handoferis

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One of the things that have bothered me for a while now, are artificial forums.
I can't find an example to save my life now, but I bet some of you already came in contact of what I am talking about: it's basically a forum, like Agora, but where ALL the threads and posts are fake, in the sense that they are always copied from somewhere else, like a 4shits thread.
The architecture of the site differs from a imageboard, because they have users and post counters, threads, forums and subforums, but the content is 100% artificial.

I don't know why someone would make something like that, and what they stand to gain from it, but there are hundreds of sites like that and it unnerves me.
You sure this isn't just a dead forum that was once active? One of the forums I frequent went without mods for a while because it was bought by an 'e-assets' company (vom). In that time, it was flooded with bots copying >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk posts and posting them into threads, then later coming back and editing links into the posts.

If the forum hadn't been active it would have been flooded with that shit in short order.
 
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magnificat

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the fake forum sounds like a great scam to sell ads
 

Vrashzt

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Yeah, now that you have said it they are definitely ad traps, nothing suspicious at all.
Still, one would think that there would be a better way to get that sweet ad revenue...
 

Andy Kaufman

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Iommi Fan 420

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Found this AI generated website in the first result of brave search. I was trying to find this original article 287417262_2236665889822382_4263568551991084040_n.jpeg
Clearly I mustn't type too good because I found the gibberish version
Screenshot 2022-06-11 at 6.03.28 pm.png
Whole website is AI generated. nearly 17,000 pages of ten posts each since August last year. They released multiple articles while I was poking around.
Screenshot 2022-06-11 at 6.12.42 pm.png
So i guess this is further proof of this theory.
Pretty freaky shit
 

Quinault Victory

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They are always called eg "John Smith" rather than "xxxPussySlayer69xxx".
'member how both Google and Facebook spent years pushing contentious "real name policies" on their users to condition them to this? People would notice obvious patterns if fake accounts tried to generate oldschool-style pseudonyms, but nobody questions @FirstnameLastnames with selfie avatars.
 

Andy Kaufman

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YouTube removed the function to search by oldest videos.
 
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Fractalactals

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'member how both Google and Facebook spent years pushing contentious "real name policies" on their users to condition them to this? People would notice obvious patterns if fake accounts tried to generate oldschool-style pseudonyms, but nobody questions @FirstnameLastnames with selfie avatars.
Even more so with AI generated selfie/portrait photos for the bot accounts, since they are in thumbnail size or smaller any imperfections will be hidden and only scrupulous users will look into it.
Nowadays the AI generation is so good even those small quirks aren't an issue.
It's over.


I wonder how this data was gathered. Does it mean that human traffic is just sending an email, using a web browser or app on people's smartphones? How does my own curl script batch count here? How does the traffic generated by applications sharing data count here? Or is this posts on social media and websites done by humans vs bots?
 

Andy Kaufman

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Anon feeds >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk AI generated "am I the asshole" stories.
I already posted my stance on the dead internet theory ITT which is more of a misunderstanding of most of the net now just being hidden/hard to find because of the tech giant's frontend algorithms.

But with this ChatGP shit we might head into the actual dead internet.
 
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PizzaW0lf

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Anon feeds >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk AI generated "am I the asshole" stories.
I already posted my stance on the dead internet theory ITT which is more of a misunderstanding of most of the net now just being hidden/hard to find because of the tech giant's frontend algorithms.

But with this ChatGP shit we might head into the actual dead internet.
This is the moment where we need to find something completely new. How do we go beyond the internet?
 
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mydadiscar

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Anon feeds >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk AI generated "am I the asshole" stories.
I already posted my stance on the dead internet theory ITT which is more of a misunderstanding of most of the net now just being hidden/hard to find because of the tech giant's frontend algorithms.

But with this ChatGP shit we might head into the actual dead internet.
Fuck, I was in a couple of those threads, amusing but scary how much traction those posts got. ChatGTP is bound to be the tip of the iceberg also, more complex private versions are bound to exist currently. When the Turing test is brought up people love to point at how AI chat bots are just really good at constant redirection and avoidance, but how do these tactics really differ from the average internet user, especially in shorter posts expected of most social media?
 
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power gem

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relevant to this thread: CNET is now letting an AI write articles for its site. The problem? It's kind of a moron.

Last week, we reported that the prominent technology news site CNET had been quietly publishing articles generated by an unspecified "AI engine." The news sparked outrage. Critics pointed out that the experiment felt like an attempt to eliminate work for entry-level writers, and that the accuracy of current-generation AI text generators is notoriously poor. The fact that CNET never publicly announced the program, and that the disclosure that the posts were bot-written was hidden away behind a human-sounding byline — "CNET Money Staff" — made it feel as though the outlet was trying to camouflage the provocative initiative from scrutiny.

[...]

But we couldn't help but notice that one of the very same AI-generated articles that Guglielmo highlighted in her post makes a series of boneheaded errors that drag the concept of replacing human writers with AI down to earth.

Take this section in the article, which is a basic explainer about compound interest (emphasis ours):

"To calculate compound interest, use the following formula:

Initial balance (1+ interest rate / number of compounding periods) ^ number of compoundings per period x number of periods

For example, if you deposit $10,000 into a savings account that earns 3% interest compounding annually, you'll earn $10,300 at the end of the first year."

It sounds authoritative, but it's wrong. In reality, of course, the person the AI is describing would earn only $300 over the first year. It's true that the total value of their principal plus their interest would total $10,300, but that's very different from earnings — the principal is money that the investor had already accumulated prior to putting it in an interest-bearing account.

It's a dumb error, and one that many financially literate people would have the common sense not to take at face value. But then again, the article is written at a level so basic that it would only really be of interest to those with extremely low information about personal finance in the first place, so it seems to run the risk of providing wildly unrealistic expectations — claiming you could earn $10,300 in a year on a $10,000 investment — to the exact readers who don't know enough to be skeptical.

Another error in the article involves the AI's description of how loans work. Here's what it wrote (again, emphasis ours):

"With mortgages, car loans and personal loans, interest is usually calculated in simple terms.

For example, if you take out a car loan for $25,000, and your interest rate is 4%, you'll pay a flat $1,000 in interest per year."

Again, the AI is writing with the panache of a knowledgeable financial advisor. But as a human expert would know, it's making another ignorant mistake.

What it's bungling this time is that the way mortgages and auto loans are typically structured, the borrower doesn't pay a flat amount of interest per year, or even per monthly payment. Instead, on each successive payment they owe interest only on the remaining balance. That means that toward the beginning of the loan, the borrower pays more interest and less principal, which gradually reverses as the payments continue.

The problem with this description isn't just that it's wrong. It's that the AI is eliding an important reality about many loans: that if you pay them down faster, you end up paying less interest in the future. In other words, it's feeding terrible financial advice directly to people trying to improve their grasp of it.

[...]

"Over time, we should expect more consumer websites to feature this kind of 'gray' material: good-enough AI writing, lightly reviewed (but not always) by human editors, will take over as much of digital publishing as readers will tolerate," Newton wrote. "The quiet spread of AI kudzu vines across CNET is a grim development for journalism, as more of the work once reserved for entry-level writers building their resumes is swiftly automated away."
 
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Szurlk367

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For some People the Internet is just Tik Tok Youtube Instagram Facebook only very few are interested in exploring and going Deep in the Rabbit Hole thats why the Internet feels dead most People are not interested in exploring more in 2006 or 2007 the Internet felt more alive because it was new most People discovered the Internet at that time now its not new anymore