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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

More amusing and frightening is when people search about themselves and turn up AI generated crap. Googling yourself was always a lucky grab bag, with the possibility of long-forgotten embarrassments being dragged up. But at least you'd have to face facts.

Now I hear of people discovering they're in prison, married to random people they've never met, or are actually already dead.

What is this going to do to recon on individuals (for example by employers, border agents or potential romantic partners) when there's a good chance the reputation raffle will report you as a serial rapist, kiddy-fiddler or Tory politician?

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This is a new way to be anonymous too. Someone post something true but nasty about you? Have LLMs cook up dozens of preposterous stories - you're secretly a rodeo clown, you write childrens books, you built a castle in Rome, you once drank a goldfish, etc.

Increase noise to drown signal.

This is essentially the service Reuptation.com claims to provide. Jon Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" describes the site games SEO to flood the search results of controversial figures with banal nothing posts[1]. The difference being that actual humans had to create that content.

In the near future, the web could become opaque with LLM schlock, but at least it may grant people a right to be forgotten.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/lindsey-stone--so-youve-been...

I think Boris Johnson tried that by saying out of the blue: he makes model busses. There was some thinking at the time that he didn't want the brexit bus to show up in searches and was trying to game search results..

I don't think it worked.

> Now I hear of people discovering they're in prison, married to random people they've never met, or are actually already dead.

My real name is very, very common -- so this has been my reality for my entire life.

These days, I have grown to appreciate it. It's like an invisibility superpower.

> What is this going to do to recon on individuals (for example by employers, border agents or potential romantic partners) when there's a good chance the reputation raffle will report you as a serial rapist, kiddy-fiddler or Tory politician?

I feel terrible for the first dozen people this happens to. That said, I look forward to this being the average case for most people. Bury the real malfeasance in AI-generated noise. Let employers and background checkers get dunked on.

> Now I hear of people discovering they're in prison, married to random people they've never met, or are actually already dead.

All three in my case, and that just for sites which predate AI.

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