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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I sounded the alarm when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz, and nobody listened.

Now, our very own self_made_human, a generally intelligent and well regarded poster here, has succumbed to the exact same trap and posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about OpenAI and the UAE.

It appears that this problem is getting out of hand. In the past (let's say <2022) we had shitty reporting too, with low quality tabloids like daily mail, kotaku, vice, etc. posting poorly sourced sensationalist stories. But at least for those, they had human authors on the payroll whose job was to find sensationalist stories that were ideally true. And the tabloids could be sued for defamation if their false claims went too far, meaning that anything too spicy had to enough evidence, however thin, to cover ass for lawsuits.

Now we have 100 million Indians all trying to set up fake websites masquerading as "news" all hooked up to script kiddie scripts and ChatGPT, configured to pump out stories without the hand of a human even touching on the process. There was no human who even pressed a button to generate the fake article about Tim, just a cronjob that triggered the generate_todays_hoax() function like it does every day. And they simply need to put up lookalikes of real news sites (think scameras, white van speakers, etc.) and pay black hat SEOs to get their results into Google/Yahoo and get eyeballs on their absolute diarrhea of shit.

And yes, I admit that writers can use AI to help them be more productive and effective. But that absolutely isn't what's happening here. These scammers/hoaxers are only after clicks/money and have literally 0 care for the accuracy or reality of their bullshit at all.

You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...

I would like to humbly ask everyone here to please be aware that these grift websites (distinct from AI output in general, feel free to chat with ChatGPT on your own time) have zero truth value and should be regarded as about as trustworthy as those nigerian prince emails in your inbox. The people creating this slop are literally malicious hoaxers and scammers who only see you as moneybags and run this as a side gig from their main job of scamming grandmas in tech support scams.

Edit: It appears that business today does in fact publish real human written articles in addition to fake AI hoaxes, so uhhh your mileage may vary

In the end this will force people to blindly trust preferred sources in a way we haven’t done in 120+ years.

Since the popularization of the camera, major hoaxes have required escalating amounts of effort to reliably and persuasively fake audiovisual evidence.

Of course, they still existed. Stalin’s erstwhile colleagues were airbrushed. The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees. But until recently, hardcore OSINT types on Twitter could pretty reliably prove quite quickly whether something was real or fake.

Now, that’s increasingly no longer the case. We are moving back to the days when you decided to believe the foreign correspondent of your preferred newspaper simply because you believe him, and his reporting, with no further evidence required, necessary, or even available.

The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees.

Wow this is real. Truly a modern marvel.

This is an example of not understanding the past. How could people be so stupid as to not know where spaghetti comes from?

Well if you don't eat spaghetti, it's not a common dish in any restaurant in your area, you haven't gone on foreign holidays, and all you know is the name of it as a food from abroad, how do you know where it comes from or how it's made? You don't care about it so you don't go to the bother of finding out "what is spaghetti and how is it made", all you've ever seen of it might be a packet of it on a shop shelf.

And this is the BBC, with the gravitas of its history behind it as the Reithian project to "to educate, inform and entertain" the public. You would no more expect a joke item on the Serious Current Affairs Programme than modern Americans would expect an Oscars musical number in the middle of the State of the Union address:

Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it. The editor of Panorama, Michael Peacock, told the BBC in 2014 how he gave de Jaeger a budget of £100 and sent him off. The report was made more believable through its voice-over by respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. Peacock said Dimbleby knew they were using his authority to make the joke work, and that Dimbleby loved the idea and went at it eagerly.

In an American context, imagine Walter Cronkite presenting a similar story.

It wasn't everybody, "hundreds" out of an audience of millions, which is probably reasonable to expect regarding general levels of public credulousness:

At the time, 7 million of the 15.8 million homes (about 44%) in Britain had television receivers. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. An estimated eight million people watched the programme on 1 April 1957, and hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees; the BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".

Right now, there's probably some exotic foodstuff that in ten years will be introduced to us in the West, but which right now we're unfamiliar with, and if a trusted source (probably AI, the way things are going) said "this food item is harvested by pixies after being fertilised with unicorn dung", we'd fall for it. Hell, we're probably already falling for AI generated slop as evidenced by the posts above re: the Tim Walz fake quote.

Ok fair, I have a history degree I should have known. I guess the recent past is harder for me to grok than the ancient past sometimes.

That's the trap we all fall into. We have some vague notion that a hundred or five hundred years ago, things weren't the same as they are now (though modern adaptations of classic works do seem to be trying their hardest to persuade us all that Regency Englishmen and women behaved just like late 20th century/early 21st century people. Ditto for genre/historical novels where the heroes, but more usually the heroines, have all the values of 21st century liberals around everything from race to sex, and the villains of course have the values of their time).

But when it comes to thirty/forty/fifty years ago, we think that's close enough that things were Just Like Now, and we forget how much social change happens in quite a little time.

EDIT: Don't be too hard on yourself, I'm old enough that I've lived through the change from "garlic is a rare, foreign, and untrusted ingredient that is not suitable for our plain but wholesome national cookery" to "now we have three new sushi joints started up in the town" 😁

This is more of a reflection on the British public than the BBC.

I think honestly the advent of AI contest is going to force the issue of epistemology more so than “trusted sources”. Things like knowing statistics and logic and using the information to make predictions is much more important than “it comes from the NYT so it’s true.

The conceit of Liberalism is that the average man has the time or inclination to invest into this level of reasoning. I think you'll be disappointed if you still think they will.

The brand of autist that hangs around in these parts might well put in the effort. Most people won't. They may or may not end up trusting the NYT. They could also revert to base superstition because the NYT is not trustworthy.

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