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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.

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> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.

Let's not go there.

I could see an argument that Hacker News users are a bit more book smart than the average internet user. But this site's user base is just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, myopia, and lack of empathy for those who view the world differently than them.

Those are all their own kind of intelligence. If anything, the book smarts can make those other areas disproportionately worse.

Once someone decides their intelligence guarantees their correctness, they stop questioning themselves. There was conversation here about Israel starving Gaza, and they Israel needed to provide for Gaza like the USA did for Germany, that that was acceptable/gold standard treatment of an occupied populace. When I looked up the numbers, and Israel was actually during starvation providing more calories per person than the USA did Germany, I was instantly downvoted and told people need more calories. Just for providing actual context to comments that were routinely being made.

Edit: I'm post rate limited from replying below. HN routinely chose to whitelist flagged Gaza discussions, but didn't whitelist comments of people who stated the minority opinion and whose comments were completely flagged into invisibility. If you arrived late and didn't get to read the original non-offensive but viewpoint challenging comments, you would assume everything from the 'wrong' viewpoint was so unhinged it had to be flagged, but many were just 'wrongthink' and not 'flag to invisibility' worthy. Or that there was group consensus on the discussion (obviously people just learned to stop posting on those threads if you had wrongthink).

Not sure how moderation can intervene, remove the topic flag and say it's 'a worthwhile discussion for HN' when the same moderation allows views/challenge of the narrative to be flagged to invisibility. It becomes more pontification than discussion at that point.

To someone who used to run a community, it is absolutely insane to me that on HN, users are given the tools to collectively censor people they disagree with, or even those who bring up inconvenient questions or truths.

HN moderators have the ability to take away people's voting privileges. It's either not an effective deterrent, not done at a large enough scale to be effective, or they are knowingly complicit in the manipulation.

Remember that even ELIZA fooled people.

That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.

Unfortunately, there's whole industries built around fooling people. It seems to me that we select for people who are good at fooling people and they become wealthy and successful. What would be nice is if we could start selecting for knowledgeable, helpful and useful people instead where insane amounts of money might actually bring some benefit to humanity rather than being spent on plunging us into dystopia.

You kidding? This site doesn't let me forget

I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.

I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.

This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.

I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).

The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]

Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.

Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.

https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151

Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ

Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.

So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.

Max Martin is a stand out talent.

You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.

Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.

Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.

Fascinating! The last sentence could also talk about the famous book.

You're saying 1984 is completely formulaic brainrot?

No not that scene, I just failed at the joke. The commercial music scene was formulaic in the 80's and earlier already. Popular culture porn.

I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.

> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop.

The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.

Said handmade slop dominating Billboard does.

I much prefer the huge amount of music written/performed by Nile Rodgers instead.

> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.

I'm not sure what you're implying? That people here are smart? Or that they're ruthless tech-bro capitalists?

Or that ~20-40% of them are bots hyping their startup capital ventures, cuz that's what YC is about -- venture capital and startups.

Some of us are just here to make fun of VC folks that deserve to be endlessly mocked. The crossover with those that are also AI hype types just makes it funnier.

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