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0 pointsnoduerme4mo ago0 comments

Let's think about this algorithmically.

If something "floods the zone with shit," it needs S amount of shit to cause a flood. But too much will eventually make the scam ineffectual. Widespread public distrust for the scam is (S+X)/time where X is the extra amount of shit beyond the minimum needed. Time is a global variable constrained by the rate at which people get burned or otherwise catch on to all other scams of the same variety. If we imagine that time-to-distrust shrinks with each new iteration of shit, then X the amount of excessive shit needed to trigger distrust should decrease over time.

The longer term problem is the externality where nothing is trusted, and the whole zone is destroyed. When that zone was "what someone wrote down that Socrates might have said," or "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," or "emails from unknown senders," that was one thing. A new baseline could be set for 'S'. When it's all writing, all art, all music and all commentary on those things, it seems catastrophic. The whole cave is flooded with shit.

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tsimionescu4mo ago

> When it's all writing, all art, all music and all commentary on those things, it seems catastrophic. The whole cave is flooded with shit.

But writing in itself has been obviously untrustworthy since it started existing - something being written down doesn't in any way make it trustworthy. The fact that audio recording, photography, and video enjoyed this undeserved reputation of being inherently trustworthy was an accident of technology, and has come to an end.

Just like with writing, though, this doesn't signal a real problem of any kind. You should still only trust writing, audio, or video based on the source - as you always should have. All that's ending is the era of putting undue trust in audio/video from untrusted sources.

Of course, the big problems will be in the transition period, when most people still think they can trust these sources, or will think they can't trust actually trustable sources instead. But this will be temporary as things readjust.

And again, audio and video have been untrustworthy for a long time, for sensitive things. You should not have trusted video in itself even in the 40s - 50s, and audio and photos probably even in the 1910s were already somewhat easily manipulated. And this is even true in a legal context - audio or video evidence is not evidence in itself, it is only part of a witness testimony who can attest to the provenance and veracity.

noduermeOP4mo ago

Quantity and velocity of misinformation are both critical variables here.

Any one person's writing was always untrustworthy, but the majority of that bad writing didn't make it to a printing press, nor was it mass-distributed.

Let's accept the proposition that all forms of media have always been full of lies. We can say that debunking always follows lies, truth spreads more slowly than fiction. The quantity and velocity of additional misinformation - especially when machines are involved in writing infinite amounts of it in the blink of an eye - lays waste to the normal series of events where a lie can be followed by a debunking with linear speed and velocity. With LLMs and social media manipulation, falsehoods gain traction exponentially while truths remain linear.

There is likely not a "transition period" where people will adjust to this, precisely because there is no mechanism to inform them they're being swindled and screwed faster than the takeoff of the algorithms that are now screwing them.

tsimionescu4mo ago

The total amount of generated untrustworthy content is irrelevant. People must learn to only read content from trusted sources, and then it won't matter how much misinformation is being published in other places.

It was never difficult to publish large amounts of misinformation, AI is only making it cheaper.

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0 pointsnoduerme4mo ago0 comments

Let's think about this algorithmically.

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tsimionescu4mo ago

> When it's all writing, all art, all music and all commentary on those things, it seems catastrophic. The whole cave is flooded with shit.

noduermeOP4mo ago

Quantity and velocity of misinformation are both critical variables here.

Any one person's writing was always untrustworthy, but the majority of that bad writing didn't make it to a printing press, nor was it mass-distributed.

tsimionescu4mo ago

It was never difficult to publish large amounts of misinformation, AI is only making it cheaper.

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