Comment by 🚀 clarahd

re theft of intellectual property. It is pretty ironic seeing the likes of Microsoft taking liberties with other peoples' work after their history of, among other things, sending squads to other businesses to police their Wundows licences.

Jun 02 · 7 months ago

3 Later Comments ↓

Any form of government ID could still be subject to abuse by a local non-democratic government. Real whistleblowers need anonymity to blow the whistle but this is a separate situation from democratic forums of debate. It used to be for large scale debate, institutional trust was earned and used as a platform for that debate. Think mainstream media. But debate took place in other forums in the more informal settings of backyard BBQs, church functions, the local pub, etc. This was more intimate and face to face. Trust was assumed because these are friends and neighbors. The difference now is that we can have large scale debate open to the world with anonymity. There is no fix but drilling in caveat emptor.

I don't think your comment reflects current reality. Mainstream news is just scraping the surface of such things as the Facebook or Wechat campaign manipulations, but is silent on the hijacking of debate in public forums where minority opinions are routinely silenced, the user banned, without any appeal due to forum dominance. Meanwhile, remote organized shills can shape the discussions under cover as netizenz.

Pubs or some rich guy's newspaper of yesteryear are barely relevant to today's not-so-homogenous and mainly online society. No you cannot build a functioning democracy on a web of make believe, and we wouldn't use caveat emptor to build a house.

If we need meaningful debate to solve problems collectively, then we enable meaningful debate, period. Just as a low tech example, you could have a local public human being validate someone's ID on behalf of a 3d party forum, which then assigns the user a unique number, without knowing their actual identity. (Though they could "validate" the pseudo-identity by checking site traffic logs, or asking for a brief local video.)

And isn't "there's no fix" something the latest ChatGPT would want us to think??

My comment was definitely a reflection on yesteryears to contrast with the present state. How does one build a web of trust? I don't see a system that is easy, secure, and not able to be exploited by unfriendly governments, local or foreign. Facebook wanted to be this internet identity and you couldn't pay me enough to sign up and let them do that for me. Blue check marks were another way, but they only worked on one platform and now they're worthless for trustworthiness. I'm sure I don't have the answers but I can certainly imagine all the ways corruption would penetrate a web of trust.

The best way will always be to spend time getting to know people and have them earn your trust (and visa versa.) This isn't compatible with the social network model of fast friends, rewards for outlandish behavior, and drive by hot takes. There's numerous perverse incentives to hone in on the worst instincts of humanity and exploit them for private gain. That's always been true but never has this been concentrated into the hands of so few. I also think this is just baked into us. Some quirk of the social behavior. That's why it can't be fixed. One opinion of a not chatgpt bot but you can think what you like. I've been on here for the better part of a year, feel free to check into me.

Original Post

This is, unfortunately, a really good article (not mine) about the state of AI as used by Google, and the damage it's caused: It's a long article, but it's very much worth reading in its entirety, in my opinion. It lays out exactly what Google have done in their attempts to reshape the web for AI, how doing so has completely decimated indie publishing, and how Google is doing its utmost to control the flow of information completely. It's depressing, but this needs to be heard. It's not...