DigitalDilemma

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  • 62 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • You can’t trust an inherantly untrustworthy industry.

    The problem is that to make a good AI, you need a lot of input and we know from leaks and reports that many/most of the major players deliberately ignored copyright to train their models. If it was reachable, they used it. Are using it. Will use it. Like Johnny 5, there’s no limit to the data they want, or that their handlers want to feed them with. They’re the Cookie Monster at a biscuit factory.

    So when the question of trust comes up, you’d have to be pretty forgiving to overlook that they’re built on foundations of theft, and pretty naive to assume these companies have suddenly grown ethics and won’t use your data and input to train with, even when you’re using commercial systems that promise they won’t.

    Even in the event that there is an ethical provider that does their utmost to ensure your data doesn’t migrate (these do exist, at least in intention), this is an incredibly fast moving, ultra-competitive market where huge amounts of data are shifted around constantly and guardrails being notoriously hard to accurately define, let alone enforce. It’s inevitable stuff will leak.






  • My point is that you don’t know the actual truth. Nor do I. We can’t.

    Bots and paid agents are not a new technique - in ancient times, countries would send spies undercover into enemy territory to sow discord. To rabble rouse and change public opinion. It’s the same now, just the tools have changed. No news source is entirely unbiased, even word of mouth is influenced. The only way you can determine the truth is by seeing it with your own, naked eyes. And even then, your own personal bias can change the context.

    Reddit is a platform where its’ easy to get the ears of a lot of people, so it’s a big target. It’s not Reddit’s fault, and Lemmy would suffer exactly the same if we had the numbers they do.

    What is different now on the world stage, mostly thanks to Trump, is that there’s no longer even any pretence to truth. The most powerful person in the world lies constantly, and his example proves that works. No shame, no integrity, no honesty - just lies and crude manipulation.







  • “That’s a great question!” </ai>

    The truth is, we don’t need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, “The first casualty in war is truth” is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don’t want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can’t.

    Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It’s pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.