[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Prederick wrote:

Y'know those women who spend a kersplillion dollars to look like a real-life barbie doll? This is the dude version of that.

It really isn't. Those women succeed. This guy ain't gonna live forever.

I do appreciate him putting his own body through this, rather than anyone else's. For science!

I am interested for when this will, inevitably, lead to a lawsuit:

AI-Generated Voice Firm Clamps Down After 4chan Makes Celebrity Voices for Abuse

It was only a matter of time before the wave of artificial intelligence-generated voice startups became a play thing of internet trolls. On Monday, ElevenLabs, founded by ex-Google and Palantir staffers, said it had found an “increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases” during its recently launched beta. ElevenLabs didn’t point to any particular instances of abuse, but Motherboard found 4chan members appear to have used the product to generate voices that sound like Joe Rogan, Ben Sharpio, and Emma Watson to spew racist and other sorts of material. ElevenLabs said it is exploring more safeguards around its technology.

The clips uploaded to 4chan on Sunday are focused on celebrities. But given the high quality of the generated voices, and the apparent ease at which people created them, they highlight the looming risk of deepfake audio clips. In much the same way deepfake video started as a method for people to create non-consensual pornography of specific people before branching onto other use cases, the trajectory of deepfake audio is only just beginning.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I do appreciate him putting his own body through this, rather than anyone else's. For science!

Only without rigorous experimental design, controls, or replicability!

For pseudo-science!

Also, if you're on Twitter (still), then you, like me, have probably noticed a more-than-slightly surprising increase in various bots in the replies of tweets now.

The only bot I like is that one on the Lego subreddit that links to sets when a number is posted.

Prederick wrote:

With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis

Holy sh*t, that's insane.

Prederick wrote:

Also, if you're on Twitter (still), then you, like me, have probably noticed a more-than-slightly surprising increase in various bots in the replies of tweets now.

Yeah, the spam bots are worse now than before Musk took over.

So, there's currently a mass-dunking going on over some AI-generated hyper-realistic softcore (not even softcore, what's the phrase for bikini pics?), but what strikes me about it, just as with the AI art is the grinding, palpable sense of resentment it's supporters have.

Where a lot of AI art seems to stem from resentment against artists, this appears to stem from resentment against "attractive women."

Anyway, as usual, Garbage Day talked about it better:

Anyways, the caption, “It is SO over” is really what I want to focus on. The original poster expanded slightly on their thinking in a reply further down the thread, writing, “The idea is like we killed journalism with fake news flood. We kill thottery with fake porn flood.” And beneath that are a bunch of really unwell users agreeing with the sentiment.

So I suppose the idea here is to replace human sex workers with A.I.-generated content because these men want to look at sexual content, but they hate the women that make it. They want the machines to free them from the self-loathing of being a “simp”.

And the fact that A.I. porn crushing the human porn industry is compared to journalism is also telling. Because I think for a lot of men, particularly in Gen Z, all of mass media, including pornography, has been successfully coded in their minds as woke and feminine by various far-right reactionaries. And these men are now beginning to see emerging A.I. tools as a way to hurt, and maybe finally vanquish, those who make the human-created media that they seem hate so much. There are a lot of folks scoffing at the idea that these tools could never successfully do this, and, based on the teeth and fingers above, we definitely aren’t there yet, but we should maybe also start wondering what might happen if these tools get good enough to actually succeed.

How will A.I. augment, amplify, and evolve the culture wars we have right now? And who will these tools most benefit?

Also, Mr. Beast paid for 1,000 people's cataract surgery, which has caused some minor kerfuffle online.

I think I view this in the same light as I do a similar stunt John Oliver did with medical debt. Whatever I might feel about the squick of this issue being made into #Content (or a broader dislike of Mr. Beast), it's still, ultimately, a good thing because the real issue at hand is that if not for a rich YouTuber paying for people to get this simple surgery for #Content, none of them probably would've been able to get it, which is The Actual Problem.

EDIT: More succinctly -

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FntNnx-acAMT9B-?format=jpg&name=small)

Farscry wrote:

The only bot I like is that one on the Lego subreddit that links to sets when a number is posted. :)

My Twitter Bot

Prederick wrote:

Also, Mr. Beast paid for 1,000 people's cataract surgery, which has caused some minor kerfuffle online.

I think I view this in the same light as I do a similar stunt John Oliver did with medical debt. Whatever I might feel about the squick of this issue being made into #Content (or a broader dislike of Mr. Beast), it's still, ultimately, a good thing because the real issue at hand is that if not for a rich YouTuber paying for people to get this simple surgery for #Content, none of them probably would've been able to get it, which is The Actual Problem.

EDIT: More succinctly -

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FntNnx-acAMT9B-?format=jpg&name=small)

The beauty of our Capitalist Overlord Production System is that every Capitalist Overlord can soothe their conscience by philanthropy. Thereby keeping things safe for the next Capitalist Overlord.

It's amazing how much solidarity there is amongst the Overlord class.

Is Mr Beast a Capitalist Overlord now?

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Is Mr Beast a Capitalist Overlord now?

Internet says he has a net worth of north of $100 million.

f*ck yeah he is.

Actually, commentators put his value somewhere north of $1.5 billion. So yes he is very much a capitalist. Anyone who amasses wealth beyond what a human and its family could consume in several lifetimes is an overlord.

Pelosi, 82, was attacked in his San Francisco home in late October, a time when his wife, Nancy Pelosi, was still speaker of the US House. According to tapes released by the police, the attacker said he was looking for her. She was not present. Her husband suffered a fractured skull and injuries to his hand and arm.

Republican leaders including Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell condemned the attack.

But prominent rightwingers including Donald Trump Jr, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk and Republican members of Congress including Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene eagerly spread jokes, misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Joe Biden said such reactions showed the Republicans were “extremely extreme”.

Jill Filipovic, a Guardian columnist, wrote that though the attack “should shock the conscience of the nation … it has shown just how immune to human decency and empathy the Trumpist right has become”.

Last week, a judge in San Francisco ordered the release of police and surveillance footage. On Friday, the footage played widely on TV and online.

Musk said sorry – in answer to a tweet in which Juanita Broaddrick, an author who accuses Bill Clinton of rape, said the Pelosi footage showed what was “still a questionable and bizarre situation between two men in their underwear”. Other users pointed out that the footage showed neither man was wearing only underwear.

That really is Elon in a nutshell.

Prederick wrote:
... Motherboard found 4chan members appear to have used the product to generate voices that sound like Joe Rogan, Ben Sharpio, ... to spew racist and other sorts of material.

I mean, you don't really need a special tool for that.

The special tool was a recording and playback device.

So I went and fooled around with ChatGPT for like three hours last night, and I can see its use as a tool, even for creative writing, although I don't think it's anywhere near Good at creative writing.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the responses feel incredibly straightjacketed, and in more than a few instances, the prompts I put in were so long it wouldn't have been that much more effort to just write the damn thing myself.

Finally, their obvious desire to prevent ChatGPT from being used for all sorts of awful outcomes means that almost every prompt feels like it ends with everyone shaking hands and agreeing that respecting other people's boundaries is good, etc.

All of that said, however, it was useful to have it mock up scenes that I could take a line from or at least look at and think "Oh, okay, I can definitely build from this," or "that's a turn of phrase I wouldn't have considered," and so on.

It's odd, I find ChatGPT far, far less ethically fraught than the AI art programs, even though I know they're treading similar ground (there's not that much difference between saying "write a scene in the style of Stephen King" and saying "Make a drawing in the style of Alex Ross"), and I'll have to think about why I feel that way. Maybe it's just because the quality of ChatGPT's writing is broadly... not great? I dunno.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Yeah, the spam bots are worse now than before Musk took over.

Also, the "For You" tab is just so many of these dudes now:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnxXrIzaAAA_29J?format=jpg&name=medium)

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fn00R02acAARTZE?format=jpg&name=medium)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/99wIyBd.png)

Prederick wrote:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fn00R02acAARTZE?format=jpg&name=medium)

Nothing says to me "this guy has the keys to intelligence" quite like saying "way smarter".

I’m following the other guy that said more smarter.

Psh, my guy says he can make you super-duper smarter. Being only way smarter is a way to guarantee a mediocre career.

f*ck I've been listening to Smartless guys for months now and it's not getting me anywhere.

Prederick wrote:

Also, the "For You" tab is just so many of these dudes now:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnxXrIzaAAA_29J?format=jpg&name=medium)

YES THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT, DUMBASS.

(not you, Pred)

I'm way smarter because I'm following the guy that's way whiter.

A streamer released an apology yesterday after he got caught having watched deep fake porn videos of two women he works with.

(Also, his claims about it being a big whoopsie are apparently total horsesh*t, because that stuff is behind a paywall so he head to search it out.)

Now, obviously, non-consensual deepfake porn stuff is ALREADY an issue, but boy howdy, is machine learning going to make it worse.

As I've noted before, I get why all the big AI generation sites have put such big "NO NSFW" markers in their algos, because god help us all when this bell gets run (and it will get rung, eventually).

Prederick wrote:

god help us all when this bell gets run (and it will get rung, eventually).

We all know who's going to do it.

Rat Boy wrote:
Prederick wrote:

god help us all when this bell gets run (and it will get rung, eventually).

We all know who's going to do it.

ElonGate?

Would happily take Quark over him.