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Notes -
Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.
I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.
What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.
Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.
Edit:
Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:
Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.
So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.
I've started noticing AI generated video in the lead up to the Australian federal election. There was one on X floating around with Tucker Carlson dumping on the current Prime Minister. Really made me think about the need to curate my feed more.
Not a rhetorical question -- do many Australians know who Tucker is? And do many Australians care what he thinks? I thought he was only relevant in American politics.
Australians who are interested in politics are pretty much bound to follow American politics, at least in the vague outline. I'd guess that your average person on the street either doesn't know who Tucker Carlson is, or knows him only as some pundit in America. Among Australians who take an active interest in politics, I'd expect much higher recognition.
I would not expect Carlson's endorsement (or disendorsement) to have any significant impact on Australian politics, though. If anything, I expect that his endorsement would hurt a candidate. We have a federal election tomorrow where it looks like what would have been a very winnable election for the Coalition has turned into a disaster, substantially due to Trump. Trump and MAGA-style voices are widely hated over here and any association with them is more likely to harm than to hurt. It's not as bad here as in Canada, but it's still true, I think, that Trump has been a disaster for conservative parties throughout the wider Anglosphere.
I've read that the reason Trump's impact on Canada was a disaster was that there is no analog to blood-and-soil MAGA voters there, only what would be called in America progressives and "RINOs"/"boomercons". Is that why Trump has damaged conservatives in Australia?
Well, no, you wouldn't expect large constituencies of "make [another country] great again" voters in another country, unless we're talking about special cases like Christian Zionists supporting Israel for religious reasons. Beyond that, why would one expect even right-wing Canadians to feel particularly positive about the guy who talks about annexing Canada and has just slapped Canada with punitive tariffs for... something?
Insofar as I've seen, the sort of Canadians who would actually support American annexation or at least be OK with it would be either disaffected forumlords who treat politics as an abstraction, general fringe loons, or recent immigrants - I remember seeing a post indicating that the Indian immigrants in Canada would be more likely to support annexation than the born Canadians.
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