How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Glad to know you’re still kicking, but, to be honest, I had no idea that you were supposed to be an ex-Stoll.
Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: one day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage.
Clifford Stoll already got his klein bottle fame. The prize would need a different gimmick — maybe a signed copy of The Cuckoo's Egg with a post-it saying "told you so."
Great to hear. Read Cuckoo's Egg in the 90s, was the first time I heard of the NSA (I'm neither resident nor citizen of the US, so I don't know how famous they were at the time).
Are you considering annotating the Cuckoo's Egg? For example with official documents from FOIA requests?
We ran into this with a product description that got AI-hallucinated into something wrong, then spread across three review sites. Took months to clean up. Repetition really does equal truth now.
AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.
I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.
It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.
You betcha, Aurornis. Simple economics tells us that cheap work drives out quality. (Is that Gresham's law?).
Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.
Gresham's Law is about currency specifically, but the analogy holds. The coffee thing is underrated though -- I've learned more from one good conversation than months of scrolling feeds optimized to keep me engaged.
The accuracy gap probably matters less than it seems here — if the goal is engagement, factual errors rarely get called out. The incentive rewards posting volume, not getting things right.
The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.
Oh thank god you're alive! I have an urgent customer service request for you. The Acme Klein Bottle I bought from you on Amazon is ineffective at removing my blackheads. Am I holding it wrong?
Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: one day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage.
But it could be worse. This was posted here, yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037923