They’re in rapid technological development cycles that’s reminiscent of the late 20th century USA. Often producing hilariously odd or bad gadgets, which people take as evidence that China sucks. As it’s said when it’s anything not-China, “you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet”.
Nice job, but are you Rosenzweig level? Because booting the kernel on iPhones has been done before. Getting a usable software stack is a whole other territory.
Tech evangelists rely heavily on logical fallacies. False equivalence is one of the main ones. “A thing happened before therefore this tech is nothing to worry about”. They’re redirecting the argument to bait people to try to prove why calculators are bad. But of course the past already happened and nobody is going prove otherwise.
They’ll ignore the rules like they always do for the violent right.
It’s more common than you think probably. I clocked Quartz spamming reddit with garbage articles sometime in the mid-2010s. Who and what are these sites even. What are their credentials. Why did they suddenly spring up out of nowhere???
It didn’t require modern AI like LLMs. Simpler algorithms of copying articles and paraphrasing them have existed for a very long time.
Maybe over a decade ago web development reached a point when anyone could relatively easily churn out professional looking site designs. Most of the news sites we’ve been fed has been garbage such as you’ve described.
One source that nobody seems to ever notice is company press release pages. Boring reports that nobody otherwise cares about gets turned into clickbait headlines.
Business Company posts a routine boring press release on their website: “Business Stuff happened at the business factory. Business as usual.”
What you see generated for these garbage news sites: “Breaking News. Business Company announces MASSIVE BREAKTHROUGH in Business Stuff. Rival business factories on suicide watch?”
You don’t need LLMs or AI in general. This is basic site scraping.
Let them show the world what they are. They’ve traditionally hidden their heinous ways from media so they can project an image of being the only one moral righteous nation.
Take the mask off. Show us everything.
That’s why the zeitgeist needs more time to settle on the perception of LLMs. It’s a cool toy, but people shouldn’t be getting it in their head that it gives them a shortcut to becoming a professional.
“Please don’t tell anyone how I live.”
You died. Welcome to hell. It’s the same as when you were alive.
A lot of forum admins just got old. It’s more like the IT nerd boomers and gen-x built the internet. They were middle age when we were kids. Most of us whippersnappers were being babysat by them.
Good luck convincing any normie on the internet today that it was actually a boomer who built the world wide web. All they see is tech illiterate old people who only made the world worse. And for some reason gen-x doesn’t exist to them.
They’re going to use Teslas as a global military spy-net. I would be surprised if they aren’t already. Minus the military part. This is just formalizing it.
The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.
The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.
Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.
What a clusterfuck of a life.
It was a late 20th century novelty symbolizing the heights of American culture and capitalism. By now much of the world has experienced McDonalds and generally fast food. Most of the developed world at least.
I gave it a try on a hobby project without double checking. I bought some parts I didn’t need. Good thing it was only about $20.
In hindsight a good portion of the diagrams I asked for were complete non-sense, but I wrote it off as poor image generation than having zero actual comprehension. It was trying to generate designs that didn’t exist because nobody does it that way. I later figured out after looking at diagrams from research papers where students built much simpler designs.
The world didn’t need as many programmers as we were led to believe. Showing text, images, and video is a solved problem. There doesn’t need to be a new framework every 6 months. They don’t need to throw out the last one to churn out a rehash of the same website so coders can justify their existence with some metrics of performance designed impress people who barely understand what they’re seeing, but nod their head in approval so nobody realizes they’re bluffing to hide their tech illiteracy. Everybody in the room is doing the same thing. The nerd with slide decks is grinning ear to ear at the approval. Maybe he starts to believe in the mythology that he might be a unicorn himself. It’s exercise in collective delusion. It needs to work because everybody involved is getting crazy rich. So the delusion must go on.
You don’t have your plumber come in every year and redo to all the pipes. Each time adding another superfluous section that serves naught but to make work for him. You sure don’t let him install a coin operated meter so he gets a cut of your water bill every time you need to flush, and then praise him like he’s the second coming of Jesus. He might be Jesus the plumber, but he’s no messiah. Maybe next years rework you’ll have him install a credit card swipe on your bathroom door.
Nobody is building entire trillion dollar multinational corporations around plumbing. Nobody is holding quarterly plumbers development conferences to announce the latest in pipework technology. In which the whole world streams it and watches in awe as they reveal the all new pipe join. Now for $999 a piece. You can’t call your plumber fast enough. Technology is cool but people can’t separate the science and engineering from the the trade work. They think the people making increasingly more cumbersome Rube Goldberg machines of code are the ones doing the science and engineering. Quite frankly I’m certain too many programmers think that too.
I’ve run this experiment before. ~90% of accounts sampled on the top 20 /r/all with not prior post history before 2-3 months got converted to cryptocurrency spam bots. Some of the remainder were porn spam. A few deleted accounts. A few seemingly real people. This was during the heights of cryptocurrency mania. Believe me or don’t. I can’t be assed with source dropping internet-pseud wankery.
Bot deception tactics have certainly changed since the prevalence of LLMs. I haven’t been paying attention to what the patterns have shifted to. Before these times, it was easily spotted because they were relatively simple.
I believe earlier this year someone on /r/theoryofreddit spotted closed networks of subreddits where bots engage with each other. Those are used to farm accounts on a massive scale.
Zuckerberg whispered that in his ear, didn’t he. That’s what Facebook calls their AI department.
Apparently funded by Thiel.
It comes as no surprise to me at least. In recent years we’ve been hearing how these manosphere and right wing guys are funded by right wing oligarchs. I mean the basic production values are top notch. It can’t be explained simply by the widespread availability of professional film making equipment. Which is the explanation I hear often. You can pick a random content creator with no audience who has somehow procured expensive equipment yet they won’t be able to reach the same level of quailty because they don’t know what they’re doing. Plus they don’t have the money to buy production staff to run everything for them. That in itself gives a false sense of capability behind the characters.
They aren’t meant to be the star of the show. Their purpose is to be in the crowd and agitate. They’re the devil that whispers people’s ear.
Bots would have proven to the a failure if a botnet went down and culture wars vanished. Their intention is to manipulate people. Not to wholesale substitute to the population.
Besides the name itself seems to go over heads. Bot farms don’t operate out of a centralized server. They’re not even bots literally. These operations are farmed out to locations around the world. Sometimes they’re real human trolls.