist: they have no money to part with essentially as whatever they are paid flows right out of their hands. What happens to capitalism when the numbers of paycheck to paycheck people continue to rise? A lot of the economic success of this country since WWII relative to other countries has depended on americans having more available disposable income to spend on consumer products than any other population in the world. We see that changing now. Strange times ahead.
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      > People need both time to plug into the vr and also money to buy the vr device and subscription. I have with my own eyes seen a motorbike-taxi driver on a Bangkok street using a cheap VR device. I think you over-estimate how much these things have to cost, and under-estimate how willing people are to pay for gadgets: 34% of Nigerians and 34% of Indonesians own tablets[0]. These are obviously not _identical_ items, but feels close enough to be a counter-point to me. 0: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1452567/share-of-tablet-owners-in-selected-countries-worldwide https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1452567/share-of-tablet-o...
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
Even before AI images became viable, you had folks in low cost countries doing the same thing with local talent. AI might make it easier but humans in those countries can give you art for a small enough amount that scale makes up the expense enough to profit. This is even present in fandom communities where young artists from low cost countries charge a lot less than their high cost country counterparts, leading to popularity and exposure on top of just revenue. The arts have so few barriers to competition that it's quite hard to compete unless your art is just that novel. Most artists that make a living do it by outputting boring things like commercial voiceovers, corporate illustrations, or headshot photography.
entropyneur 2y ago
You don't need AI to attach bullshit titles to photos. The problem is with Facebook algorithm that recommends content based on"engagement" - nothing good can come out of this by design. AI just makes bullshit makers more productive like the rest of us.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  >The problem is with Facebook algorithm that recommends content based on"engagement" Ye it is pure toxic and made me stop using Facebook. At some point in time a was fed "people falling and hurting them self a bit" videos. And I hovered over them and tried to find the blacklist button. So Facebook started to feed me more of those! And a hate those kind of videos.
PostOnce 2y ago
To enrage or endear at all costs, the engagement justifies the means. It is ironic that an article railing against people doing all they can for engagement ends with... a call to engage. Sign up for my newsletter.
DeathArrow 2y ago
I saw this kind of posts since months ago and I wondered what is the point of "sadcore". At first I thought they want to raise the engagement of some accounts and gather a following. But looking at the accounts, they doesn't seem to sell or promote anything. Are they just sad trolls with a mission to amplify the amount of sadness in the world?
- waysa 2y ago
  Attention is worth money. I assume they'll sell the accounts to scammers or political campaigns at some point.
sharpshadow 2y ago
Still waiting for the top notch open source video AI. Want to see those kittens squeezed in the hydraulic press. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long as the 4K to 8k transition.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  For real or do you mean you don't want the model to tell you what you can generate?
mns 2y ago
In Romania it's full of these pages that I never understood, but apparently they are used for 2 things: - filter people that can be scammed, you can see that people commenting on these posts and congratulating whatever AI slop you have in the picture are targeted by bots that try to tell them they won something or getting them to buy various useless stuff online - gather real likes and people in groups and for pages that later turn up to promote certain political candidates (see the recent annulled Romanian elections) or just change their names from "Beautiful Romania" to "Calin Georgescu for president"
markbabinmark 2y ago
He forgot to mention the reverse bait effect where loads of people engage due to their need to let us know that this is obviously ai. But in reallity these comments play a role in boosting the content
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Yeah this is a bit part of youtube too. Some accounts are masterclasses in putting out just slightly frustrating quirks solely designed to drive a subset of people to the comments and boost engagement. The whole performance is a carefully rehearsed act from some of these content creators.
onionisafruit 2y ago
The villagers had a point about the scythe. Using it led to his house burning down.
addicted 2y ago
Better this AI generated crap than the cute animal stories and videos where the animals are abused and hurt and then the abused pretends to heal them to gain sympathy views and money.

270 points by spzb 2y ago

It's kind of stupidity farming isn't it. Is there anything wrong with that? The stupid people get to do some engaging, which is after all what their brain evolved to enjoy, everyone's a winner? Maybe?

swayvil 2y ago

The technology of mind-control is advancing at a furious pace. These AI generated images and videos are just the latest evolution. Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? What will its final form look like? What do the scifi prophets say? (This vast irresistible mind-control machinery serves the billionaires of course) Poverty is probably your best shield. Because then you can't afford a phone. Someday the universal suicide order will drop and the only people left will be monks and beggars.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
> Poverty is probably your best shield. I am betting on relationships with people, and avoiding public Internet, except for shitposting on here. This can be modelled as the back half of a whalefall. The Internet used to be a magic place where you could just stumble into community, useful information, etc. Now it's been over-exploited and game is becoming scarce. The information is saturated with crap and mass media was never a substitute for friendships. Even though it's the hardest thing I've ever done, I'll have to make real friends.
disqard 2y ago
I upvoted you. What you wrote sounds a bit "out there", but, like Margaret Atwood's work, it's actually not too far away. > Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? I'm reminded of Hiro Protagonist (living in a storage unit), or Ready Player One protagonist (living in some impoverished mobile home stack) -- these are the "vulnerable". As for "immune", it's the people who "control the supply": https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out-about-this-insane-zuckerberg-vr-photo/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out... P.S. Like all real-world examples, we have an exception -- Felon Husk, who gets high on his own supply, making him simultaneously victim and perpetrator.

hyperhello 2y ago

Those worthless posts on Facebook are all bot engagement farms. You can recognize them for having nothing to do with anything, and the commenters are all bots as well. You can click on their profile because it has to be public. If you look at their friends, they won't be mostly from someplace like real friends would, they'll be from all over. Each one of them will have a cover photo that is a low quality picture of...some people, doing nothing. Their posts will all be bot engagement, with a few nothing pictures (such as a sunset with the caption "Nice sunset.") It's all, 100%, crap.

hackit2 2y ago
You've basically summed up most social media users habits and profiles.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
And they make money. Zuck makes money because he can claim users. Facebook ad metrics (what they report as clicks) were always inflated to begin with and now its just ai slop.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

> The article you've just read is one such example. There is no way to verify that. Until a method exists to discern real from AI-generated content, we should probably assume it's generated (for our safety). Sadly, that's the world we live in now. It was kind of like that before, but it's even more so now.

swayvil 2y ago
I don't think it matters whether it was created by an AI or an advertising agency or a dude in his basement. What matters is how powerful it is. The powerful stuff will play your little mind like a piano. One glance and you're lost.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  I agree. It doesn't matter. Even if a human wrote it, how does that change anything? It certainly doesn't make it more true or a more honest reflection of somebody's feelings. These people who keep worrying about AI generated content don't seem to realize the rubbish that humans create is not better.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  Hard agree. Kony2012 was human made (or at least human started) and then it went on and spread like wildfire by using useful idiots along the way...
andrewinardeer 2y ago
Deepfake Detector by Mozilla can assist https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-detector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-det...
- gs17 2y ago
  How well does that actually work in practice? I was using the demo on Fakespot's site and verbatim output from ChatGPT seems to get detected pretty well, but random HN comments got a lot of (presumably) false positives. "AI detectors" are kind of a crapshoot in my opinion, but I'm curious.

totetsu 2y ago

Wow amazing article

kadir1234 2y ago

hard to put a finger on it, but i do think you should give humanity a little credit... it's actually somewhat easy to spot the "AI" when it does appear in these situations? or maybe i'm just deluded.

iamthemonster 2y ago
I can only imagine that the "AI" look must be somehow intentional. I recently discovered how to make very realistic images - you simply ask for your image, then you use the follow-up prompt "make it more realistic" and, most shockingly, it actually works. I never thought of doing it before because it's so stupid.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  It's probably like how scam emails often have obvious misspellings in order to intentionally filter out anyone incredulous enough to notice.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Critical thinking needs to be taught in schools. Either that or the society of the future is going to be hugely screwed. If we teach kids critical thinking, they will not only be able to recognise scam, they will also stop being religious, which is another good thing. I wonder why we still don't have critical thinking in schools.

swayvil 2y ago
Critical thinking won't save you. Emotion trumps rationality. This stuff plays on emotions.
- danparsonson 2y ago
  ...which critical thinking skills help you to notice, so that you are less likely to fall prey to it.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    The point, perhaps, is that you can't use reason to convince someone to be more reasonable. Humans are fundamentally emotional animals, and if you want to get them to start valuing reason, you have to use emotional arguments to do so, by definition.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
Critical thinking doesn't make people less religious nor should less religious people be a goal in society. I struggle to explain, but I feel like our data-obssessed society has completely thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to these things. No one labels themselves with a religion or political party because there is a flaw in each one and anything with a flaw can't be correct, scientifically, so we just don't believe in any grand purpose to our lives, don't believe in any world leaders, don't believe in any shared tenets, and basically are all lonely and weak (because we abandon every group with a flaw). The result of critical thinking shouldn't be a worse off society...
- 2y ago

jp42 2y ago

In recent India's general election. A deepfake video of a leading politician costed a massive vote shift and they almost lost an election. The damage was done by the time they have clarified it is fake.

lurk2 2y ago
I've heard the social media landscape is a lot different in India because so much of it passes through the comparatively-opaque WhatsApp rumor mill.
- kennyloginz 2y ago
  Compared to?
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    Most of the West? WhatsApp groups in South Asia seem to work like Telegram groups in Russia, and I don’t know that I’m aware of a European or American equivalent
    - seattle_spring 2y ago
      Do you just mean because the lies shared on WhatsApp are hidden within groups, whereas the lies on X and FB are more public?
      - lurk2 2y ago
        That was what I was getting at. I've read of a few (literal) witch hunting stories from India and Africa, and they all seem to start on WhatsApp groups. A similar phenomenon occurs in South America, as well, though in that case the killings tend to resemble lynch mobs hunting down suspected killers. I've seen similar things happen in Western countries (e.g. when Reddit identified the wrong guy as the Boston Marathon bomber, local Facebook groups where seniors jump at their own shadow, etc), but I've only ever heard of it resulting in an actual death in non-western countries, and the common vector seems to be WhatsApp. My working theory is that unmoderated peer-to-peer platforms like this are naturally conducive to witch-hunting (e.g. 4chan used to have a real problem with it), and that perhaps the groups being comparatively private might prevent law enforcement from becoming aware of the issue before it gets out of control. But the other factor here is that these are all areas of the world where the rule of law is not particularly effective when compared to western countries, so WhatsApp might just be the means by which an old problem is manifesting, rather than being the cause of the problem itself.

unraveller 2y ago

Letting algorithms bring you slop of any kind is your own fault. wontfix.

beeflet 2y ago
My poor grandmother spent her entire weekend baking this AI slop and no one went to her birthday
gaudystead 2y ago
I fear your opinion is one that most casual content consumers don't even realize is happening. They just want to consume content... However, they also share the road with you, help decide what content/messaging gets spread, and vote with their dollar (and political vote), just like you. While I agree with your opinion, although it may be their fault, it easily can spread to become everyone's problem.
zeofig 2y ago
but couldfix? noyoucouldntlol

bestouff 2y ago

> They did also all seem to be active churchgoers but that must be some kind of coincidence... Oh i love this one !

k-i-r-t-h-i 2y ago

Easy to hate on this, but the existence of these kinds of things is so fascinating. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of people are out there generating AI click bait because people or system somewhere allows / encourages / pays for this market to exist

BoredPositron 2y ago
That’s not what’s happening here. The get-rich-quick grifters started selling AI slop manuals. It’s like saying brands that spend a lot on ads are successful. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
petesergeant 2y ago
And the feedback loop means we’re doing fuzzing on the human brain! If we can just take the human out of the loop and let the AI post and use a genetic algorithm to tweak its content, we’ll all be getting rooted in no time.
theamk 2y ago
They are fascinating in the same sense road accidents or fatal diseases are - some people might like to watch them, but overall there is nothing good about this.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>Bizarre as it may seem, some people actually send real money to these "creators" It's also just plain ol' ad revenue as well. Not such thing as bad engagement. >And then there are opportunities to sell "guest posts" to other spam merchants who want to get their content in front of gullible eyeballs. Yeah, that too. get ad revenue, then become the ad yourself. and... the article ends. Well that was a lot more fluff than I anticipated. Yes, not much will change until the people themsevles start rejecting this content en masse. But there will be people falling for it. There are still people falling for old school email spam, so it's sadly not shocking AI works for the non-discerning viewer.

simonw 2y ago

404media have by far the best coverage of the epidemic of AI generated spam images on Facebook: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ It is mainly driven by get rich quick YouTube influencers, many from India and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly it is not a great way to actually make money.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chii 2y ago
a very small amount of US dollars paid out to these people could be considered a "significant" amount of income when converted to those lower cost of living places.
lurk2 2y ago
Some are better than others. About three months ago I started seeing channels that were clearly stealing content from other channels and splicing it over a text-to-speech narration. I knew they were doing this because I had seen the original videos they were stealing from. But then I've also seen a far larger number of channels which use text-to-speech to make audiobooks from public domain works. I recently listened to a couple of Plato's works on a channel like this. The text-to-speech did a fairly convincing reading, with Socrates and his companions each having their own distinct voices. These videos had tens of thousands of views, which might not be great, but if you can put out a few hundred videos like that in less than a year it might be worth it to the right person. I also suspect most of the film summary channels have been using AI in similar ways since before it was even popular. Those videos get into the millions of views and in my opinion they are not bad as far as low-effort content goes.
silisili 2y ago
I can't read the whole article, but one important point is that Facebook subsidizes users from these areas. It's cheaper to get 'Facebook data' than regular data. As a result, life revolves around Facebook. All day, every day. It's how you shop, you contact each other, you 'google things', it's everything. And being rather high unemployment areas, people tend to spend all day there. So given that you've essentially captured an entire demographic with little to no money that spend all their time on your platform, it's no surprise that's where the scams come from, whether it's outright or through such slop. Who can blame them? And FB doesn't care, they just report 10 million user growth, without telling the actual truth that they're in a roundabout way, paying those users.

rendaw 2y ago

What social media has microtransaction stars?

raziel2p 2y ago
Facebook, apparently: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/347766223948126 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/347766223948126
kennyloginz 2y ago
Twitter?
areyourllySorry 2y ago
telegram also has stars, and reddit wanted to let you cash out gold, not sure what happened with that. let's also not forget tiktok's gifts. i believe instagram also has some kind of gifts but i can't find them
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
Twitch and twitch bits. YouTube has something similar.

Nursie 2y ago

When it comes to images like those in the article, “Is this real?” is not really part of my reaction. Neither is “poor thing” or “wow that’s impressive” or whatever else. My reaction is “why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?”. I don’t care if it’s real, the only reason I visited the website is to check if the local market’s on this week, and maybe see if anyone I know has posted anything (increasingly unlikely). I think in the modern age it's healthy to have a much wider cynicism - what is this crap, I didn't ask for it, f### off. I don’t really get why Facebook tries so hard to get me to look at this rubbish. The more of this shit-shovelling there is, the less often I go and the fewer friend posts there are. It’s becoming a dead platform.

b3lvedere 2y ago
“why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?” Because you allow it to.
- Nursie 2y ago
  That's not really a useful answer. I'm looking for the motive, which (when it's something you're not directly looking for) is usually money. I fully understand that "stop using the service" is an option.
  - b3lvedere 2y ago
    Fair enough. Let me rephrase it: Because "they" don't care on what kind of method they can use to extracting money from everything that makes you you. The algorithms have a simple task: Try and shove as much possible methods in your systems to get you to spend money.
    - Nursie 2y ago
      Right, and given this is usually the answer to "why is this being shoved in my face", my initial point stands - it doesn't matter if it's AI slop or not. The article makes the point that a lot of people are easily fooled into interacting with fake AI stuff. My wider point is that regardless of how 'real' the images are, someone's trying to get you to look at bullshit for profit reasons, either the platform's or their own, therefore it's all best ignored.

dexwiz 2y ago

Could this be some sort of meta training activity? Meta allows this kind of content and uses engagement as a measure of value for future training material.

gamedever 2y ago

I adopted this panda. Could really use some help but he brings me joy https://civitai.com/posts/12371259 https://civitai.com/posts/12371259

anshumankmr 2y ago

Damn two of those would have fooled me too if I wasn't looking too carefully.. the one like the one with the old lady and her cake and the kittens one.

AndrewOMartin 2y ago
The one where the cake is decorated with the phrase "Happy Birthday Bithiday"? Maybe that's her name. Seriously though, I completely understand. AI slop tends to have a "when you see it, you can't unsee it" issue, but on first glance they're pretty compelling. Only when writing this did I notice how uncanny the 42 year old woman's thumbs were.
- anshumankmr 2y ago
  Yeah the two Birthday's gave it away. If it had some name, I would have believed it . Even the ones with the statue thing, the rose one looks realistic whereas the other two with the wooden lady is too perfect for a wooden statue (though I am no carpenter ) and the one with the sheep in the background, they just seem a little too small Idk why.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    It doesn't say "birthday" twice. It says "Happy Birthday Bithiday". The second word is gibberish.
- fullshark 2y ago
  And no one is carefully vetting their content feeds, if anything their brains are completely shut off as they scroll.

noduerme 2y ago

There's a saddening effect that this kind of garbage foists onto society, and onto individual humans, that costs drastically more than the money the content itself scrapes up. On a societal level, you have the net effect of millions of individuals being duped into throwing their empathy at something absurdly false. That is a recipe for wild and random backlashes as people become convinced that the world is something it isn't. On an individual level, liking some fake bullshit, then realizing it's fake, causes people to feel humiliated. Ultimately, being humiliated by giving away your empathy to the wrong subject causes people to become angry and reject their natural empathy towards legitimate other people, having been fooled so many times already. Maybe a better way of saying this is: Bad currency drives out good. And if the currency is empathy and sympathy itself, then we are racing toward a society that will no longer be able to cast itself into anyone else's shoes.

disqard 2y ago
> Bad currency drives out good That's the second time I've read this phrase on HN this week (earlier, it was in reference to the ad-supported Internet). The race-to-the-bottom of zeroing out people's empathy to grab fractions of a penny (at scale) also reminds me of the Malthusian trap (aka "rats on the island") in slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch". Whatever little nooks exist where some micro-pennies can still be found, will be farmed (at scale).
- noduerme 2y ago
  Empathy farming is what people with a religious or moral framework would call wicked. The reason the writer here observed that most of the suckers writing sympathy notes appear to be religious is not that religious people are stupid, it's that religious people are the last to completely abandon the notion that other people are real and need their support. They are the last to realize when a false messiah or a fake 105 year old woman baking fake cakes needs their help. It hijacks their moral framework, because they have invested a lifetime in believing certain tropes and terms and what (I as an atheist) would call sappy horseshit, which nonetheless imbues meaning into all aspects of their daily life. They don't suspect that the attack on their dignity will come disguised as an appeal to their faith.

firefoxd 2y ago

I was sent a YouTube video that was blatantly fake. Five seconds in I closed it and moved on. But I got curious. I went back to the video and checked the channel. It has 7.4 million subscribers. It uploads 4 or 5 times a day. At least two 3 hours videos, and a couple short ones. All videos are generated with a voice over. All those that I have checked have comments with real people in them. This battle is already lost.

disqard 2y ago
Morbid curiosity: would you be willing to share a link to that channel? FWIW, I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat-earthers to try and understand what the appeal is (spoiler: it's often some variant of "if the Earth were a ball hurtling through space, that would be too terrifying")... maybe I should just stay away from this one :D
- firefoxd 2y ago
  I didn't really want to link them. But here @sympa_fr on youtube. Note it's in french.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  I was trolling as flat earther a little bit in my youth when the internet was more innocent. I thought it was mostly trolls and some strange people?

LVB 2y ago

A form that is particularly annoying to me is where official-sounding accounts are posting about plausible scientific advances or discoveries. Just yesterday, I saw some "James Webb Space Telescope" account gushing about new photos that dropped. They were beautiful, though obviously a little too nice, and of course NASA/JPL had released no such photos. I can't put my finger on why this bugs me--and my wife thinks I'm being a pedantic when I comment that they're fake ("it's a nice picture, they like it, let them be")--but I think it has to do with the targeting of folks that absolutely would like that photo to be real.

never_inline 2y ago
I concur, I have seen videos of "Honda Unicorn 160 2025" motorcycle models which looked too much like high-end cruiser motorcycles then realized it was AI generated.
ramon156 2y ago
Disinformation is a very real thing to get angry about. At the same time it's a blessing, because it gives away if people fact check the stuff they see
- onionisafruit 2y ago
  On the other hand, without dis/misinformation, it wouldn’t be so important to know whether people fact check the stuff they see.
rightbyte 2y ago
It bugs you becouse it is a lie and fools people I guess? It is like these "life hack" cooking recipes that don't work. They are wasting kids enthusiasm in cooking and trust in people.
- nasmorn 2y ago
  Or any recipe in existence that will pretend you can caramelize onions in 10 minutes so they don’t have to admit their recipe is actually taking as long as anyone who knows how to cook knows it will. All prep time will also assume you have the worlds best knife skills so cutting 300g of carrots julienne will be like 2min tops

kennyloginz 2y ago

Maybe this an effect from ai, but this article reads like straight up ai

furyofantares 2y ago
There is plenty of human in the article. I suspect your ai-detector senses are heightened due to the content, and the writing style is mostly straightforward with a few needless flowery words, which makes it ripe for false detection. But when I re-read it with "did AI write this?" in mind, there's plenty of stuff in there that I would find it rather difficult to get an LLM to write if I tried.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

What’s the end game here for Facebook? Surely people will just stop going to these platforms or is the thinking Ai + the algorithm will be even more effective… shutter at the thought

petesergeant 2y ago
> What’s the end game here for Facebook? FB is functionally dead for many people, unlikely to meaningfully grow. So they’re trying to reduce costs and make sure new platforms and ones that still have some growth potential get the effort instead. I’d rather work on the Threads or Instagram Reels teams than the FB one. And who knows, maybe the VR revolution Zuck wants really will happen.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  VR revolution lacks the physics for it to ever happen. People need both time to plug into the vr and also money to buy the vr device and subscription. Two things that every business in the world wants from people which are in short supply these days due to how many hands want a finger in the finite pie of the consumers available time and money. Not to mention how the pie is generally shrinking due to increases to cost of living and wage depression. It is kind of interesting how the incentive to profit leads to an outcome of lessened potential for profit. Someone who lives paycheck to paycheck is economically useless in the eyes of the capitalist: they have no money to part with essentially as whatever they are paid flows right out of their hands. What happens to capitalism when the numbers of paycheck to paycheck people continue to rise? A lot of the economic success of this country since WWII relative to other countries has depended on americans having more available disposable income to spend on consumer products than any other population in the world. We see that changing now. Strange times ahead.
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    > People need both time to plug into the vr and also money to buy the vr device and subscription. I have with my own eyes seen a motorbike-taxi driver on a Bangkok street using a cheap VR device. I think you over-estimate how much these things have to cost, and under-estimate how willing people are to pay for gadgets: 34% of Nigerians and 34% of Indonesians own tablets[0]. These are obviously not _identical_ items, but feels close enough to be a counter-point to me. 0: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1452567/share-of-tablet-owners-in-selected-countries-worldwide https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1452567/share-of-tablet-o...

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

Even before AI images became viable, you had folks in low cost countries doing the same thing with local talent. AI might make it easier but humans in those countries can give you art for a small enough amount that scale makes up the expense enough to profit. This is even present in fandom communities where young artists from low cost countries charge a lot less than their high cost country counterparts, leading to popularity and exposure on top of just revenue. The arts have so few barriers to competition that it's quite hard to compete unless your art is just that novel. Most artists that make a living do it by outputting boring things like commercial voiceovers, corporate illustrations, or headshot photography.

entropyneur 2y ago

You don't need AI to attach bullshit titles to photos. The problem is with Facebook algorithm that recommends content based on"engagement" - nothing good can come out of this by design. AI just makes bullshit makers more productive like the rest of us.

rightbyte 2y ago
>The problem is with Facebook algorithm that recommends content based on"engagement" Ye it is pure toxic and made me stop using Facebook. At some point in time a was fed "people falling and hurting them self a bit" videos. And I hovered over them and tried to find the blacklist button. So Facebook started to feed me more of those! And a hate those kind of videos.

PostOnce 2y ago

To enrage or endear at all costs, the engagement justifies the means. It is ironic that an article railing against people doing all they can for engagement ends with... a call to engage. Sign up for my newsletter.

DeathArrow 2y ago

I saw this kind of posts since months ago and I wondered what is the point of "sadcore". At first I thought they want to raise the engagement of some accounts and gather a following. But looking at the accounts, they doesn't seem to sell or promote anything. Are they just sad trolls with a mission to amplify the amount of sadness in the world?

waysa 2y ago
Attention is worth money. I assume they'll sell the accounts to scammers or political campaigns at some point.

sharpshadow 2y ago

Still waiting for the top notch open source video AI. Want to see those kittens squeezed in the hydraulic press. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long as the 4K to 8k transition.

rightbyte 2y ago
For real or do you mean you don't want the model to tell you what you can generate?

mns 2y ago

In Romania it's full of these pages that I never understood, but apparently they are used for 2 things: - filter people that can be scammed, you can see that people commenting on these posts and congratulating whatever AI slop you have in the picture are targeted by bots that try to tell them they won something or getting them to buy various useless stuff online - gather real likes and people in groups and for pages that later turn up to promote certain political candidates (see the recent annulled Romanian elections) or just change their names from "Beautiful Romania" to "Calin Georgescu for president"

markbabinmark 2y ago

He forgot to mention the reverse bait effect where loads of people engage due to their need to let us know that this is obviously ai. But in reallity these comments play a role in boosting the content

kjkjadksj 2y ago
Yeah this is a bit part of youtube too. Some accounts are masterclasses in putting out just slightly frustrating quirks solely designed to drive a subset of people to the comments and boost engagement. The whole performance is a carefully rehearsed act from some of these content creators.

onionisafruit 2y ago

The villagers had a point about the scythe. Using it led to his house burning down.

addicted 2y ago

Better this AI generated crap than the cute animal stories and videos where the animals are abused and hurt and then the abused pretends to heal them to gain sympathy views and money.