[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.

Stengah wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

"Be sure to tip the waitstaff. They made your evening enjoyable and deserve more money." Funny, I thought if AI was left to its own devices on the Internet, it'd turn into a supremacist asshole.

Depends on which parts of the internet you let your AI wander into.

So does that mean we should or shouldn't let them listen to the GWJ Podcast?

Rat Boy wrote:

"Be sure to tip the waitstaff. They made your evening enjoyable and deserve more money." Funny, I thought if AI was left to its own devices on the Internet, it'd turn into a supremacist asshole.

Nope, it just got a 14 day ban for being transphobic. But it's now a shoe-in for Best Comedy Album at next year's Grammys.

Oof. Not to get all tinfoil-conspiracy-theory, but the video of the offending clip in the article Rat Boy links makes me wonder if someone behind the scenes had their thumb on the scale of the algorithm. Because it's an actual joke, with a setup (comedian tries to make a transphobic, anti-liberal joke) and a payoff (nobody laughs, everyone leaves). There are no weird non-sequiturs that are only tangentially related to what came before if you squint, none of that sense that it's coming from an alien who watched a lot of Seinfeld but doesn't actually get it, or that an algorithm is rolling a twenty-sided die to determine the next line. It appears purposeful in a way that nothing else I've seen from it does.

And other than that bit, if anything it's always felt very "safe," there's never that undercurrent of mean-spiritedness that gave Seinfeld its biting edge. The characters are always cheery and wholesome and supportive of one another, which I always assumed was by design, specifically because you can't assign intent to an AI, or context, or any of the things that make irony and satire work. So to have something like this come out of the blue... I don't trust it. Feels like some crank behind the scenes was trying to see what they could get away with.

Speaking of AI, Elon's concerned because ChatGPT won't do a racism.

I love these people's insane thought experiments. It's literally "if the only way to prevent nuclear armageddon is to say the N-word, then shouldn't I be able to say it?!?!!?"

I've heard white people drag that out multiple times in my life. Why? Why be so concerned with something so utterly asinine?

EDIT: I know, it's the desperate hope to get you to agree that "sometimes, it IS okay to say!"

Actually, in that case it is not okay to say it either. You'd just say it to avert catastrophe while being prepared to deal with the backlash.
That is what they don't understand. Ends don't justify. Trying to concoct a forced fantasy to get you to consider the ends justifying the means just once, doesn't change the fact that... the ends DON'T justify the means.

hbi2k wrote:

Oof. Not to get all tinfoil-conspiracy-theory, but the video of the offending clip in the article Rat Boy links makes me wonder if someone behind the scenes had their thumb on the scale of the algorithm. Because it's an actual joke, with a setup (comedian tries to make a transphobic, anti-liberal joke) and a payoff (nobody laughs, everyone leaves). There are no weird non-sequiturs that are only tangentially related to what came before if you squint, none of that sense that it's coming from an alien who watched a lot of Seinfeld but doesn't actually get it, or that an algorithm is rolling a twenty-sided die to determine the next line. It appears purposeful in a way that nothing else I've seen from it does.

And other than that bit, if anything it's always felt very "safe," there's never that undercurrent of mean-spiritedness that gave Seinfeld its biting edge. The characters are always cheery and wholesome and supportive of one another, which I always assumed was by design, specifically because you can't assign intent to an AI, or context, or any of the things that make irony and satire work. So to have something like this come out of the blue... I don't trust it. Feels like some crank behind the scenes was trying to see what they could get away with.

If I had to handicap what I thought would have gotten it banned, I would have put money on AI Kramer screaming the N-word.

PROFOUNDLY NSFW, MAKE SURE YOU'RE WEARING HEADPHONES

While deepfake technology is going to do many, terrifying things... this is goddamn hilarious.

Garbage Day wrote:

Warning, do not press play on the video above unless you are alone and/or wearing headphones!! The audio deepfakes seem to be coming from ElevenLabs, which went viral on 4chan last week, to the point where the company had to drastically overhaul their community guidelines. But enough wildly out of control audio deepfakes were created during the free-for-all that they’re now all over Twitter.

Anyways, until A.I. firms hire some folks with actual community moderation experience who understand how the worst people on the internet are going to use their product in the exact wrongest way imaginable this will keep happening. But as we learned during the web 2.0 era, it’s bad for businesses to think about how people will weaponize their platforms, so I doubt super hyped-up A.I. companies will be any less naive about this stuff. Oh well, maybe we’ll fix this during the next revolution in computing!

Who could've possibly seen this happening? I mean, anyone other than blinkered "move fast, break things" tech dudes.

Prederick wrote:

PROFOUNDLY NSFW, MAKE SURE YOU'RE WEARING HEADPHONES

While deepfake technology is going to do many, terrifying things... this is goddamn hilarious.

....and also manages to make a transphobic joke at the end. Unless that's the joke? I'm not entirely sure.

Mmm, missed that. Apologies.

I know the tech is the tech and tech development doesn't really have a side, but it's hard to not view the rush to AI in the context of a broader devaluation and general disdain for artists and their work.

Voice actors are increasingly being asked to sign rights to their voices away so clients can use artificial intelligence to generate synthetic versions that could eventually replace them, and sometimes without additional compensation, according to advocacy organizations and actors who spoke to Motherboard. Those contractual obligations are just one of the many concerns actors have about the rise of voice-generating artificial intelligence, which they say threaten to push entire segments of the industry out of work.

The news highlights the impact of the burgeoning industry of artificial intelligence-generated voices and the much lower barrier of entry for anyone to synthesize the voices of others. In January, Motherboard reported how members of 4chan quickly took a beta program from artificial voice company ElevenLabs and used it to generate voices of celebrities, including Emma Watson reading sections of Mein Kampf. The labor implications on the voice acting industry tie directly to ElevenLabs’ work too, with the company marketing its service as an option for gaming, movies, audiobooks, and more.

“It's disrespectful to the craft to suggest that generating a performance is equivalent to a real human being's performance,” SungWon Cho, a game and animation voice actor who also goes by the handle ProZD, told Motherboard in an email. “Sure, you can get it to sound tonally like a voice, and maybe even make it sound like it's capturing an emotion, but at the end of the day, it is still going to ring hollow and false. Going down this road runs the risk of people thinking that voice-over can be replaced entirely by AI, which really makes my stomach turn.”

By marketing their tech as a replacement for human voice actors, the developers have actively picked a side.

And ProZD better stock up on antacids, because they are absolutely going to replace a lot of voice actors with ai, and it will be indistinguishable for the most part, especially as the tech gets better.

Prederick wrote:

I know the tech is the tech and tech development doesn't really have a side, but it's hard to not view the rush to AI in the context of a broader devaluation and general disdain for artists and their work.

Bolded and stacked for emphasis; as a brand/media artist in marketing, I am extremely tired of the jokes about being replaceable right now. It's a fad that has negative implications for any industry where rich people decide it's not something to be valued, and devaluing that arena so they can profit by raising it back up again when they get tired of when the current parlour trick isn't a cure-all for everything they hoped it could be.

There's something familiar about all this that I can't quite put my finger on, like I'm getting a red alert on the back of my neck. Oh wait...

We're preparing our firm's website for launch and the caution we're receiving from our marketing guru is that Google's algorithm is apparently being trained to detect whoever is using ChatGPT in their content and to penalise their search engine ranking accordingly.

Now, I think there's a bit of self interest and commercial survival there given Microsoft has the right to acquire a 49% equity stake in OpenAI and is known to be working on incorporating AI tech into Bing.

I assume of course that content generated by Google's rival AI (based on Lambda) will not be similarly penalised in search ranking indices...

I tell everyone I know that if AI can do my job as good as I can that I'll happily retire and let AI duke it out in legal circles.

Elon fires top Twitter engineer for giving bad news:

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

What a small, mediocre man.

Rat Boy wrote:
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

$44 billion was only for the initial fifteen minutes of fame. After that it's $2 billion for each additional minute.

The Psycho Friends Network!

This is the kind of AI I can get behind. 1990's pop culture deepfake mash-ups!

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

An enormous baby with billions of dollars, filling its diapers daily.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FojRzDfaAAAi8_Y?format=png&name=900x900)

God, grant me the confidence, etc.

I’m not a regular user, but nearly every time I click on a Twitter link, just below I see various unrelated tweets from Elon Musk. He definitely hasn’t been hidden from me. I don’t think I ever followed him, though I was a pretty early user so may have back in the day

Random aside, sometimesdee was mildly jealous recently when see saw that Barack Obama was one of my followers. So I’ve got that going for me.

From BoingBoing which is very left leaning but still it is in the congressional record

AOC makes Twitter executive admit company changed policy to accommodate Trump's racist Tweets

AOC
Let's talk about something real. I'd like to show you a tweet posted by former President Trump about my colleagues and I on July 14 2019, it says in part, "Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came? Then come back and show us how it's done. These places need your help badly, you can't leave fast enough. I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy as quickly to work out free travel arrangements." A day or two after that, Donald Trump publicly incited violence at a rally targeting four Congresswoman including myself saying, "go back to where you came from." Ms. Navaroli, as I understand it, you were a senior member of Twitter's content moderation team when this was posted. As part of your responsibilities, did you review this tweet?

Navaroli
Yes, it was my team's responsibility to review these tweets.

AOC
And what did you conclude?

Navaroli
My team made the recommendation that for the first time we find Donald Trump in violation of Twitter's policies and use the public interest interstitial.

AOC
For the first time.

Navaroli
Yes.

AOC
And at the time, Twitter's policy included a specific example, when it came to banned abuse against immigrants. They specifically included the phrase "go back to your country" or "go back to where you came from." Correct?

Navaroli
Yes, it was specifically included in the content moderation guidance. As an example,

AOC
You brought this up to the Vice President of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey, correct?

Navaroli
I did, yes.

AOC
And she overrode your assessment, didn't she?

Navaroli
Yes, she did.

AOC
And something interesting happened after she overrode your assessment. A day or two later, Twitter seemed to have changed their policies, didn't they?

Navaroli
Yes, that trope "go back to where you came" from was removed from the content moderation guidance as an example.

AOC
So Twitter changed their own policy after the President violated it in order to potentially accommodate his tweet.

Navaroli
Yes.

AOC
Thank you. So much for bias against right wing on Twitter.

Bfgp wrote:

We're preparing our firm's website for launch and the caution we're receiving from our marketing guru is that Google's algorithm is apparently being trained to detect whoever is using ChatGPT in their content and to penalise their search engine ranking accordingly.

As someone who works in SEO, I can confirm that this is exactly something Google will do as soon as they can. And I cannot wait for them to implement it because I hate ChatGPT.

A journalist falling for a very obvious AI generated picture feels like a bad look at things to come.

In other news:

Where will traffic come from now?

But let’s jump back to my initial question. If an A.I. arms race within social has turned every platform into a video platform and is turning our search engines into chatbots, how do you get people to look at your website? Not even just for little guys like me (lol), but even for big publishers.

There is simply no path forward for a news outlet of any meaningful size trying to support itself on social and search traffic. So what will be the A.I. platform publishing strategy? Well, I’m going to make a couple predictions and we’ll see how I do:

1- The conversational A.I. search results will get better and quickly make the human-generated results beneath them feel like the current second page of search results.

2 - Chasing maximum mass appeal social traffic for over a decade stripped most digital media companies of any real discernible audience, which means they can’t really replace social traffic with paying subscribers. The traffic drop-off from the current pivot to video on social will back them further into a corner.

3 - In an effort to not look as desperate as they are, a handful of big publishers will announce they’re partnering with either Bing or Google to feed the A.I. assistants directly to make the A.I. search results “better” and “more accurate”.

4 - Reporters will protest and resign and unions will scramble to create anti-A.I. agreements, but it won’t be fast enough. There will be a whole new SEO but for supplying information quickly to an A.I. There’ll be all kinds of fights about what kind of politics the A.I. is learning. There will also probably be a custom chatbot fad similar to the iPad-optimized website craze and the Everyone Needs A News App era.

5 - On the brand side, companies will pay for greater visibility in the A.I. recommendations. For instance, a car company might pay to be among the options listed for “the best mid-size sedan” by the A.I. for a financial quarter. There’ll be all kinds of fights about what is and isn’t an ad.

6 - Google adsense-like programs for A.I. citations will roll out for smaller publishers and the last remaining bloggers, like the food writers who make the recipes the A.I.s are spitting out. There will also probably be some convoluted way to reformat your site to better feed the A.I. And I imagine Google will probably also figure out a way to shoehorn YouTube in there somehow.

7 - And, finally, all of these initiatives will lead to a further arms race between A.I. platforms and individuals using A.I. tools of their own to game the system, which will further atrophy the non-A.I.-driven parts of the web.

I hope I’m wrong!

For more information about what our future will be, just watch 30 Rock reruns.

A funny scene! I liked that show

7 problems facing Bing, Bard, and the future of AI search

And...

This Podcast Has Hosts, Jokes, and Expert Guests. It's All AI-Generated

AI Radio is a new show on Spotify. Its hosts cover everything from sex to the latest developments in tech, they joke and go on tangents, and interview experts on the topics being discussed. But there's a catch: the show's hosts aren't real. The experts aren't real either. They're all AI.

AI Radio is hosted by two chatbots named Bella and Adam. So far, the show has two episodes. Bella and Adam talk about current events that sound nonsensical but are actually true, such as discussing Google’s new web toy where you can make colorful blobs sing opera.

“I’m telling you Bella, this is going to be the next big thing, it’ll be a complete game changer and increase Google stock price doublefold,” AI co-host Adam says in the second episode of AI Radio. “Just think of it, people will flock to this new technology and create their own little singing blob a family, it’ll go viral.”

How long before it gets banned like AI Seinfeld?

BIRT all AI entities must be referred to as either "Kodos" or "Kang."