Title: AITAH for calling out my [Friend/Husband/Wife/Mom/Dad/Son/Daughter/X-In-Law] after [He/She] did [Undeniably something outrageous that anyone with an IQ above 80 should know its unacceptable to do]?
Body of post:
[5-15 paragraph infodumping that no sane person would read]
I told my friend this and they said I’m an asshole. AITAH?
Comments:
Comment 1: NTA, you are abosolutely right, you should [Divorce/Go No-Contact/Disown/Unfriend, the person] IMMEDIATELY. Don’t walk away, RUNNN!!!
Comment 2: NTA, call the police! That’s totally unacceptable!
And sometimes you get someone calling out OP… 3: Wait, didn’t OP also claim to be [Totally different age and gender and race] a few months ago? Heres the post: [Link]
I was born before the Internet. The Internet is always lumped into the "entertainment" part of my brain. A lot of people that have grown up knowing only the Internet think the Internet is much more "real". It's a problem.
I've come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:
Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics
Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input
Category 3: IRL Other people's words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations
Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telegrams, etc...
Category 5: The General Internet
The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.
I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I'm gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea).
I genuinely miss the 90s. I mean, yeah, early forms of internet and computers existed, but not everyone had a camera, and not everyone got absolutely bukkaked with disinformation. Not that I think everything is bad about the tech in of itself, but how we use it nowadays is just so exhausting.
Man, sometimes when I finish grabbing something I needed from Reddit, I hit the frontpage (always logged out) just out of morbid curiosity. Every single time that r/AmIOverreacting sub is there with the most obvious "no, you're not" situation ever.
I never once seen that sub show up before the exodus. AI or not, I refuse to believe any frontpage posts from that sub are anything other than made up bullshit.
If it's well-written enough to be entertaining, it doesn't even matter whether it's real or not. Something like it almost certainly happened to someone at some point.
I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Reddit (at least for a while). My tipping point has become how the "drone" story is becoming popular. At first it was intriguing and mysterious (the airport shutdowns and reports of large vehicles at low levels was fascinating), but I'm getting the vibe it's a misinformation campaign to distract the US from how we are about to be changed.
I was actually permabanned in the "News" sub for an innocuous comment. All it was is that I noted the federal authorities are likely correct for saying most of the reports of "UFOs" are likely airplanes and manmade drones, and to play devil's advocate I mentioned there were likely legitimate reports of UAPs, but since the majority were probably mistaken planes the Federal agencies' reactions were technically truthful.
Look at that, the detection heuristics all laid out nice and neatly. The only issue is that Reddit doesn't want to detect bots because they are likely using them. Reddit at one point was using a form of bot protection but it wasn't for posts; instead, it was for ad fraud.
I wonder where people in the future will get their information from. What trustworthy sources of information are there? If the internet is overrun with bots, then you can't really trust anything you read there, as it could all be propaganda. What else to do, though, to get your news?
I dunno, part of me is ok with it. It's clear to me how bad things are going to get. So having certain platforms or spaces with some level of public identity validation seems like it might be ok....
Especially when it's about gathering real information. When everything you read is written by an anonymous author, you'd have no chance to know whether it's true or wrong, except if it's a paper on theoretical maths of course.
Yeah, a real problem solver would probably be to remove the incentive for someone to do this.
It would probably be far less likely for someone to do that on lemmy, as there is no karma and you dont get paid for upvotes or something. (Still there are incentives, like creating credibility, celebrity accounts, maybe influence public opinion, self-pleasure from seeing upvotes to "your" posts/comments etc., but they arent such potent incetives as directly monetary incetives.)
You don't think that commercial products can't get good (or bad) coverage in a place like this? In any discussion of hardware, software (including, for example, video games), cars, books, movies, television, etc., there's plenty of profit motive behind getting people interested in things.
There are already popular and unpopular things here. Some of those things are pretty far removed from a direct profit motive (Linux, Star Trek memes, beans). But some are directly related to commercial products being sold now (current video games and the hardware to run them, specific types of devices from routers to CPUs to televisions to bicycles or even cars and trucks, movies, books, etc.).
Not to mention the political motivations to influence on politics, economics, foreign affairs, etc. There's lots of money behind trying to convince people of things.
As soon as a thread pops up in a search engine it's fair game for the bots to find it, and for that platform to be targeted by humans who unleash bots onto that platform. Lemmy/Mastodon aren't too obscure to notice.
This is the whole reason that I discovered and came to Lemmy. Reddit is literally 90% bots, from the posts, to the filtering, to the censoring, to outright banning. It's a mess.
In the age of A/B testing and automated engagement, I have to wonder who is really getting played? The people reading the synthetically generated bullshit or the people who think they're "getting engagement" on a website full of bots and other automated forms of engagement cultivation.
How much of the content creator experience is itself gamed by the website to trick creators into thinking they're more talented, popular, and well-received than a human audience would allow and should therefore keep churning out new shit for consumption?
It's ultimately about ad money. They haven't cared it's humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It's bizarre.
It's pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.
It’s stupidly easy to make up stuff on AITA and get upvotes/comments. I made up one just for fun and was surprised at how popular it got. Well, now not so much, but back when I did.
If you know the audience and what gets them upset, you’ve got easy karma farming.
It's like reality TV & soap operas in text form.
You can somewhat easily spot the AI posts though, which are plentiful now. They all tend to have the same "professional" writing style and a high tendency to add mid sentence "quotes" and em dashes (—) which you need a numpad combo to actually write out manually - a casual write-up would just use the - symbols, if at all. LLMs also make a lot of logic errors that may pop up. Example from one of the currently highly upvoted posts:
He pulled out what looked like a box from a special jewelry store. My heart raced with excitement as I assumed it was a lovely bracelet or a special memento for our wedding day. But when he opened the box, I was absolutely stunned. Inside was a key to a house he supposedly bought for us. I was taken aback because I had no idea he was even looking for real estate. My first reaction was one of shock and confusion, as I thought it was a huge decision that we should have discussed together.
As I processed the moment, I realized the house wasn’t just any house—it was a fixer-upper on the outskirts of town. Now, I get that it can be a great investment, but this particular house needed a ton of work. I’m talking major renovations and repairs, and I honestly had no desire to live there.
Aside from the weird writing (Oh jolly! Expensive gifts! How exciting!), this lady somehow realized & identified this house, location and its state just by looking at some random key in that moment. Bonus frustration if you read through the comments who eat all of this shit up, assuming they aren't also bots.
Interesting observation about the em dash. I never thought about it that hard, but reddit's text editor (as well as Lemmy's, at least on the default UI) automatically concatenate a double dash into an en dash, rather than an em dash.
I use em dashes (well, en dashes, as above) in my writing all the time, because I am a nerd.
For anyone who cares, an en dash is the same width as an N in typical typography, and looks like this: --
An em dash is, to no one's surprise, the same with as an M. It looks like this: —
(For what it's worth, Lemmy does not concatenate a triple dash into an em dash. It turns it into a horizontal rule instead.)
Two weeks ago someone on one of those story subs, I think it was amioverreacting, was milking off karma making updates. They made 5 posts about the whole thing and even started to sell merch to profit in real life until they took the last post down.
The truly valuable data is the stuff that was created prior to LLMs, anything after this is tainted by slop. Any verifiable human data would be worth more, which is why they are simultaneously trying to erode any and all privacy
These days the LLMs feed the LLMs so you can model models unless you're excluding any public data from the last decade. You have to assume all public data based on users is tainted when used for training.
Tbh, I see how this can be really good for people. We can never again believe that what apples are saying online is really representative of the general population. It never has been, but now we have a really solid reason to dispel the belief that doesn't require much explanation.
That said, we'll need to combat this with more right knit communities where people can better identify themselves as human. Captcha doesn't do that, but the Goth girls on VF so long ago had it figured out. We gotta do proper "salutes".