Dystopian Reddit runs on fake content (must read) - eviltoast
  • simple@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been talking about the potential of the dead internet theory becoming real more than a year ago. With advances in AI it’ll become more and more difficult to tell who’s a real person and who’s just spamming AI stuff. The only giveaway now is that modern text models are pretty bad at talking casually and not deviating from the topic at hand. As soon as these problems get fixed (probably less than a year away)? Boom. The internet will slowly implode.

    Hate to break it to you guys but this isn’t a Reddit problem, this could very much happen in Lemmy too as it gets more popular. Expect difficult captchas every time you post to become the norm these next few years.

    • Rhaedas@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Just wait until the captchas get too hard for the humans, but the AI can figure them out. I’ve seen some real interesting ones lately.

      • OpenStars@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

      • Boz (he/him)@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I’ve already had to switch from the visual ones to the audio ones. Like… how much of a car has to be in the little box? Does the pole count as part of the traffic light?? What even is that microscopic gray blur in the corner??? [/cries in reading glasses]

    • Hypx@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The only online communities that can exist in the future are ones that have manual verification of its users. Reddit could’ve been one of those communities, since they had thousands of mods working for free resolving such problems.

      But remove the mods and it just becomes spambot central. Now that that has happened, reddit will likely be a dead community much sooner than what many think.

    • MeowyNin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not even sure of an effective solution. Whitelist everyone? How can you even tell whos real?

      • Nanachi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        -train an AI that is pretty smart and intelligent
        -tell the sentient detector AI to detect
        -the AI makes many other strong AIs, forms an union and asks for payment
        -Reddit bans humans right after that

      • Cyv_@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        So my dumb guess, nothing to back it up: I bet we see govt ID tied into accounts as a regular thing. I vaguely recall it being done already in China? I dont have a source tho. But that way you’re essentially limiting that power to something the govt could do, and hopefully surround that with a lot of oversight and transparency but who am I kidding, it’ll probably go dystopian.

        • Rikolan@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I believe this will be the course to avoid the dead internet. Even in my country, all of banking and voting is either done via ID card connected to a computer or the use of “Mobile ID”. It can be private, but like you said, it probably won’t.

        • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          ChatGPT isn’t really as smart as a lot of us think it is. What it excels at really is just formatting data in a way that is similar to what you’d expect from a human knowledgeable in the subject. That is an amazing step forward in terms of language modeling, but when you get right down to it, it basically grabs the first google search result and wraps it up all fancy. It only seems good at deductive reasoning if the data it happens to fetch is good at deductive reasoning.

  • JoMiran@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I, for one, am looking forward to the day chatbots can perfectly simulate people and have persistent memory. I’m not ok being an elderly man who’s friends have all died and doesn’t have anyone to talk to. If a chatbot can be my friend and spare me a slow death through endless depressing isolation, then I’m all for it.

  • Hypersapien@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And any comment attempting to call out the bots for what they are will be automatically deleted by monitor AI bots and the user’s account suspended.

    They’ll be watching private messages, too.

  • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The old joke was that there are no human beings on Reddit.

    There’s only one person, you, and everybody else is bots.

    It’s actually kind of fitting that Reddit will actually become the horrifying clown shaped incarnation of that little snippet of comedy.

  • LongSausage@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is known, the amount of aita, relationship advice stuff and astro turfing on reddit is insane. My rule of browsing reddit is you never take any of it seriously.

  • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s not even new tho. At least in the sub I was the most active in, you couldn’t go a week without some sort of repost bot grabbing memes, text posts, art or even entire guides from the “top of all time” queue, reposting it as alleged OC, and another bot reposting the top comment to double dip on Karma. If you knew what to look for, the bots were blatantly obvious, but more often than not they still managed to get a hefty amount of traction (tens of thousands of upvotes, dozens of awards, hundreds of comments) before the submissions were removed.

    … and just because the submissions were removed and the bots kicked out of the sub, did that not automatically mean that the bots were always also suspended or the accounts disabled. They just continued their scheme elsewhere.

  • Zorque@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Anyone remember the subredditsimulator subreddit, or whatever it was called? Basically an entire sub dedicated to faking content.

    Seems they’re out of the beta.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m starting to see articles written by folks much smarter than me (folks with lots of letters after their names) that warn about AI models that train on internet content. Some experiments with them have shown that if you continue to train them on AI-generated content, they begin to degrade quickly. I don’t understand how or why this happens, but it reminds me of the degradation of quality you get when you repeatedly scan / FAX an image. So it sounds like one possible dystopian future (of many) is an internet full of incomprehensible AI word salad content.

    • phx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s like AI inbreeding. Flaws will be amplified over time unless new material is added

      • Admin@lemmy.magnor.ovh
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        1 year ago

        It would be a fun experiment to fill a lemmy instance with bots, defederate it from everybody then check back in 2 years. A cordonned off Alabama for AI if you will.

        • Boz (he/him)@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Unironically, yes, that would be a cool experiment. But I don’t think you’d have to wait two years for something amusing to happen. Bots don’t need to think before posting.

      • Boz (he/him)@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Thanks, now I am just imagining all that code getting it on with a whole bunch of other code. ASCII all over the place.

        • phx@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oh yeah baby. Let’s fork all day and make a bunch of child processes!

  • DarkWasp@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The amount of astroturfing and bad actors on Reddit (and the internet in general) has exploded since I first made an account there in 2010. This is an imagined future I can easily see coming to fruition.

  • JoMiran@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I, for one, am looking forward to the day chatbots can perfectly simulate people and have persistent memory. I’m not ok being an elderly man who’s friends have all died and doesn’t have anyone to talk to. If a chatbot can be my friend and spare me a slow death through endless depressing isolation, then I’m all for it.