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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

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.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
alex1138 8mo ago
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
Fr0styMatt88 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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)
  - root_axis 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...
    - dragonwriter 8mo ago
      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.)
  - fuzzer371 8mo ago
    No one uses em dashes
    - awakeasleep 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
        My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.
    - rmunn 8mo ago
      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-not-stop-for-death-479 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).
sheept 8mo ago
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
- cortesoft 8mo ago
  Or they are reposting other people's content
- eru 8mo ago
  > [...] 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 8mo ago
    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
- fallinditch 8mo ago
  A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!
  - lucumo 8mo ago
    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.
    - Terr_ 8mo ago
SilverSlash 8mo ago
I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.
- munificent 8mo ago
  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-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
  - ruperthair 8mo ago
    Wow! I hadn't seen this, thanks. Do you think they are doing it with relatively innocent motives?
    - munificent 8mo ago
      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.
- zdc1 8mo ago
  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.
  - esseph 8mo ago
hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  That was already the case for anything printed or written. You have no way of telling if this is true or not.
quantummagic 8mo ago
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.
- Refreeze5224 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - theteapot 8mo ago
    I'm noticing more of these race baiting comments on YC too lately. AI?
    - ycombinator_acc 8mo ago
      No, that’s a common cope. Not AI. Not bots. Not Indians or Pakistanis. Not Kremlin or Hasbara agents. All the above might comprise a small percentage of it, but the vast majority of the rage bait and rage bait support we’ve seen over the past year+ on the Internet (including here) is just westerners being (allowed and encouraged by each other to be) racist toward non-whites in various ways.
      - theteapot 8mo ago
        How's your day been?
- neilv 8mo ago
  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#Accusations_of_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )
TiredOfLife 8mo ago
You don't need AI for that. https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
ryanjshaw 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    > 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 8mo ago
      Also, most Reddit users are AI.
  - ryanjshaw 8mo ago
    > 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?
    - 8mo ago
josfredo 8mo ago
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.
- haxiomic 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    I've been using "It will get worse before it gets worse" more and more lately
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
phatfish 8mo ago
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.
BrtByte 8mo ago
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
lrvick 8mo ago
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.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Of course - because everyone is banned upon first suspicion.
- tomaskafka 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
    - adzm 8mo ago
      You're describing Discord today
      - 8mo ago
mlrtime 8mo ago
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!
b3lvedere 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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).
spicyusername 8mo ago
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.
- gooob 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
  - baubino 8mo ago
    > 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.
  - 8mo ago
eudamoniac 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  "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 8mo ago
    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.
charles_f 8mo ago
In reciprocity, my parents call "AI" anything they don't like or want to believe. We truly live in wonderful times!
theptip 8mo ago
> 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.
novok 8mo ago
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.
atomtamadas 8mo ago
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 :)

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

alex1138 8mo ago

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

Fr0styMatt88 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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)
- root_axis 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...
  - dragonwriter 8mo ago
    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.)
- fuzzer371 8mo ago
  No one uses em dashes
  - awakeasleep 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.
  - rmunn 8mo ago
    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-not-stop-for-death-479 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).

sheept 8mo ago

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

cortesoft 8mo ago
Or they are reposting other people's content
eru 8mo ago
> [...] 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 8mo ago
  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
fallinditch 8mo ago
A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!
- lucumo 8mo ago
  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.
  - Terr_ 8mo ago

SilverSlash 8mo ago

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

munificent 8mo ago
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-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...
- ruperthair 8mo ago
  Wow! I hadn't seen this, thanks. Do you think they are doing it with relatively innocent motives?
  - munificent 8mo ago
    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.
zdc1 8mo ago
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.
- esseph 8mo ago

hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
That was already the case for anything printed or written. You have no way of telling if this is true or not.

quantummagic 8mo ago

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.

Refreeze5224 8mo ago
[flagged]
- theteapot 8mo ago
  I'm noticing more of these race baiting comments on YC too lately. AI?
  - ycombinator_acc 8mo ago
    No, that’s a common cope. Not AI. Not bots. Not Indians or Pakistanis. Not Kremlin or Hasbara agents. All the above might comprise a small percentage of it, but the vast majority of the rage bait and rage bait support we’ve seen over the past year+ on the Internet (including here) is just westerners being (allowed and encouraged by each other to be) racist toward non-whites in various ways.
    - theteapot 8mo ago
      How's your day been?
neilv 8mo ago
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#Accusations_of_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )

TiredOfLife 8mo ago

You don't need AI for that. https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

ryanjshaw 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  > 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 8mo ago
    Also, most Reddit users are AI.
- ryanjshaw 8mo ago
  > 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?
  - 8mo ago

josfredo 8mo ago

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.

haxiomic 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  I've been using "It will get worse before it gets worse" more and more lately
Nevermark 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.

phatfish 8mo ago

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.

BrtByte 8mo ago

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

lrvick 8mo ago

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.

direwolf20 8mo ago
Of course - because everyone is banned upon first suspicion.
tomaskafka 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
  - adzm 8mo ago
    You're describing Discord today
    - 8mo ago

mlrtime 8mo ago

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!

b3lvedere 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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).

spicyusername 8mo ago

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.

gooob 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
- baubino 8mo ago
  > 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.
- 8mo ago

eudamoniac 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
"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 8mo ago
  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.

charles_f 8mo ago

In reciprocity, my parents call "AI" anything they don't like or want to believe. We truly live in wonderful times!

theptip 8mo ago

> 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.

novok 8mo ago

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.

atomtamadas 8mo ago

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 :)