There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.
It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare.
There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected world? The best arguments from both sides proliferate, thereby causing "The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread".
I would expect a figurative war for human attention. With so much information being available, everyone would try to make people focus on what they want to communicate.
> The best arguments
Some of these tropes and arguments aren't really the best. There's a lot of rhetorical gotchas, e.g. "that's exactly what I'd expect from a human" when an automated solution isn't up to par.
> from both sides
The only real "side" is the one actively pushing for something. Everyone else isn't a camp - they're just random people.
How does this relate to online commenting? Are you expecting the "figurative war for human attention" to make comments more diverse?
>Some of these tropes and arguments aren't really the best. There's a lot of rhetorical gotchas, e.g. "that's exactly what I'd expect from a human" when an automated solution isn't up to par.
I think you're overestimating the epistemic rigor of the average internet commenter, eternal September, etc.
>The only real "side" is the one actively pushing for something
Are you implying the "astroturfing" is only on one side? If you might just be experiencing motivated reasoning and/or confirmation bias. Most of the astroturfing behavior can be applied to the anti-AI side as well, eg. people complaining about electricity or water consumption in every thread about the impacts of AI, or "ai slop".
This phenomenon appears to be incrementally coming for every single topic and public platform.
I literally ask it to look for something, and immediately afterwards (before reading the long-winded result), ask it if the results were real or fabricated. It's just how the cost-benefit analysis works out, and I didn't learn until a ton of times reading the results, getting suspicious of a few, doing websearches to verify them, not finding them, then coming back to ask if they were real.
"Sorry! It's absolutely fair that you called me out on that... It's important that you hold me to a high standard... You're absolutely right..."
I'm finding it valuable for compressing all of the docs in the world, so I don't have to look up what a function does or how to accomplish something in some framework or CLI. I find it capable of writing code if I move an inch at a time; build copious verbose debugging output that I feed back into it every time it screws up; and when it goes into a stupid loop being stupid, just debugging by hand before wasting hours trying to get it to see something that it doesn't want to see.
Need to double check what is available, though I feel like that angle could work.
I’ve been wondering also if a simple lie & deception detection type system could be a useful angles. It’s complicated in practice; though the human intuition would say it’s figured this out millennia ago- I can’t tell you how many times my body has figured out someone’s toxic negative vibe by feeling. And I think we probably understand this better than we think and can represent it in the computer space with analysis of signals and some follow on questions. Hope I’m not too naive here.
[0] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-tools-for-humanit... and the feature piece at https://time.com/7288387/sam-altman-orb-tools-for-humanity/
It's against the HN guidelines to insinuate that astroturfing happens on HN.
I was surveilled, experimented on and followed by them for being American-Pakistani and speaking out against them from 2022-2023. It was a scary time and I wish I were making this up. I wonder sometimes if they really are the good guys, and I just got things backwards. I also heard when you are kidnapped and in hostile territories for long enough, you fall in love with the kidnappers.
Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious.
(It's interesting that conservatives saw it as a partisan cause.)
Every propagandistic argument is going to be like that for 80% of people, and 40% of people are going to be within that 80% about 99% of the time. They think the biggest issue of our time is how much people complain.
their landing page stops short of saying that Doublespeed would be "a good fit for your political campaign." I'd prefer fighting an AI-powered drone over becoming a victim of "Dead Internet-aaS" startup. at least, flying lawnmowers are honest
I think everyone would agree with this but is there any formal evidence of how Twitter and TikTok affect elections or legislation?