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Interesting that it didn't seem to include "unalive". Which as a phenomenon is so very telling that no one actually cares what people are really saying. Everyo
by grues-dinner 1y ago
Interesting that it didn't seem to include "unalive".
Which as a phenomenon is so very telling that no one actually cares what people are really saying. Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means. It's all performative.
- jdkoeck 1y agoWhich is good, right? I don’t think we want actual censorship.
- qingcharles 1y agoIt's totally performative. There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create. At what point do the new words become the actual words? Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL?
- girvo 1y agoMy Gen Z coworkers use it IRL, for what that’s worth!
- freeone3000 1y agoIt depends on if you think that something is less real because it’s transmitted digitally.
- qingcharles 1y agoNo, I'm only thinking that we're not permitted in a lot of digital spaces to use the banned words (e.g. suicide), but IRL doesn't generally have those limits. Is there a point where we use the censored word so much that it spills over into the real world?
- fouronnes3 1y agoThis question is sort of the same as asking why the universal translator wasn't able to translate the metaphor language of the Star Trek episode Darmok. Surely if the metaphor has become the first order meaning then there's no litteral meaning anymore.
- qingcharles 1y agoI guess, so far, the people inventing the words have left the meaning clear with things like "un-alive" which is readable even to someone coming across it for the first time. Your point stands when we start replacing the banned words with things like "suicide" for "donkeyrhubarb" and then the walls really will fall.
- userbinator 1y agoThis form of obfuscation has actually already occurred over a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_rhyming_slang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_rhyming_slang
- t-3 1y agoRhyming slang rhymes tho. The recipient can understand what's meant by de-obfuscating in-context. Random strings substituted for $proscribed_word don't work in the same way.
- waterproof 1y agoIn Cockney rhyming slang, the rhyming word (which would be easy to reverse engineer) is omitted. So if "stairs" is rhyme-paired with "apples and pears" and then people just use the word "apples" in place of "stairs". "Pears" is omitted in common use so you can't just reverse the rhyme. The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words but that's not how it would be used IRL.
- zimpenfish 1y agoSee also Polari[0] and the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 (CDT links broken, use [2]) [2] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon_old_introduction https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon_...
- cheschire 1y agoIf only we had a way to mass process the words people write to each other, derive context from those words, and then identify new slang designed to bypass filters…
- apricot 1y ago> Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL As a parent of a teenager, I see them use "unalive" non-ironically as a synonym for "suicide" in all contexts, including IRL.
- kulahan 1y agoWell that’s sad. They can’t even face the word?
- kevinventullo 1y agoIt’s not about whether they can face it. The younger generations are more in tune with mental health and topics like suicide than any previous generation. The etymology of the euphemism was about avoiding online censorship, while its “IRL” usage was merely absorbed through familiarity from the online usage.
- mcny 1y agoBut unalive self is suicide and unalive is just death, right? For example, You can unalive other people against their will...
- rhdunn 1y agoI've seen 'unalived' used as a synonym for 'died' or 'killed' by YouTube minecrafters (e.g. CaptainSparkles) to avoid YouTube's demonitization/censorship. For example, using "I was unalived by a skeleton." instead of "I was killed by a skeleton."
- soulofmischief 1y agoLiteral Newspeak in action and we're doing nothing about it.
- fennecbutt 1y ago'An hero' came before it but that was as a meme. Unalive is mostly to avoid censorship same as ahh. But once they enter common usage it's not really about censorship anymore.
- Terr_ 1y ago> There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create. I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to act like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere) "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly bans any discussion of that topic.
- cyanydeez 1y agoyou mean become 4chan?
- Waterluvian 1y agoHey I was pro-skub waaaay before all the anti-skub people switched sides.
- thehappypm 1y agoSkub is a real slur tho so that one doesn’t work
- osn9363739 1y agoIsn't that a reference to a 10 or 20 year old web comic?
- heavyset_go 1y agoThe latter, we're old.
- sitharus 1y agoNo it isn’t, it’s a reference to a Perry Bible Fellowship comic https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/ (This one is sfw, not all of the comics are) Even urban dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for skub as a slur.
- 1y ago
- BurningFrog 1y agoA specialized AI could do it as well as any human. The future will be AIs all the way down...
- derefr 1y ago> At what point do the new words become the actual words? Presumably, for this use-case, that would come at exactly the point where using “unalive” as a keyword in an image-generation prompt generates an image that Apple wouldn’t appreciate.
- montagg 1y agoThey become the “real words” later. This is the way all trust & safety works. It’s an evolution over time. Adding some friction does improve things, but some people will always try to get around the filters. Doesn’t mean it’s simply performative or one shouldn’t try.
- immibis 1y agoWhy do you think that AI pretending things like suicide don't happen (and that nothing is happening in Palestine) is an improvement?
- Rebelgecko 1y agoThis is somewhat related to the concept of the "euphemism treadmill": the matter-of-fact term of today becomes the pejorative of tomorrow so a new term is invented to avoid the negative connotation of the original term. Then eventually the new term becomes a pejorative and the cycle continues.
- dkdbejwi383 1y agoIt has been suggested - although I am unsure if there is strong evidence - that the word "bear" is a euphemism along these lines, meaning "brown one" for the since-forgotten original name for the animal, as it was allegedly believed to be either too frightful to say aloud, or would summon a bear.
- ben_w 1y agoWhile it's conceivable (consider phrases such as "speak of the devil and he shall appear" and similar phrases in other languages), I would also say the etymology of names for things are often at the same level as "brown one": • Horse, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱers-, “to run” • Planet, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs), “wanderer” • Lots of Latin-derived words, companion (bread together), conspire (breathe together), transgression (step across), etc. • Hamburger the food named after the city of Hamburg, where "burg" means "castle", because it had a castle • My forename means "son of the right/south" or "son of days", my family name means "wheat field/clearing" (in a different language); where "wheat" itself comes from Proto-Germanic, from *hwītaz (“white”) and the "ley" part from Proto-Indo-European *lówkos (“clearing”), derived from *lewk- (“bright”), and *lewk- also gives all these derived terms even just in English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_the_Proto-Indo-European_root_*lewk- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive...
- 0points 1y agoIt's not suggested, the historic use of noa words is a fact. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name
- nicoburns 1y ago> Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL? In my experience yes. This is already commonplace. Mostly, but not exclusively, amongst the younger generation.
- PunchyHamster 1y agoI think it stemmed from content creators using it to avoid platform filters (even if video is not removed it gets deprioritized, at least on YT) and kids repeat it
- joquarky 1y agoI feel like we can call our society mature when we no longer need safety alignment in AI.
- scarface_74 1y agoYou never tried some of the earlier pre-aligned chatbots. Some of the early ones would go off on racist, homophobic rants from the most innocent conversations without any explicit prompting. If you train on all the data on the internet, you have to have some type of alignment.
- decremental 1y agoYou say that as if it stands as truth on its own. We actually don't need to filter out how people actually talk and think. Otherwise you just end up with yet another enforcer against wrong-think. I wonder if you even think that deeply about it or if you're just wired at this point to conform.
- tehjoker 1y ago[flagged]
- scarface_74 1y agoReally? You would want every conversation no matter what you were talking about to immediately devolve to something you would see on 4chan?
- bravesoul2 1y agoThere is one way: machine learning!
- blitzar 1y agoAlways has been, nothing is new. You can't say fuck on tv, but you can say fudge as a 1 for 1 replacement. You cant show people having sex, but you can show them walking into a bedroom and then cut to 30 seconds later and they are having a cigarette in bed. Now after the influence of TV and Movies ... is Vaping after sex a thing?
- stripline 1y agoMy kids watch streamers on YouTube and the common replacement is “frick”. It’s said so often that they started using it saying things like “what the frick!?” so I had to explain to them that’s essentially the same as using the real word.
- qingcharles 1y agoI wonder why they didn't just use the "frack" from BSG?
- blitzar 1y agoTakes a person of culture to watch BSG
- fer 1y ago> There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create. Not even to match the current language. How would you censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0]. [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebron_james_slang_for_jerking_off/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebro...
- xenator 1y agoLucky developers who wrote these rules live in totality different world at far distance from people
- jama211 1y agoReducing the language used or making it harder does have measurable effects, it’s a logical fallacy in general that unless you can prevent something perfectly that thing will occur with the same frequency. See many examples such as “padlocks are useless because a determined smart attacker can defeat them easily so don’t bother with them” - which conveniently forgets that many crimes are committed by non-determined, dumb and opportunistic attackers who are often deterred by simple locks. Yes, people will use other words. No, this does not make this purely performative. It has measurable effects on behaviour and how these models will be used and spoken to, which affects outcomes.
- hulium 1y agoSeems more like it should stop the AI from e.g. summarizing news and emails about death, not for a chat filter.
- scarface_74 1y agoFor awhile, I couldn’t get ChatGPT to give me summaries of Breaking Bad and Better Cañl Saul episodes without tripping safety filters.
- Zak 1y agoI'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger backlash against platforms that apply censorship of that sort.
- martin-t 1y agoNo-one cares yet. There's a very scary potential future in which mega-corporations start actually censoring topics they don't like. For all I know the Chinese government is already doing it, there's no reason the British or US one won't follow suit and mandate such censorship. To protect children / defend against terrorists / fight drugs / stop the spread of misinformation, of course.
- lazide 1y agoThey already clearly do on a number of topics?
- martin-t 1y agoCan you give examples? The closest I've seen is autodetection of certain topics related to death and suicide and subsequently promoting some kind of "help" hotline. A friend also said google allows an interview with a pedophile on youtube but penalizes it in search results so much that it's (almost?) impossible to find even when using the exact name. But of course, if a topic is shadowbanned, it's hard to find out about it in the first place - by design.
- lazide 1y agoGuns (specific elements). Drugs (manufacture). Sexual topics. Cursing (too much). Large swathes of political topics. Crypto. It’s flip-flopped on specifics numerous times over the years, but these policies are easy to find. From demonitization, channel bans (direct and shadow), and creator bans. We can of course argue until we’re blue in the face about correctness or not (most are not unreasonable by some societal definition!) but they’re definitely censorship.
- martin-t 1y agoYeah, those topics are definitely censored on big platforms but I have the impression that it relies of manual reporting. At least reddit feels like that because what you can say depends on the subreddit - not just the mods but what kinds of people visit it and what they report. No idea about youtube, videos are definitely censored using some automated means but it's still possible to get around it. E.g. some gun youtubers avoided saying full-auto by saying more-semi-auto. So i don't think they use very sophisticated models or they don't are yet. This kind of thing is obvious to a human and even LLMs generate responses which say it's a tongue-in-cheek to avoid censorship. Comments are also generally less censored. After that health insurance CEO got punished for mass murder and repeated bodily harm with an extra-legal death penalty, many people were openly supporting it. I can say it here too and nobody will care. Even LLMs (both US and Chinese, except Claude because Claude is trained by eggshell-walking suckers) readily generate estimates of how many people he caused to die or suffer. The internet would look very different if companies started using state of the art models to detect undesirable-to-them speech. But also people would fight back more so it might just be a case of boiling the frog slowly.
- elliotto 1y agoUnalive and other self censors were adopted by young people because the tiktok algorithm would reprioritize videos that included specific words. Then it made its way into the culture. It has nothing to do with being performative
- SOTGO 1y agoI think what they meant is that the platforms are being performative by attempting to crack down on those specific words. If saying "killed" is not allowed but "unalived" is permitted and the users all agree that they mean the same thing, then the ban on the word "killed" doesn't accomplish anything.
- mcny 1y agoWhat does using the grape emoji when talking about sexual assault accomplish? I see videos, compassionate, kind people who make videos speaking to victims in a completely serious tone use this emoji. People talk about tiktok algorithm on tiktok. I don't even know...
- grues-dinner 1y agoI suppose it accomplishes being able to talk about sexual assault without having the video removed or demonetised by a regex that (fortunately?) doesn't get updated.
- cyanydeez 1y agoyo, these are businesses. It's not performative, its CYA. They care because of legal reasons, not moral or ethical.
- durkie 1y agoSeriously. I feel like “performative” gets applied to anything imperfect. They’ll never stop 100% of murders, so these laws against it are just performative…
- grues-dinner 1y agoIt seems more like banning specifically stabbing, shooting, strangulation and blunt impact rather then murder in general, and then just allowing killing by pushing out of windows because people figured out that it's not covered by existing laws. But no one important seems to be kicking up a fuss right now, so well allow it, as the lack of fuss is the key thing thing here. Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that look bad even to the non-terminally online.
- cyanydeez 1y agoThe point is: "perfomative" refers to aping Ethical and Moral behaviors. That is _not_ why Apple would do this. They would do this because Legally, they could be culpable if an LLM told a 14 year old to do _anything_ thats illegal. That's all. I'm constantly amazed how this basic CYA legal world escapes into griping about social culture war nonsense.
- grues-dinner 1y agoSo then, should they not be on the watch for the 14-year-old being told that "unaliving" themselves or others is a fantastic idea? Looks like they only care about doing basically the minimum required to tick the (presumably partly imagined, since case law is still nascent) "not our fault, we tried" legal box. They are putting on a show, a performance, if you will, as legal cover and to maintain the artifice of their shiny corporate property rather than any genuine desire to stop the concept of death harming their customers somehow (which to be clear, I think mostly ends up somewhere between silly, overreaching, futile and vain when taken to the extremes). > performative (adjective, sense 2): not sincere but intended to impress someone, prove that something is true, etc. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/performative https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/performa...) I'm not sure why you think that anything to with some "culture war" thing? It's legal/moral theatre akin to taking belts off people at airports. If something does eventually get through they can point at the CCTV of millions of people dicking about with leather goods and say "can't touch us for that, we did the checks". Apple couldn't give a toss if an occasional teenager offs themselves now and then, as long as it doesn't come back on them.
- heavyset_go 1y agoGood, let them. Don't give them a reason to crack down on speech.
- mschuster91 1y ago> Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means. Well, that's what happens when you let an enemy nation control one of the most biggest social networks there is. They just go try and see how far they can go. On the other hand, Americans and their fear of four letter words or, gasp, exposed nipples are just as braindead.
- Meekro 1y agoIt's interesting how, in just 10-20 years, we've gone from criticizing The Great Firewall of China to basically admitting that they had the right idea (to limit the ability of the foreign internet to influence Chinese culture) and trying to do the same thing.
- x3n0ph3n3 1y agoI look at from a framing of cultural reciprocity. If we could influence them and behave freely in their markets, they can do the same in ours.
- mschuster91 1y agoexactly. When dealing with autocracies and strongmen, you need to project an image of strength, not subservience. I don't have anything against China per se, IMHO it just was completely foolish to not insist on full reciprocity from the start.
- grues-dinner 1y agoNot just culture, but also the tech sector in general. All that domestic tech would have been strangled in the cradle if the western hyperscalers had any say leaving them in an awkward spot if the conviviality dial got turned down. As many Europeans are now finding out: what does Europe have instead of Office 365, say? LibreOffice? It's no WPS Office.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoIt's also a shining example of American puritanism. Asian models or those in Europe are far less censored.
- notarobot123 1y agoI'm sure this has more to do with legal liability than morals.
- plasticchris 1y agoWhich is a reflection of morality, of sorts.
- mystified5016 1y agoMorality and law are completely disjoint. On a Venn diagram, it's two circles separated by about a lightyear or so.
- Asraelite 1y agoWhat? They couldn't be more closely connected. In a democracy, laws are to a large extent a reflection of the wishes of the voters, and voters want what they believe is moral. It's true there's no casual relation in the other direction, if that's what you mean - law does not define morality.
- jowea 1y agoAt first I thought of advertisers, but that is not relevant here, right? But maybe it's not just legal liability but bad press too.
- reaperducer 1y ago[flagged]
- franzkappa 1y ago
- _blk 1y agoNo leetspeak filters either.