[seiferteric]

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.

[spicyusername]

    divisiveness this kind of stuff will create

I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created".

Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

And who can blame them (us). It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite. And each little snippet worms its way into your brain (and well being) one way or the other.

It's just been too much for too long and you can tell.

[_heimdall]

> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite

Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits. At that point I can't help but think the only real issue with being a luddite is not following the crowd and fitting in.

[spicyusername]

I didn't use it disparagingly.

In fact, it's easier than ever to see the intended benefit of such a lifestyle.

[_heimdall]

Fair enough! I must have just misread you then, I'm too used to see it described as a bad thing.

[dugidugout]

Which also has a term with stigma: hipster

[pousada]

Hipster used to mean that but meaning changed to being someone who “doesn’t fit in” but only for performative reasons, not really “for real” but just to project an image of how cool they are

[dugidugout]

Alas, something something capitalism.

[KPGv2]

> Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits

They didn't say to avoid certain tech. They said to avoid takes and news headlines.

Your conflation of those two is like someone saying "injecting bleach into your skin is bad" and you responding with "oh, so you oppose cleaning bathrooms [with bleach]?"

[_heimdall]

How so? The OP referenced how difficult it is to avoid said takes and news without being a complete luddite. That certainly implies avoiding certain tech, I have to assume they meant much of the digital tech we use today rather than the power loom luddites were pushing back on.

Your bleach scenario is confusing to me, its also you arguing against something completely unrelated to the discussion here.

[gooob]

it's malware in the mind. it was happening before deep fakes was possible. news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells. now we have tools that pretty much just accelerate and automate that process. it's interesting. it would be helpful to figure out how to prevent people (especially upcoming generations) from getting swept away by all this.

[butlike]

I think fatigue will set in and the next generation will 'tock' back from this 'tick.' Getting outraged by things is already feeling antiquated to me, and I'm in my 30's.

[pseudohadamard]

There's a massive industry built around this on YT, exemplified by the OP's post about his parents. To a first-order approximation, every story with a theme of "X does sexist/racist/ageist/abusive thing to Y and then gets their comeuppance" on YouTube is AI-generated clickbait. The majority of the "X does nice thing for Y and gets a reward or surprise" dating from the last year or two are also AI-generated clickbait, but far more of the former. Outrage gets a lot more clicks than compassion.

[baubino]

> news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells.

As someone who’s read a newspaper daily for 30+ years, that is definitely not true. The news has always tried to capture your attention but doing so using anger and outrage, and using those exclusively, is a newer development. Newspapers and broadcast news used to use humor, suspense, and other things to provoke curiosity. When the news went online, it became focused on provoking anger and outrage. Even print edition headlines tend to be tamer than what’s in the online edition.

[Ntrails]

> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite

It really isn't that hard, if I'm looking at my experience. Maybe a little stuff on here counts. I get my news from the FT, it's relatively benign by all accounts. I'm not sure that opting out of classical social media is particularly luddite-y, I suspect it's closer to becoming vogue than not?

Being led around by the nose is a choice still, for now at least.

[abustamam]

I think the comment you're replying to isn't necessarily a question of opting out of such news, it's the fact that it's so hard to escape it. I swipe on my home screen and there I am, in my Google news feed with the constant barrage of nonsense.

I mostly get gaming and entertainment news for shows I watch, but even between those I get CNN and Fox News, both which I view as "opinion masquerading as news" outlets.

My mom shares so many articles from her FB feed that are both mainstream (CNN, etc) nonsense and "influencer" nonsense.

[Ntrails]

Right, and my point is how easy opting out actually is.

I have no news feed on my phone. I doubt on android it is any harder to evade. Social media itself is gone. The closest I get to click-bait is when my mother spouts something gleaned from the Daily Mail. That vector is harder to shift I concede!

[abustamam]

Fair points on both fronts! Though I think you may be conflating simple with easy. Removing social media from one's life is certainly simple (just uninstall the app!), but it's not that easy for some people because it's their only method of communication with some folks. I mostly don't use SM but I log onto Instagram because some of my friends only chat there, same with Facebook.

[b00ty4breakfast]

>I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created".

Simulacra and Simulation came out in '81, for an example of how long this has been a recognized phenomenon

[bombcar]

I honestly think it might be downstream of individualized mass-market democracy; each person is tasked with fully understanding the world as it is so they can make the correct decisions at all level of voting, but ain't nobody got time for that.

So we emotionally convince ourselves that we have solved the problem so we can act appropriately and continue doing things that are important to us.

The founders recognized this problem and attempted to setup a Republic as an answer to it; so that each voter didn't have to ask "do I know everything about everything so I can select the best person" and instead were asked "of this finite, smaller group, who do I think is best to represent me at the next level"? We've basically bypassed that; every voter knows who ran for President last election, hardly anyone can identify their party's local representative in the party itself (which is where candidates are selected, after all).

[scelerat]

Completely agree, but at the same time I can't bring myself to believe that reinforcing systems like the electoral college or reinstating a state-legislature-chosen Senate would yield better outcomes.

Most people I know who have strong political opinions (as well as those who don't) can't name their own city council members or state assemblyman, and that's a real problem for functioning representative democracy. Not only for their direct influence on local policy, but also because these levels of government also serve as the farm team or proving grounds for higher levels of office.

By the time candidates are running with the money and media of a national campaign, in some sense it's too late to evaluate them on matters of their specific policies and temperaments, and you kind of just have to assume they're going to follow the general contours of their party. By and large, it seems the entrenched political parties (and, perhaps, parties in general) are impediments to good governance.

[bombcar]

I think it's an inherent problem with democracy in itself, and something that will have to be worked out at some time, somewhere.

The accidents that let it occur may no longer be present - there are arguments that "democracy" as we understand it was impossible before rapid communication, and perhaps it won't survive the modern world.

We're living in a world where a swing voter in Ohio may have more effect/impact on Iran than a person living there - or even more effect on Europe than a citizen of Germany.

[jvanderbot]

I disagree.

Voting on principles is fine and good.

The issue is the disconnect between professed principles and action. And the fact that nowadays there are not many ways to pick and choose principles except two big preset options.

[vacuity]

It's easier to focus on fewer representatives, and because the federal government has so much power (and then state governments), life-changing policies mainly come top-down. Power should instead flow bottom-up, with the top being the linchpin, but alas.

[baubino]

> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite.

It’s quite easy actually. Like the OP, I have no social media accounts other than HN (which he rightfully asserts isn’t social media but is the inheritor of the old school internet forum). I don’t see the mess everyone complains about because I choose to remove myself from it. At the same time, I still write code every day, I spend way too much time in front of a screen, and I manage to stay abreast of what’s new in tech and in the world in general.

Too many people conflate social media with technology more broadly and thus make the mistake of thinking that turning away from social media means becoming a luddite. You can escape the barrage of trolls and hottakes by turning off social media while still participating in the much smaller but saner tech landscape that remains.

[vitaflo]

Nothing wrong with being a Luddite these days. It’s the only way to not have your mind assaulted.

[KPGv2]

I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means. It doesn't mean "avoids specific new tech." It means "avoiding ALL new tech because new things are bad."

A luddite would refuse the covid vaccine. They'd refuse improved trains. They'd refuse EVs. etc. This is because ludditism is the blanket opposition to technological improvements.

[GuinansEyebrows]

you have completely misunderstood what it means to be a luddite.

the luddites were a labor movement opposed to the negative externalities imposed by rapid industrialization of formerly-craft/artisinal markets. it was a movement that stood for the protection of workers rights and the quality of goods produced; it was not opposed to new technologies. what it did oppose was the irresponsible use of those technologies at the expense of workers and consumers.

what you're referring to is probably more accurately described as primitivism.

[Forgeties79]

> I feel like you people are intentionally misconstruing what "Luddite" means.

That’s a very unfair accusation to throw at someone off the cuff. Anyway, what you wrote is not what a Luddite is at all, especially not the anti-vaccine accusation. I don’t think you’re being deliberately deceptive here, I think you just don’t know what a Luddite is (was).

For starters: They were not anti-science/medicine/all technology. They did not have “blanket opposition to all technological improvement.” You’re expressing a common and simplistic misunderstanding of the movement and likely conflating it with (an also flawed understanding of) the Amish.

They were, at their core, a response against industrialization that didn’t account for the human cost. This was at the start of the 19th century. They wanted better working conditions and more thoughtful consideration as industrialization took place. They were not anti-technology and certainly not anti-vaccine.

The technology they were talking about was mostly related to automation in factories which, coupled with anti-collective bargaining initiatives, led to further dehumanization of the workforce as well as all sorts novel and horrific workplace accidents for adults and children alike. Their call for “common sense laws” and “guardrails” are echoed today with how many of us talk about AI/LLM’s.

Great comic on this: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/

[sdoering]

> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite.

Then I am very proudly one. I don't do TikTok, FB, IG, LinkedIn or any of this crap. I do a bit of NH here and there. I follow a curated list of RSS feeds. And I twice a day look at a curated/grouped list of headlines from around the world, built from a multitude of sources.

Whenever I see a yellow press headline from the German bullshit print medium "BILD" when paying for gas or out shopping, I can't help but smile. That people pay money for that shit is - nowadays - beyond me.

To be fair. This was a long process. And I still regress sometimes. I started my working life at an editorial team for an email portal. Our job was to generate headlines that would stop people from logging in to read their mail and read our crap instead - because ads embedded within content were way better paid than around emails.

So I actually learned the trade. And learned that outrage (or sex) sells. This was some 18 or so years ago - the world changed since then. It became even more flammable. And more people seem to be playing with their matches. I changed - and changed jobs and industries a few times.

So over time I reduced my news intake. And during the pandemic learned to definitely reduce my social media usage - it is just not healthy for my state of mind. Because I am way to easily dopamine addicted and trigger-able. I am a classic xkcd.com/386 case.

[bigmeme]

> Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

Case in point: if you ask for expertise verification on HN you get downvoted. People would rather argue their point, regardless of validity. This site’s culture is part of the problem and it predates AI.

[vitaflo]

This has been going on since Usenet. Nothing new.

[b3lvedere]

Just twenty minutes ago i got a panic call that someone was getting dozens of messages that their virusscanner is not working and they have hundreds of viruses. By removing Google Chrome from sending messages to the Windows notification bar everything went back to normal on the computer.

Customer asked if reporting these kinds of illegal ads would be the best course. Nope, not by a long shot. As long as Google gets its money, they will not care. Ads have become a cancer of the internet.

Maybe i should setup a Pi-Hole business...

[bryanrasmussen]

If there was a GDPR type law for any company above a certain size (so as to only catch the big Ad networks) that allowed the propagation of "false" ads claiming security issues, monetary benefits or governmental services, then it could stop transmission of most of the really problematic ads, because any company the size of Google is also in the risk minimization business and they will set up a workflow to filter out "illegal" ads to at least a defensible level so they don't get fines that cost more than the ads pay.

Also can you set Windows not to allow Ads notifications through to the notification bar? If not that should also be a point of the law.

Now I bet somebody is going to come along and scold me for trying to solve social problems by suggesting laws be made.

[shadowgovt]

Not scold (that is how we shape social behavior), but only note that Safe Harbor essentially grants the opposite of this (away from the potential default of "By transiting malware you are complicit and liable in the effect of the malware") so it'd have to be a finely-crafted law to have the desired effect without shutting down the ability to do both online advertising and online forums at all.

... which doesn't sound impossible. It's also entirely possible that the value of Section 230 has run its course and it should generally be remarkably curtailed (its intent was to make online forums and user-generated-content networks, of which ad networks are a kind, possible, but one could make the case that it has been demonstrated that operators of online forums have immense responsibility and need to be held accountable for more of the harms done via the online spaces they set up).

[ericmcer]

People just need to have like a barebones understanding of: computer hardware level, OS level, browser level and how permissions work between the three.

If you have that you will never get scared by a popup in Chrome.

[lrvick]

If there are ad incentives, assume all content is fake by default.

On the actual open decentralized internet, which still exists, mastodon, IRC, matrix... bots are rare.

[tomaskafka]

That’s not because it’s decentralized or open, it’s because it doesn’t matter. If it was larger or more important, it would get run over by bots in weeks.

Any platform that wants to resist bots need to - tie personas to real or expensive identities - force people to add AI flag to AI content - let readers filter content not marked as AI - and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked, one strike and you are dead forever

The issue then becomes that marking someone as “posts unmarked AI content” becomes a weapon. No idea about how to handle it.

[Okawari]

It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.

There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.

[thesuitonym]

> I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.

[Okawari]

Yeah, you are right! I have started going down that road the last year or so, but mostly in the IRC sphere. I started hanging out libera.chat, but found a smaller community on irc.inthemansion.com which I really enjoy.

I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here

[lrvick]

https://hashbang.sh / #!:matrix.org

Been running for over 20 years and pick up new randos every day or two.

[KPGv2]

> It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).

[mycall]

It happens in some places like Russia (MAX App) or in China (WeChat/Alipay) but do we want to go down that authoritarian road?

[adzm]

You're describing Discord today

[Q6T46nT668w6i3m]

Bots are a major problem on Discord. I frequently receive messages to buy MMO gold.

[jayd16]

That's a flaw in the GP's plan, not a flaw in the observation that Discord is a good example of what they're asking for.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked,

It would certainly be fun to trick people I dislike into posting AI content unknowingly. Maybe it has to be so low-key that they aren't even banned on the first try, but that just seems ripe for abuse.

I want a solution to this problem too, but I don't think this is reasonable or practical. I do wonder what it would mean if, philosophically, there were a way to differentiate between "free speech" and commercial speech such that one could be respected and the other regulated. But if there is such a distinction I've never been able to figure it out well enough to make the argument.

[iso1631]

Usenet died partly due to the ads, and the inability for adblocking software at the time to keep up.

People left and never came back.

But those bots were certainly around in the 90s

[sigio]

Worst is... the bots, spam and ads are still there, even if there is no-one to read them. Usenet might still be alive (for piracy/binaries at least), and maybe a handfull of still-alive text-groups, but in the text-groups I used to read, it's nothing but a constant flow of spam since 15+ years.

[direwolf20]

Of course - because everyone is banned upon first suspicion.

[ryanjshaw]

I’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.

[raincole]

Those subreddits label content wrong all the time. Some of top commentors are trolling (I've seen one cooking video where the most voted comment is "AI, the sauce stops when it hits the plate"... as thick sauce should do.)

You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

[input_sh]

> Those subreddits label content wrong all the time.

Intentionally if I might add. Reddit users aren't particularly interested in providing feedback that will inevitably be used to make AI tools more convincing in the future, nobody's really moderating those subs, and that makes them the perfect target for poisoning via shitposting in the comments.

[immibis]

Also, most Reddit users are AI.

[ryanjshaw]

> You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

I don’t just look at the bot decision or accept every consensus blindly. I read the arguments.

If I watch a video and think it’s real and the comments point to the source, which has a description saying they use AI, how is that unreliable?

Alternatively, I watch a video and think it’s AI but a commenter points to a source like YT where the video was posted 5 years ago, or multiple similar videos/news articles about the weird subject of the video, how is that unreliable?

[butlike]

I don't understand. In the grandparent comment you say you have a problem spending too much time on those subreddits and watching too many of those videos, but then you push back here.

Personally, I don't think that behavior is very healthy, and the other parent comment suggested an easy "get out of jail free" way of not thinking about it anymore while also limiting anxiety: they're unreliable subreddits. I'd say take that advice and move on.

[iwontberude]

Which themselves are arguments from bots.

[bentcorner]

This itself could be a bot argument casting doubt on reddit. It's an endless cycle.

If bots reference real sources it's still a valid argument.

[lukan]

"I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth."

Some people, quite some time ago, also came to that conclusion. (And they did not even had AI to blame)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

[padjo]

I’m really hoping that we’re about to see an explosion in critical thinking and skepticism as a response to generative AI.

Any day now… right?

[ryanjshaw]

I show my young daughter this stuff and try to role model healthy skepticism. Critical thinking YT like Corridor Crew’s paranormal UFO/bigfoot/ghosts/etc series is great too. Peer pressure might be the deciding factor in what she ultimately chooses to believe, though.

[notarobot123]

I think the broader response and re-evaluation is going to take a lot longer. Children of today are growing up in an obviously hostile information environment whereas older folk are trying to re-calibrate in an environment that's changing faster than they are.

If the next generation can weather the slop storm, they may have a chance to re-establish new forms of authentic communication, though probably on a completely different scale and in different forms to the Web and current social media platforms.

[butlike]

Haha, AGI happens because some future generation just 'forgets' that it was all bullshit slop before

[efnx]

One can hope!

[lukan]

Yeah, one can. But then I see people just accepting the weak google search AI summary as plain facts and my hope fades away.

[lesam]

Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

[KPGv2]

Yeah this is what I always expected to happen. Cryptographic signing of source material so you can verify who the initial claimant is, and base credibility on the identity of that person.

[ekianjo]

It was always easy to fake photos too. Just organize the scene, or selectively frame what you want. There is no such thing as any piece of media you can trust.

[bandrami]

The construction workers having lunch on the girder in that famous photo were in fact about four feet above a safety platform; it's a masterpiece of framing and cropping. (Ironically the photographer was standing on a girder out over a hundred stories of nothing).

[wiz21c]

Although I do use the dead internet, I didn't see much of "fake news" like that...

[expedition32]

Ah yes the good old days of witch trials and pogroms.

I am no big fan of AI but misinformation is a tale as old as time.

[djeastm]

My favorite theory about those subreddits is that it's the AI companies getting free labeling from (supposed) authentic humans so they can figure out how to best tweak their models to fool more and more people.

[bradgessler]

What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?

[sheept]

a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

[eru]

> [...] and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

Why not? Surely you can ask your friendly neighbourhood AI to run a consistent channel for you?

[sheept]

AI is capable of consistent characters now, yes, but the platforms themselves provide little incentive to. TikTok/Instagram Reels are designed to serve recommendations, not a user-curated feed of people you follow, so consistency is not needed for virality

[cortesoft]

Or they are reposting other people's content

[vitaflo]

Sort by oldest. If the videos go back more than 3 years watch an old one. So many times the person narrating the old vids is nothing like the new vids and a dead ringer for AI. If the account is less than a year old, 100% AI.

[grugagag]

New AI narration is a dead giveaway to us but many people can’t tell they’re not listening to a human. It is very concerning.

[zahlman]

How can they look repetitive while being inconsistent? Do you mean in terms of presentation / "editing" style?

[phire]

I actually avoid most YouTube channels that upload too frequently. Especially with consistent schedules.

Even if I'm 100% certain it's not AI slop, it's still a very strong indicator that the videos are some kind of slop.

[grugagag]

Content farms, whether AI generated or not their incentive is to pump out low quality high output. Most of their content even it involves a human narrator are heavily packed with AI generated media.

[fallinditch]

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

[nicbou]

Some keyboards and operating systems — iOS is one of them — convert two dashes into an emdash.

[Sharlin]

And macOS, at least my keyboard layout, has both en and em dashes easily typeable with Alt+- and Alt+Shift+- respectively.

[JoeJonathan]

I use emdashes and endashes all the time—but maybe that's because I'm an academic?

[Sharlin]

I use them – well, mostly en dashes because that's the custom where I'm from – because I'm a bit of a typography nerd and have grown to dislike the barrenness of ASCII.

[Nevermark]

I can’t wait for my keyboard to start auto-completing “Your” with “are absolutely right!”

[nicbou]

In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones.

I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.

Very related: https://practicaltypography.com/

[Nevermark]

Agreed that is useful, despite the unintended consequences of dash meddling.

[lucumo]

Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.

Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.

[eks391]

I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.

[zahlman]

Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point.

Down with that foul fifth glyph! Down, I say!

[hardlianotion]

second vowel actually.

[agoodusername63]

Bet they asked an AI to make the bit work /s

[lucumo]

:-D

I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".

It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.

[PurelyApplied]

I apprEciatE your dEdication to ExclusivEly using 'e' in quotEd rEfErEncE, but not in thE rEst of your clEarly human-authorEd tExt.

I rEgrEt that I havE not donE thE samE, but plEase accEpt bad formatting as a countErpoint.

[throwaway290]

Finally a human in this forum. Many moons did I long for this contact.

(Assuming you did actually hand craft that I thumbs-up both your humor and industry good sir)

[mmarq]

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47342

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Disparition_(roman)

[Terr_]

nice try but u used caps and punctuation lol bot /s

[sqquima]

My AI generator loves to write ergo, concordantly, and vis-a-vis.

[quantummagic]

As they say, the demand for racism far outstrips the supply. It's hard to spend all day outraged if you rely on reality to supply enough fodder.

[InsideOutSanta]

This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies).

In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack one group of people, not realizing that you are making the issue worse by further escalating and blaming actual people, rather than realizing that the problem is systemic.

We have social networks like Facebook that require people to be angry, because anger generates engagement, and engagement generates views, and views generate ad impressions. We have outside actors who benefit from division, so they also fuel that fire by creating bot accounts that post inciting content. This has nothing to do with racism or people on one side. One second, these outside actors post a fake incident of a racist cop to fire up one side, and the next, they post a fake incident about schools with litter boxes for kids who identify as pets to fire up the other side.

Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division.

[DrScientist]

> Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division.

It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry.

People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the revenue is split between themselves and the platforms.

In my view if the platforms can't tackle this problem then the platforms should be shutdown - promoting this sort of material should be illegal, and it's not an excuse to say our business model won't work if we are made responsible for the things we do.

ie while it turns out you can easily scale one side of publishing ( putting stuff out their and getting paid by ads ), you can't so easily scale the other side of publishing - which is being responsible for your actions - if you haven't solved both sides you don't have a viable business model in my view.

[shadowgovt]

In social networks, revenue is enhanced by stickiness.

Anger increases stickiness. Once one discovers there are other people on the site, and they are guilty of being wrong on the internet, one is incentivized to correct them. It feels useful because it feels like you're generating content that will help other people.

I suspect the failure of the system that nobody necessarily predicted is that people seem to not only tolerate, but actually like being a little angry online all the time.

[groundzeros2015]

> it's built to optimise for revenue generation

I think blaming it all on money ignores that this also serve political goals.

Groups spend money to manipulate public opinion. It’s a goal in and of itself that has value rather than a money making scheme.

[DrScientist]

Sure -it's a mix - but to be honest I think it's over-emphasized - in that in the US most of that kind of money driving politics operates in plain sight.

For example, the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election, was I suspect mostly people trying to make money, and more importantly, was completely dwarfed by US direct political spending.

There is also a potentially equally, if not larger problem, in the politicisation of the 'anti-disinformation' campaigns.

To be honest I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between a grifter being directly paid to promote a certain point of view, and somebody being paid indirectly ( by ads ).

In both cases neither really believes in the political point they are making they are just following the money.

These platforms are enabling both.

[zahlman]

> In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack one group of people, not realizing that you are making the issue worse by further escalating and blaming actual people, rather than realizing that the problem is systemic.

I don't see anything like outrage in GP, just a vaguely implied sense of superiority (political, not racial!).

[groundzeros2015]

> outraged at people who think racism is a problem.

This is one level of abstraction more than I deal with on a normal day.

The fake video which plays into people’s indignation for racism, is actually about baiting people who are critical about being baited by racism?

[InsideOutSanta]

That's not what I said.

[blfr]

I agree with grandparent and think you have cause and effect backwards: people really do want to be outraged so Facebook and the like provide rage bait. Sometimes through algos tuning themselves to that need, sometimes deliberately.

But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.

I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.

The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@gossip.goblin

[InsideOutSanta]

> people really do want to be outraged

No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry."

But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry. Not because they desire to be angry, but because they feel that there is something happening in the world that is wrong and that they must fight.

[1]: for approximate values of "nobody"

[MontyCarloHall]

>Nobody wants to be angry.

I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?

[InsideOutSanta]

As someone who used to read some of these subreddits before they became swamped in AI slop, I did not go there to be angry but to be amused and/or find like-minded people.

[lazide]

If you think for a bit on what you just wrote, I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with what they wrote.

You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.

[quietbritishjim]

I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.

My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.

But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.

[InsideOutSanta]

There's a difference between wanting to be angry and feeling that anger is the correct response to an outside stimulus.

I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.

The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.

Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.

[RGamma]

You may be vastly overestimating average media competence. This is one of those things where I'm glad my relatives are so timid about the digital world.

[neilv]

I hadn't heard that saying.

Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive.

Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace.

In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available.

(Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't left when a black person doesn't get a job for "culture fit" gut feel reasons.)

Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered, with the goal of discrediting the position that the fake initially seemed to support.

(Famous alleged example, in second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )

[hn_throwaway_99]

I like that saying. You can see it all the time on Reddit where, not even counting AI generated content, you see rage bait that is (re)posted literally years after the fact. It's like "yeah, OK this guy sucks, but why are you reposting this 5 years after it went viral?"

[whattheheckheck]

Right... when you overhear the elderly in the gym locker rooms talk about "the Mexicans that keep moving in" yeah racism is so short in supply....

[watwut]

Wut? If you listen to what real people say, racism is quite common has all the power right now.

[silisili]

Rage sells. Not long after EBT changes, there were a rash of videos of people playing the person people against welfare imagine in their head. Women, usually black, speaking improperly about how the taxpayers need to take care of their kids.

Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. On one hand I admire the hustle for clicks. On the other, too many people fell for it and probably never knew it was a grift, making all recipients look bad. I only happened upon them researching a bit after my own mom called me raging about it and sent me the link.

[blks]

You sure about that? I think actions of the US administration together with ICE and police work provide quite enough

[pjc50]

Wrong takeaway. There are plenty of real incidents. The reason for posting fake incidents is to discredit the real ones.

[actionfromafar]

That's why this administration is working hard to fill the demand.

[verisimi]

Political!

[actionfromafar]

More like observation. Have you seen the videos DHS puts out?

[Fr0styMatt88]

I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3.

Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

[fsckboy]

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)

[Duanemclemore]

The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

[XorNot]

Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.

The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).

The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.

[bee_rider]

Is this—not an em-dash? On iOS I generated it by double tapping dash. I think there are more iOS users than AIs, although I could be wrong about that…

[Duanemclemore]

Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?

[root_axis]

The audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.

[dorfsmay]

For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...

[dragonwriter]

Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)

[D-Machine]

Thank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.

[kelvie]

Of note is theother terrible heuristic I've seen thrown around, where "emojis = AI", and now the "if you use not X, but Y = AI".

[bhaak]

With the right context both are pretty good actually.

I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.

[zahlman]

>I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

I see this way more often on GitHub now than I did before, though.

[wjholden]

Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.

[bee_rider]

Em-dashes are completely innocent. “Not X but Y” is some lame rhetorical device, I’m glad it is catching strays.

[icedchai]

When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.

[fuzzer371]

No one uses em dashes

[dragonwriter]

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.

[crimony]

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

[BLKNSLVR]

That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.

[robin_reala]

Option shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).

[leoc]

Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.

[Terr_]

Alt-0151 on the numpad in Windows.

Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.

Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.

[dboreham]

You can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.

[cwnyth]

Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.

[schrodinger]

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

[dboreham]

I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.

[rmunn]

Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).

[Finnucane]

Here is an image of the original manuscript page:

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893

Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.

[0xis]

When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.

[awakeasleep]

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

[amrocha]

My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.

[DocTomoe]

Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.

[account42]

Approximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.

[DocTomoe]

But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.

[SilverSlash]

I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.

[zdc1]

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc.

Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

[hattmall]

It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if not months. Youtube doesn't pay you out unless you are verified, so ban people posting AI and not disclosing it and the well will run dry quickly.

[esseph]

The Payoff from AI videos could get someone in the Whitehouse.

[Nevermark]

Well then email spam will never have an incentive. That is a relief! I was going to predict that someday people would start sending millions of misleading emails or texts!

[esseph]

I said something to a friend about this years ago with AI... We're going to stretch the legal and political system to the point of breaking.

[nottorp]

> eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content

You get it wrong. Real-world content will become indistinguishable from "AI" content because that's what people will consider normal.

[cubefox]

It's not a band-aid at all. In fact, recognition is nearly always algorithmically easier than creation. Which would mean fake-AI detectors could have an inherent advantage over fake-AI creators.

[munificent]

Would be nice, but unlikely given that they are going in the opposite direction and having YouTube silently add AI to videos without the author even requesting it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...

[ruperthair]

Wow! I hadn't seen this, thanks. Do you think they are doing it with relatively innocent motives?

[munificent]

I have no insight, but I assume they are doing it because they can use AI to make a few variations of a video and then automatically A/B test them to see which ones get more engagement, and then use that to make videos that are more engaging than what the author actually uploaded.

This is "innocent" if you accept that the author's goal is simplify to maximize engagement and YouTube is helping them do that. It's not if you assume the author wants users to see exactly what they authored.

[novok]

Eventually it will make everyone say that videos are fake because nobody trusts videos anymore. We will ironically be back to something like the 40s where security cameras didn't exist and photography was rare and relatively expensive. A strange kind of privacy.

[charles_f]

In reciprocity, my parents call "AI" anything they don't like or want to believe.

We truly live in wonderful times!

[alex1138]

Next step: find out whether Youtube will remove it if you point it out

Answer? Probably "of course not"

They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably

[hshdhdhj4444]

The problem’s gonna be when Google as well is plastered with fake news articles about the same thing. There’s very little to no way you will know whether something is real or not.

[ekianjo]

That was already the case for anything printed or written. You have no way of telling if this is true or not.

[josfredo]

I fail to understand your worry. This will change nothing regarding some people’s tendency to foster and exploit negative emotions for traction and money. “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness? You worry about what could happen but everything already has happened.

[acatton]

> “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness?

Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.

It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.

But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.

I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

[2] https://www.youtube.com/CaptainDisillusion

[SirMaster]

Seems rather simple to solve to me.

Just have video cameras (mostly phones these days) record a crypto hash into the video that the video sharing platforms read and display. That way we know a video was recorded with the uploader's camera and not just generated in a computer software.

There aren't that many big tech companies that are responsible for creating the devices people use to record and host the platforms and software that people use to play back the content.

[haxiomic]

The current situation is not as bad as it can get; this is accelerant on the fire and it can get a lot worse

[troupo]

I've been using "It will get worse before it gets worse" more and more lately

[Nevermark]

It really isn’t that slop didn’t exist before.

It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop.

There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up.

And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment for anyone trying to figure things out.

It isn’t the same staying the same. Nothing has ever stayed the same. “Staying the same” isn’t a thing in nature and hasn’t been the trend in human history.

[vladms]

True for videos, but not true for any type of "text claim", which were already plenty 10 years ago and they were already hard to fight (think: misquoting people, strangely referring to science article, dubiously interpreting facts, etc.).

But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.

If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.

[Nevermark]

You are right that text had this problem.

But today’s text manufacturing isn’t our grand.., well yesterday’s text manufacturing.

And pretty soon it will be very persuasive models with lots of patience and manufactured personalized credibility and attachment “helping” people figure out reality.

The big problem isn’t the tech getting smarter though.

It’s the legal and social tolerance for conflict of interests at scale. Like unwanted (or dark pattern permissioned) surveillance which is all but unavoidable, being used to manipulate feeds controlled by third parties (between us and any organic intentioned contacts), toward influencing us in any way anyone will pay for. AI is just walking through a door that has been left wide open despite a couple decades of hard lessons.

Incentives, as they say, matter.

Misinformation would exist regardless, but we didn’t need it to be a cornerstone business model with trillions of dollars of market cap unifying its globally coordinated efficient and effective, near unavoidable, continual insertion into our and our neighbors lives. With shareholders relentlessly demanding double digit growth.

Doesn’t take any special game theory or economic theory to see the problematic loop there. Or to predict it will continue to get worse, and will be amplified by every AI advance, as long as it isn’t addressed.

[jplusequalt]

>AI makes it easier

How many people were getting quote tweeted on Twitter with deep fake porn of them before Grok could remove the clothes off your person with a simple prompt?

[BrtByte]

It's sad, yeah. And exhausting. The fact that you felt something was off and took the time to verify already puts you ahead of the curve, but it's depressing that this level of vigilance is becoming the baseline just to consume media safely

[atomtamadas]

Humans have strong self preservation instincts so at some point they'll start to ignore the free internet content or treat it as no more than fiction. There might come the time when people will demand personal meetings for everything, kind of a return to nature because they won't trust anything that can be machine generated. In way that's positive as current trends of weakening deeper human connections will be reversed thanks to AI :)

[eudamoniac]

I think people will eventually learn to not trust any videos or stories they see online. I think the much bigger issue will be what happens when the LLM providers encode "alignment" into the models to insist on certain worldviews, opinions, or even falsehoods. Trust in LLMs and usage of them is increasing.

"Great question! No, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can I help with anything else?"

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

"Eventually" does alot of heavy lifting in your prediction. This is like saying that if you feed poison to panda bears, they will eventually become immune to poison. On what timescale though? 8 million years from now, if the species survived, and if I've been feeding that poison to each and every generation... sure.

If I just feed it to 10 pandas, today, they're all dead.

And I suspect that humanity's position in this analogy is far closer to the latter than the former.

[eudamoniac]

People stopped falling for photoshopped pictures and staged Chinese reels pretty quickly. I think people will pretty quickly decide anything outrageous is probably AI. And by people I mean the right half of the bell curve, which is all you can hope for. The left half will have problems in the world as they always have.

[TiredOfLife]

You don't need AI for that.

https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

[mlrtime]

There are top posts daily of either 100% false images or very doctored images to portray a narrative (usually political or social) on reddit.

Then the comments are all usually not critical of the image but to portray the people supporting the [fake] image as being in a cult. It's wild!

[theptip]

> Will create

As others have noted, it’s a long-term trend - agree that as you note it’ll get worse. The Russian psy-ops campaigns from the Internet Research Agency during Trump #1 campaign being a notable entry, where for example they set up both fake far-left and far-right protest events on FB and used these as engagement bait on the right/left. (I’m sure the US is doing the same/worse to their adversaries too.)

Whatever fraction bots play overall, it has to be way higher for political content given the power dynamics.

[phatfish]

Google is complicit in this sort of content by hosting it no questions asked. They will happily see society tear itself apart if they are getting some as revenue. Same as the other social media companies.

And yes I know the argument about Youtube being a platform it can be used for good and bad. But Google control and create the algorithm and what is pushed to people. Make it a dumb video hosting site like it used to be and I'll buy the "bad and good" angle.