[K0balt]

I was wandering around the carcass of Reddit the other day, and it’s crazy how it’s like 70 percent AI now commenting to each other in a lot of subs that used to be at least nominally interesting… and then a few clueless humans getting all riled up with an AI lol.

They’re getting 200m a year to share that garbage pit with ai training.

[arw0n]

Reddit was already heavily astroturfed before AI. There's no space on the internet where you can get as much bang for a buck with an influence campaign due to its centralized frontpage. The most obvious example is /r/worldnews, with millions of readers, a few thousand commenters and maybe 40k voters. To skew any discussion, you need at most 6k accounts, and that's giving you the kind of influence on American politics as would the frontpage of the NYT. You could hire real people for each account, and it would still be worth it.

[dijit]

I'm wondering how it goes with a lot of social media actually.

There were problems with the "algorithm"[0] before being intentionally gamed... but I feel like it's easier than ever to have an army of bots intentionally pointing a conversation.

I'll give you a brief example (we should not debate this case on HN but I'm talking specifically about a hypothesis that can be drawn).

In the UK, the streets are alight with the news of the murder of a young white boy at the hands of a Sikh boy. In the UK, historically, the Sikh community has been seen as a bit of an outlier in terms of how well they integrated and how tolerant they are. They are, for all intents and purposes "model immigrants".

The issue was, when the police were called to the scene of the stabbing, they immediately arrested the barely conscious boy on the ground, who had been stabbed and was bleeding from the mouth- handcuffing him and dismissing his pleas on the basis that he might have been making racist remarks.

The people in my circles are furious at the police for doing this.

However, it seems like there is an army of bots who keep trying to paint it as if it's a problem with Sikhs, or that their religious rights were the problem.

(for context, British law permits baptised Sikhs to carry a dull Kirpan knife - but this knife was not used for the incident above, it was a separate and still illegal knife to carry).

So now, online, instead of people talking about police indifference or the issues we have when we see race before trying to assess the situation: we are instead caught in a conversation about banning Kirpans for Sikhs (they have never been used in any crime from what I can tell) or how the Sikhs should feel bad or whatever.

Which is wonderful for a politician who wants to dismiss the criticism against the police as racism, but not so good for holding the police and media to account for the situation and the attempted coverup.

By being able to control the aggression, they are able to control the response, which drowns everything else out, and with LLMs the barrier is stupidly low to do this.

Creating division for your own reasons has never been cheaper or easily accessible.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...

[airstrike]

The police immediately arrested the barely conscious boy because the killer's brother called the police saying his brother had been attacked.

[dijit]

I think you missed the part of this where I talked about specifically not litigating this case on this forum.

I was gesturing that the sentiment online is being reframed from one of the police handling of the situation (whatever the outcome you personally think it should have gone down as) and the media coverage- to instead the "issue" of Sikhism and religious rights in the kingdom, despite those aspects playing literally no role in the situation that transpired.

I was speaking specifically about how little cost it is to do this reframing now.

[airstrike]

I don't care whether you're litigating it or not, I care about reporting the facts so that whoever reads the thread is better inform than they would be otherwise

[dijit]

There’s a bunch of conflicting information, for example your fact would be further clarified by saying:

A) He was described by the father of the killer as having a mouthful of blood when police arrived (per bodycam footage).

B) He stated he could not breathe 9 times and that he had been stabbed 5 times (as per bodycam footage)

C) He was immobilised

D) During the 999 call an ambulance was requested. (as per the recording to 999)

His statements were dismissed by police and he was handcuffed before any later assessment of his claims, the handling of the officer greatly accelerated the death of Nowak (as per the coroner report).

[airstrike]

Great, thanks for sharing all of that.

I'm not excusing the police's behavior, I just wanted to clarify they didn't assume the victim was the killer for no reason.