[HN Gopher] PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory
___________________________________________________________________
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory
Author : TheCog
Score : 194 points
Date : 2025-01-24 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hallofdreams.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hallofdreams.org)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Ooof. The idea--or reality--that humans' accounts would be
| hijacked by site-owners to make impersonating slop (presumably to
| bring in ad-revenue) is somehow both infuriating and energy-
| sapping-depressing.
|
| Issues of trust and attribution have always existed for the web,
| but for many reasons it feels _so much worse now_ --how bad must
| it get before some kind of sea-change can occur?
|
| I'm not sure what the solution would be here.
|
| * Does one need to establish a friggin' _trademark_ for their own
| name /handle [0], just so they can threaten to sue using money
| they probably don't have?
|
| * Is it finally time for PKI and everybody signs their posts with
| private keys and wastes CPU cycles verifying signatures to check
| for impersonation?
|
| * Is there some set of implied collective expectations which need
| to be captured and formalized into the global patchworks of law?
|
| [0] Ex: By establishing a small but plausible "business" selling
| advice and opinions under that name, and going after the
| impersonator for harming that brand.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I exchange public keys with close friends in person. A large
| scale solution would be very Orwellian. You would need a
| national ID that is a smart card to connect to an ISP and
| possible biometric verification.
| hooverd wrote:
| Do you exchange public keys with your non-computer-toucher
| close friends?
| arccy wrote:
| if you convince them to use signal that's close enough...
| afpx wrote:
| Could I buy a physical device like RSA SecurID from my bank
| branch or post office and log into a closed VPN-like network
| where all the servers are run by verified users? I know there
| are problems with that idea.
| bawolff wrote:
| We already have e-passports and zero knowledge proofs to show
| you have one without revealing who you are.
|
| If all else fails, there is always the web of trust (i think
| web of trust has a lot of issues, but establishing soneone is
| human seems like a much lower bar than establishing identity)
| m463 wrote:
| It is sad. I have been putting a copyright notice on my resume
| at the bottom to prevent some nonsense.
|
| I have always wondered if people could attach some sort of
| cryptographic marker to their posts, that could link to an
| archive somewhere. Mostly I was thinking of backups of posts to
| yelp that couldn't be taken down, but I wonder if it would work
| that posts someone never made.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I have been putting a copyright notice on my resume at the
| bottom to prevent some nonsense.
|
| I expect the bad-actors will feed it into an LLM and say:
| "Rephrase this slightly", and they will get away with it
| because the big-money hucksters will have already convinced
| courts to declare it transformative or fair-use.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Shouldn't we invent a protocol that keeps the content you
| produce under your control so that places like forums or
| facebook are only discovery devices and interaction
| facilitators, but not custodians of all communication? Being
| able to independantly reach the source of piece of information
| is increasingly important.
| hooverd wrote:
| Don't sign your posts!
| Terr_ wrote:
| Are you saying nothing should be key-signed because you want
| some kind of deniability later?
|
| Or do you mean people should avoid using an pseudonym in
| favor of posts that are anonymous, so that there's never any
| created identity to exploit/defend?
| hooverd wrote:
| -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
|
| Sorry, it was a bad joke, there's a phrase "don't sign your
| posts" used when someone ends one with an insult. I support
| signing your posts with digital signatures if you want.
|
| -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
| iHUEARYKAB0WIQQC37hdRRO1LtrTQY8AXxvbqjG5KgUCZ5QRXwAKCRAAXxv
| bqjG5 Kth4AQCccNygglcSyEiMAqQyw6cXH54fnqBT9rJO9TSIqH14rgEAy
| UwxiQlV05XV Du2ftMk3DwiUZLKDxVI+ODCn4osf2wM= =XZhX -----END
| PGP SIGNATURE-----
| bee_rider wrote:
| Impersonating somebody to make it look like they said something
| they didn't really ought to be considered defamation or
| something.
|
| Also there's something really uncomfortable about the phrasing
| of a lot of those answers. I mean, even as somebody with an
| engineering degree, I try not to ever answer a question "as a
| <field> engineer" because when screwing around online I haven't
| done the correct amount of analysis to provide answers "as an
| engineer" ethically (acknowledging the irony of using the
| phrase here, but, clearly this is not a technical statement so
| I think it is fine). The bot doesn't seem to have this
| compunction.
|
| This ravenprp guy was an engineering student a couple years
| ago. I guess it's less of a thing because he wasn't commenting
| under his real name. But it seems like this site, given the
| type of content it hosts, could easily end up impersonating
| somebody "as an engineer" in the field they work and have a
| professional reputation in. And the site even has a historical
| record of them asking and answering questions through their
| education, so it does a really good job of misleading people
| into thinking an engineer is answering their questions.
|
| I know the idea of an individual professional reputation has
| taken a beating in the modern hyper-corporate world. But the
| more I think of it, the more I think... this seems incredibly
| shitty and actually borderline dangerous, right?
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| The ShackNews forum: https://www.shacknews.com/chatty was similar
| - go back in time on on it and you can find posts about 9/11
| unfolding.
| tomrod wrote:
| Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to
| report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the
| camaraderie of the early days.
| r58lf wrote:
| Same with siliconinvestor.com
|
| It was an early stock discussion forum. It grew rapidly when
| search engines started indexing everything and this forum had
| a URL for each message that was easily indexable.
|
| It's still around, but nothing like the old days.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I find these old school forums fascinating. How does that
| even work, to have a thread of 192,211 posts about
| Qualcomm?
|
| https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=3603
| 5
|
| Suppose the average post is about 1 paragraph long. One
| paragraph is about 150 words. So 192211 * 150 = about 29
| million words. For comparison, the Lord of the Rings
| trilogy is only around half a million words.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if there are more words about
| Qualcomm in that thread than the total amount of internal
| and external documentation and financial guidance that
| Qualcomm itself has ever produced.
|
| Surely users aren't expected to read the entire thread
| before adding a post? But I think I remember seeing old
| forums where that basically is the expectation. And
| honestly... that's pretty cool. It seems better than the
| new social media, where we keep having low-effort recurring
| debates. I like the idea of adding to an enormous pile of
| scholarship in cyberspace. A Ship of Theseus discussion
| which may outlive any individual participant, but has a
| semblance of continuity all the same, like an undergraduate
| college society with a 100+ year history.
|
| Time for a cyberpunk revival. Retro-cyberpunk, we could
| call it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie
| of the early days.
|
| I remember visiting those forums when I was young and feeling
| like part of a big group of friendly people hanging out
| online together.
|
| I tried creating a new account recently and it had a very
| different vibe. Felt like the old guard had been established
| and the forums I looked at were dominated by a couple of
| posters who just wanted to talk, but not discuss anything.
|
| Some of the post counts of those people were eye-watering.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| > Felt like the old guard had been established and the
| forums I looked at were dominated by a couple of posters
| who just wanted to talk, but not discuss anything.
|
| I think this is the case for most places, I'm afraid. I use
| mainly Discord - there are certainly a lot of servers where
| I'm purely because I'm talking to people I met there, and I
| don't even play that game anymore.
|
| There solution is simpler - after time we create private
| servers or channels for the old guard, but even then the
| places deteriorate.
|
| It's a thing I don't know how to solve.
| sdwr wrote:
| The problem is when the old guard becomes an exclusive
| clique. Sometimes it's by accident ("I'm happy with the
| friends I already have"), but usually there's a portion
| of the inner circle that validate themselves by
| gatekeeping newcomers.
|
| There has to be an active commitment to include
| (annoying, tactless, socially-impoverished) newbies, or
| the snake eats its tail and collapses under its own
| weight.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| reddit had camaraderie in the early days too.
|
| Is there anywhere on the internet that still has camaraderie?
| encom wrote:
| It's been a long time since I visited the Ars forums, but the
| news article commenters today are absolutely deranged. It
| makes me want to not engage with the forums again.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I don't quite understand the issue of "back-dating" or hijacking
| accounts. How is this being done exactly? I came away from this
| article wondering if I was missing something.
| Evidlo wrote:
| The last section mentions that the PhysicsForums admins are
| experimenting with LLM-generated responses, so I think the site
| owners are responsible.
|
| > We reached out to Greg Bernhardt asking for comment on LLM
| usage in PhysicsForums, and he replied:
|
| > "We have many AI tests in the works to add value to the
| community. I sent out a 2024 feedback form to members a few
| weeks ago and many members don't want AI features. We'll either
| work with members to dramatically improve them or end up
| removing them. We experimented with AI answers from test
| accounts last year but they were not meeting quality standards.
| If you find any test accounts we missed, please let me know. My
| documentation was not the best."
|
| Why they would recycle old human accounts as AI "test
| accounts", I have no idea.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Looks like Greg now does SEO for Shopify. That fits I guess.
|
| https://gregbernhardt.com/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbernhardt
|
| https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/author/greg-
| bernhardt...
|
| https://x.com/GregBernhardt4/status/1875287174205374533
|
| > _" The dead internet theory is coming to fruition. This is
| a large reason I'm starting to cut back on social media and
| take back my time."_
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Oh, I thought he would be a physicist
| Terr_ wrote:
| > How is this being done exactly?
|
| Presumably it's being done by the site-owner, whether that
| means new-management or original management getting
| desperate/greedy.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Oh that's so disappointing to hear about PhysicsForums.
| Thanks for the answer to you, and the others who replied.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Whoever runs the site/database is just inserting rows with fake
| datestamps under existing (presumably abandoned) account names.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| How could anyone possibly think it'd be OK to impersonate
| real humans?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They don't give a fuck if its "ok". They are just trying to
| scrape up some additional ad revenue, like 99% of the rest
| of the internet.
| simplicio wrote:
| I don't really get the revenue angle though. The AI posts
| don't seem to be trying to drive traffic to ads or
| anything. I really don't understand the point of auto-
| generating a bunch of AI gibberish under the name of old
| users on ones own site?
| roywiggins wrote:
| A misguided attempt at SEO?
| guynamedloren wrote:
| Wondering the same. I couldn't make it through the article.
| Fascinating discovery, but poorly written and difficult to
| navigate the author's thoughts. The interstitial quotes were
| particularly disorienting.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Money quote:
|
| > There's also a social contract: when we create an account in an
| online community, we do it with the expectation that people we
| are going to interact with are primarily people. Oh, there will
| be shills, and bots, and advertisers, but the agreement between
| the users and the community provider is that they are going to
| try to defend us from that, and that in exchange we will provide
| our engagement and content. This is why the recent experiments
| from Meta with AI generated users are both ridiculous and
| sickening. When you might be interacting with something
| masquerading as a human, providing at best, tepid garbage, the
| value of human interaction via the internet is lost.
|
| It is a disaster. I have no idea how to solve this issue, I can't
| see a future where artificially generated slop doesn't eventually
| overwhelm every part of the internet and make it unusable. The
| UGC era of the internet is probably over.
| lumost wrote:
| I suspect that the honest outcome will be that platforms where
| AI content is allowed/encouraged will begin to appear like a
| video game. If everyone in school is ai-media famous - then no
| one is. There is most assuredly a market for a game where you
| are immediately influencer famous, but it's certainly much
| smaller than the market for social media.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Invite only forums or forums with actual identity checking of
| some sort. Google and Facebook are in prime position to
| actually provide real online identity services to other
| websites, which makes Facebook itself developing bots even
| funnier. Maybe we'll eventually get bank/government issued
| online identity verification.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Online identity verification is the obvious solution, the
| only problem is that we would lose the last bits of privacy
| we have on the internet. I guess if everyone was forced to
| post under our real name and identity, we might treat each
| other with better etiquette, but...
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Optimistically, if all you want to do is prove you are, in
| fact, a person, and not prove that you are a specific
| person, there's no real reason to need to lose privacy. A
| service could vouch that you are a real person, verified on
| their end, and provide no context to the site owner as to
| what person you are.
| roywiggins wrote:
| That doesn't stop Verified Humans(TM) from copying and
| pasting AI slop into text boxes and pressing "Post." If
| there's really good pseudonymity, and Verified Humans can
| have as many pseudonyms as they like and they aren't
| connected to each other, one human could build an entire
| social network of fake pseudonyms talking to each other
| in LLM text but impeccable Verified Human labels.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| The identity provider doesn't need to tell the forum that
| you are 50 different people. They could have a system
| where if the forum bans you the forum would know it's the
| same person they banned on reapplication. As far as
| people making a real person account then using that to do
| Ai stuff yeah there will have to be a way to persistently
| ban someone through anonymous verification, but thats
| possible. Both the identity verifier and forum will be
| incentivized to play nice with each other. If a identity
| provider is allowing one person to make 50 spam accounts
| the forum can stop accepting verification from that
| provider.
| crdrost wrote:
| I just want to semi-hijack this thread to note that you
| can actually peek into the future on this issue, by just
| looking at the present chess community.
|
| For readers who are not among the _cognoscenti_ on the
| topic: in 1997 supercomputers started playing chess at
| around the same level as top grandmasters, and some PCs
| were also able to be competitive (most notably, Fritz
| beat Deep Blue in 1995 before the Kasparov games, and
| Fritz was not a supercomputer). From around 2005, if you
| were interested in chess, you could have an engine on
| your computer that was more powerful than either you or
| your opponent. Since about 2010, there 's been a decent
| online scene of people playing chess.
|
| So the chess world is kinda what the GPT world will be,
| in maybe 30ish years? (It's hard to compare two different
| technology growths, but this assumes that they've both
| hit the end of their "exponential increase" sections at
| around the same time and then have shifted to
| "incremental improvements" at around the same rate. This
| is also assuming that in 5-10 years we'll get to the
| "Deep Blue defeats Kasparov" thing where transformer-
| based machine learning will be actually better at
| answering questions than, say, some university
| professors.)
|
| The first thing is, proving that someone is a person, in
| general, is small potatoes. Whatever you do to prove that
| someone is a real person, they might be farming some or
| all of their thought process out to GPT.
|
| The community that cares about "interacting with real
| humans" will be more interested in continuous
| interactions rather than "post something and see what
| answers I get," because long latencies are the places
| where GPT will answer your question and GPT will give you
| a better answer anyways. So if you care about real
| humanity, that's gonna be realtime interaction. The chess
| version is, "it's much harder to cheat at Rapid or Blitz
| chess."
|
| The second thing is, privacy and nonprivacy coexist. The
| people who are at the top of their information-spouting
| games, will deanonymize themselves. Magnus Carlsen just
| has a profile on chess.com, you can follow his games.
|
| Detection of GPT will look roughly like this: you will be
| chatting with someone who putatively has a real name and
| a physics pedigree, and you ask them to answer physics
| questions, and they appear to have a _really vast_
| physics knowledge, but then when you ask them a simple
| question like "and because the force is larger the
| accelerations will tend to be larger, right?" they take
| an unusually long time to say "yep, F = m a, and all
| that." And that's how you know this person is pasting
| your questions to a GPT prompt and pasting the answers
| back at you. This is basically what grandmasters look for
| when calling out cheating in online chess; on the one
| hand there's "okay that's just a really risky way to play
| 4D chess when you have a solid advantage and can just
| build on it with more normal moves" -- but the chess
| engine sees 20 moves down the road beyond what any human
| sees, so it knows that these moves aren't actually risky
| -- and on the other hand there's "okay there's only one
| reason you could possibly have played the last Rook move,
| and it's if the follow up was to take the knight with the
| bishop, otherwise you're just losing. You foresaw all of
| this, right?" and yet the "person" is still thinking
| (because the actual human didn't understand why the
| computer was making that rook move, and now needs the
| computer to tell them that the knight has to be taken
| with the bishop as appropriate follow-up).
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > you will be chatting with someone who putatively has a
| real name and a physics pedigree, and you ask them to
| answer physics questions, and they appear to have a
| really vast physics knowledge, but then when you ask them
| a simple question like "and because the force is larger
| the accelerations will tend to be larger, right?" they
| take an unusually long time to say "yep, F = m a, and all
| that." And that's how you know this person is pasting
| your questions to a GPT prompt and pasting the answers
| back at you.
|
| Honestly, (even) in my area of expertise, if the
| "abstraction/skill level" or the kind of wording (in your
| example: much less scientifically precise wording, "more
| like a 10 year old child asks"), it often takes me quite
| some time to adjust (it completely takes me out of my
| flow).
|
| So, your criterion would yield an insane amount of false
| positives on me.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| My parents use a lot of Facebook - and things some people
| say under their real name are really mindblowing.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I guess if everyone was forced to post under our real
| name and identity, we might treat each other with better
| etiquette, but...
|
| But Facebook already proved otherwise.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Posting with IRL identity removes the option to back down
| after a mistake and leads to much worse escalations,
| because public reputations will be at stake by default.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > with actual identity checking of some sort
|
| I am hoping OpenID4VCI[0] will fill this role. It looks to be
| flexible enough to preserve public privacy on forums while
| still verifying you are the holder of a credential issued to
| a person. The credential could be issued from an issuer that
| can verify you are an adult (banks) for example. Then a site
| or forum etc, that works with a verifier that can verify
| whatever combination of data of one or more credentials
| presented. I haven't dug into the full details of
| implementation and am skimming over a lot but that appears to
| be the gist of it.
|
| [0] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-
| issu...
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Ironically, on Facebook itself I am only friends with people I
| actually know in real life. So, most of the stuff I see in my
| feed is from them.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm only friends with people I know on Facebook, so I'm
| mostly see ads on that site. There's a feed to just see stuff
| your friends post, but for some reason the site defaults to
| this awful garbage ad spam feed (no surprise really).
| jgilias wrote:
| Oh, there are solutions. One is a kind of a socialized trust
| system. I know that Lyn Alden that I follow on Nostr is
| actually her not only because she says so, but also because a
| bunch of other people follow her too. There are bot accounts
| that impersonate her, but it's easy to block those, a it's
| pretty obvious from the follower count. And once you know a
| public key that Lyn posts under, I'm sure it's her.
|
| She could start posting LLM nonsense, but people will be quick
| to point it out, and start unfollowing. An important part is
| that there's no algorithm deciding what I see in my feed
| (unless I choose so), so random LLM stuff can't really get into
| my feed, unless I chose so.
|
| Another option is zero knowledge identity proofs that can be
| used to attest that you're a human without exposing PII, or
| relying on a some centralized server being up to "sign you in
| on your behalf"
|
| https://zksync.mirror.xyz/kWRhD81C7il4YWGrkDplfhIZcmViisRe3l...
| roywiggins wrote:
| How can ZK approaches prevent people from renting out their
| human identity to AI slop producers?
| jgilias wrote:
| By just making it more expensive. We're never going to get
| rid of spam fully, but the higher we can raise the costs,
| the less spam we get.
|
| EDIT: Sorry, I didn't answer your question directly. So it
| doesn't, but makes spam more expensive.
| cess11 wrote:
| If you think about historical parallels like advertising and
| the industrialisation of entertainment, where the communication
| is sufficiently human-like to function but deeply insincere and
| manipulative, I think you'll find that you absolutely can see
| such a future and how it might turn out.
|
| A lot or most of people will adapt, accept these conditions
| because compared to the constant threat of misery and precarity
| of work, or whatever other way to sustenance and housing, it
| will be very tolerable. Similar to how so called talk shows
| flourished, where fake personas pretend to get to know other
| fake personas they are already very well acquainted with and so
| on, while selling slop, anxieties or something. Like Oprah, the
| billionaire.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Well, the end of open, public UGC content anyway.
|
| I have heard of Discord servers where admins won't assign you
| roles giving you access to all channels unless you've
| personally met them, someone in the group can vouch for you, or
| you have a video chat with them and "verify."
|
| This is the future. We need something like Discord that also
| has a webpage-like mechanism built into it (a space for a whole
| collection of documents, not just posts) and is accessible via
| a browser.
|
| Of course, depending on discovery mechanisms, this means this
| new "Internet" is no longer an easy escape from a given reality
| or place, and that was a major driver of its use in the 90's
| and 00's - curious people wanting to explore new things not
| available in their local communities. To be honest, the old,
| reliable Google was probably the major driver of that.
|
| And it sucks for truly anti-social people who simply don't want
| to deal with other people for anything, but maybe those types
| will flourish with AI everywhere.
|
| If the gated hubs of a possible new group-x-group human
| Internet maintain open lobbies, maybe the best of both worlds
| can be had.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > It had fairly steady growth until 2012, before petering out
| throughout the 2010s and 2020s in lieu of more centralized sites
| like StackExchange, and by 2025, only a small community was left
|
| This timeline tracks with my own blogging. Google slowly stopped
| ranking traditional forum posts and blogs as well around that
| time, regardless of quality, unless it was a "major".
|
| > But, unlike so many other fora from back in the early days, it
| went from 2003 to 2025 without ever changing its URLs, erasing
| its old posts, or going down altogether.
|
| I can also confirm if you have a bookmark to my blog from 2008,
| that link will still work!
|
| The CMS is no longer, it's all static now... which too few orgs
| take the short amount of time to bother with when "refreshing"
| their web presence :(
| Lammy wrote:
| > Google slowly stopped ranking traditional forum posts and
| blogs as well around that time
|
| IMO the true inflection point was 2014 when Google first hid
| (from the UI) and then fully removed (no longer accessible by
| magic URL) the "Blogs" and especially the "Discussions"
| filters. Some contemporary discussions on "Discussions":
|
| - https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/googles-search-filters-
| now...
|
| - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2014/03/bring-back-forum-
| se... (details the briefly-working magic URLs)
|
| - https://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/23/search-discussions-
| blogs-p...
|
| - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-
| gone-1799...
|
| - https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4687960.htm
|
| - https://www.thecoli.com/threads/i-cant-google-search-by-
| disc...
|
| - https://www.neogaf.com/threads/anyone-else-annoyed-google-
| re...
|
| - https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/57249/has-the-
| op...
|
| - https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/how-to-do-google-
| discuss...
|
| - https://browsermedia.agency/blog/alternatives-discussion-
| sea...
| layer8 wrote:
| I recently noticed that there is now a not-visible-by-default
| "Forums" option in Google Search. It is selected by
| specifying the query parameter udm=18:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=hp+50g&udm=18
| lkramer wrote:
| This is interesting. I wonder why it's not visible by
| default.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe it is/was an A/B test, to see if it hurts ad
| revenue (it probably does).
|
| The option appeared randomly for me on a search, and I
| took immediately note of the udm number. :)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Ran through the lower numbers that hit something
| interesting:
|
| 8 = jobs (but doesn't return any results) 15 =
| attractions (but doesn't return any results)
| nateglims wrote:
| I remember several traditional programming forums I frequented
| in the 00s getting hit hard by the Google Panda update around
| 2013. It ruined their SEO and they started to go into decline.
| Forums and blogs had a culture that isn't replicated by reddit,
| social media, etc. It's a shame to lose it.
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content
| is that...nobody wants it.
|
| (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie,
| not _literally_ nobody.)
|
| If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a
| blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by
| _humans_. I don 't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop
| posted under a human's name.
|
| I now spend dismaying amounts of time and energy avoiding LLM
| content on the web. When I read an article, I study the writing
| style, and if I detect ChatGPTese ("As we dive into the ever-
| evolving realm of...") I hit the back button. When I search for
| images, I use a wall of negative filters (-AI, -Midjourney,
| -StableDiffusion etc) to remove slop (which would otherwise be
| >50% of my results for some searches). Sometimes I filter
| searches to before 2022.
|
| If Google added a global "remove generative content" filter that
| worked, I would click it and then never unclick it.
|
| I don't think I'm alone. There has been research suggesting that
| users immediately dislike content they perceive as AI-created,
| regardless of its quality. This creates an incentive for
| publishers to "humanwash" AI-written content--to construct a
| fiction where a human is writing the LLM slop you're reading.
|
| Falsifying timestamps and hijacking old accounts to do this is
| definitely something I haven't seen before.
| robswc wrote:
| 100%.
|
| So far (thankfully) I've noticed this stuff get voted down on
| social media but it is blowing my mind people think pasting in
| a ChatGPT response is productive.
|
| I've seen people on reddit say stuff like "I don't know but
| here's what ChatGPT said." Or worse, presenting ChatGPT copy-
| paste as their own. Its funny because you can tell, the text
| reads like an HR person wrote it.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've noticed the opposite actually, clearly ChatGPT written
| posts on Reddit that get a ton of upvotes. I'm especially
| noticing it on niche subreddits.
|
| The ones that make me furious are on some of the mental
| health subreddits. People are asking for genuine support from
| other people, but are getting AI slop instead. If someone
| needs support from an AI (which I've found can actually
| help), they can go use it themselves.
| asddubs wrote:
| I was googling a question about opengraph last week. so many
| useless AI drivel results now.
| Gracana wrote:
| Yup, I'm the same, and I love my LLMs. They're fun and
| interesting to talk to and use, but it's obvious to everyone
| that they're not very reliable. If I think an article is LLM-
| generated, then the signal I'm getting is that the author is
| just as clueless as I am, and there's no way I can trust that
| any of the information is correct.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > but it's obvious to everyone that they're not very
| reliable.
|
| Hopefully to everyone on HN, but definitely not to everyone
| on the greater Internet. There are plenty of horror stories
| of people who apparently 100% blindly trust whatever ChatGPT
| says.
| Gracana wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, I suppose I see that sort of thing on
| reddit fairly regularly, especially in the "here's a story
| about my messed-up life" types of subreddits.
| rapind wrote:
| > If Google added a global "remove generative content" filter
| that worked, I would click it and then never unclick it.
|
| It's not just generated content. This problem has been around
| for years. For example, google a recipe. I don't think the
| incentives are there yet. At least not until Google search is
| so unusable that no one is buying their ads anymore. I suspect
| any business model rooted in advertising is doomed to the
| eventual enshitification of the product.
| jchw wrote:
| Exactly. Why in the hell would I want someone to use ChatGPT
| _for_ me? If I wanted that, I could go use that instead.
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| I believe most times such responses are made in assumption
| that people are just lazy, like we used provide links to
| https://letmegooglethat.com/ before.
| MrPowerGamerBR wrote:
| > If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I
| want to see writing by humans. I don't want to read a wall of
| copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name.
|
| This reminds me of the time around ChatGPT 3's release where
| Hacker News's comments was filled with users saying "Here's
| what ChatGPT has to say about this"
| Aerroon wrote:
| I can understand it for AI generated text, but I think there
| are _a lot_ of people that like AI generated images. Image
| sites like get a _ton_ of people that like AI generated images.
| Civitai gets a lot of engagement for AI generated images, but
| so do many other image sites.
| earnestinger wrote:
| I don't understand the problem with AI generated images.
|
| (I very much would like any AI generated text to be marked as
| such, so I can set my trust accordingly)
| cogman10 wrote:
| > I don't understand the problem with AI generated images.
|
| Depends on what they are used for and what they are
| purporting to represent.
|
| For example, I really hate AI images being put into kids
| books, especially when they are trying to be psuedo-
| educational. A big problem those images have is from one
| prompt to the next, it's basically impossible to get
| consistent designs which means any sort of narrative story
| will end up with pages of characters that don't look the
| same.
|
| Then there's the problem that some people are trying to
| sell and pump this shit like crazy into amazon. Which
| creates a lot of trash books that squeeze out legitimate
| lesser known authors and illustrators in favor of this pure
| garbage.
|
| Quite similar to how you can't really buy general products
| from amazon because drop shipping has flooded the market
| with 10 billion items with different brands that are
| ultimately the same wish garbage.
|
| The images can look interesting sometimes, but often on
| second glance there's just something "off" about the image.
| Fingers are currently the best sign that things have gone
| off the rails.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Despite what people think there is a sort of art to getting
| interesting images out of an ai model.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| That's not the issue though, it should be marked as such or
| be found in a section people looking for it can easily find
| it instead of shoving it everywhere. To me placing that
| generated content in human spaces is a strong signal for
| low effort. On the other hand generated content can be
| extremely interesting and useful and indeed there's an art
| to it
| daveguy wrote:
| I agree. AI generated text and images should be marked as
| such. In the US there was a push to set standards on
| watermarking AI generated content (feasible for
| images/video, but more difficult for text, because it's
| easier to delete). Unfortunately, the effort to study
| potential watermarking standards was rescinded as of Jan
| 22 2025.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They know everyone, especially the ones they seek
| attention from, has such labels in their muted keywords
| list.
| egypturnash wrote:
| People who submit blog posts here sure do love opening their
| blogs with AI image slop. I have taken to assuming that the
| text is also AI slop, and closing the tab and leaving a
| comment saying such.
|
| Sometimes this comment gets a ton of upvotes. Sometimes it
| gets indignant replies insisting it's real writing. I need to
| come up with a good standard response to the latter.
| daveguy wrote:
| > I need to come up with a good standard response to the
| latter.
|
| How about, "I'm sorry, but if you're willing to use AI
| image slop, how should I know you wouldn't also use AI text
| slop? AI text content isn't reliable, and I don't have time
| to personally vet every assertion."
| numpad0 wrote:
| Trying to gaslight your enemy is certainly an option for
| something, not always the best nor the one in line with
| HN guideline. Frankly it just rarely reduce undesirable
| behaviors even if you're in the mood to be manipulative.
| agumonkey wrote:
| nobody wants to see other's ai generated images, but most
| people around me are drooling about generating stuff
|
| wait for the proof-of-humanity decade where you're paid to be
| here and slow and flawed
| ijk wrote:
| Most AI generated images are like most dreams: meaningful to
| you but not something other people have much interest it.
|
| Once you have people sorting through them, editing them, and
| so on the curation adds enough additional interest...and for
| many people what they get out of looking at a gallery of AI
| images is ideas for what prompts they want to try.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Most AI genetated visuals have a myriad of styles but you
| could mostly tell it's something not seen before and thats
| what people may be drooling for. The same drooling happened
| for things that have finally found their utility after a long
| time and are we're now used to. For example 20 years ago
| Photoshop filters were all the rage and you'd see them
| expressed out everywhere back then. I think this AI gen phase
| will lose interest/enthusiasm over time but will enter and
| stay in toolbox for the right things, whatever people decide
| to be then.
| ijk wrote:
| The problem with "provide LLM output as a service," which is
| more or less the best case scenario for the ChatGPT listicles
| that clutter my feed, is that if I wanted an LLM result...I
| could have just asked the LLM. There's maybe a tiny proposition
| if I didn't have access to a good model, but a static page that
| takes ten paragraphs to badly answer one question isn't really
| the form factor anyone prefers; the actual chatbot interface
| can present the information in the way that works best for me,
| versus the least common denominator listicle slop that tries to
| appeal to the widest possible audience.
|
| The other half of the problem is that rephrasing information
| doesn't actually introduce new information. If I'm looking for
| the kind of oil to use in my car or the recipe for blueberry
| muffins, I'm looking for something backed by actual data, to
| verify that the manufacturer said to use a particular grade of
| oil or for a recipe that someone has actually baked to verify
| that the results are as promised. I'm looking for more
| information than I can get from just reading the sources
| myself.
|
| Regurgitating text from other data sources mostly doesn't add
| anything to my life.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to
| understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan
| academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting
| anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that
| makes it easier for some to understand.
|
| If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car
| and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be
| useful and not new information
| krapp wrote:
| >If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car
| and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be
| useful and not new information
|
| You can literally just google that or use the appendix
| that's probably at the back of the manual. It's also
| probably stamped on the engine oil cap. It also probably
| doesn't matter and you can just use 10w40.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I'm just reusing the example in the comment I responded
| to. Fill in something else then...
| ziddoap wrote:
| Illustrative examples are illustrative, not literal.
| chowells wrote:
| I have to protest. A lot of 3b1b _is_ new. Not the math
| itself, but the animated graphical presentation is. That 's
| where the value from his channel comes in. He provides a
| lot of tools to visualize problems in ways that haven't
| been done before.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I guess the way I think of the visualizations and video
| as a whole as a type of rephrasing. He's not the first
| person to try to visualize math concepts
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think a good comparison is when you go to a store and there
| are salesmen there. Nobody wants to talk to a salesman. They
| can almost never help a customer with any issue, since even an
| ignorant customer usually knows more about the products in the
| store than the salesmen. Most customers hate salesmen and a
| sustainable portion of customers choose to leave the store or
| not enter because of the salesmen, meaning the store looses
| income. Yet this has been going on forever. So just prepare for
| the worst when it comes to AI, because that's what you are
| going to get, and neither ethical sense, business sense or any
| rationality is going to stop companies from showing it down
| your throat. They don't give a damn if they will lose income or
| even bankrupt their companies, because annoying the customer is
| more important.
| Balgair wrote:
| > (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback".
| ie, not literally nobody.)
|
| Reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quote: Nobody goes there
| anymore, its too crowded.
| elashri wrote:
| It is sad that this is happening to PhysicsForums. It was one of
| first websites I was using frequently 15 years ago when I started
| my physics passion (later career). I was active reader and
| contributed on few occasions but I still remember some members
| who I thought that one day I will be smart and knowledgeable like
| them. With years and the move to social media following Arab
| spring things started to change (as part of the overall
| transition from forum being the dominant place for discussions).
| But I stopped visiting it around 2018 unless I came through
| google search (later kagi). I still find the archive useful to
| answer some questions and I would disagree with author of article
| that because no one is sharing links on twitter that means no one
| care.
| LordShredda wrote:
| Don't give out your real name online, the server admin might
| change your posts.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Dead internet theory is one of those ideas that keeps resurfacing
| or being revied with articles like this, even though the evidence
| is only limited to confirmation bias. It ignores that there are
| huge parts of the internet that are not dead. I think it's more
| like the quality of discourse has fallen for reasons that are not
| clear.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > there are huge parts of the internet that are not dead
|
| Such as?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The article looked at the PhysicsForums and found that 92% of
| the text is AI or machine generated...
| paulpauper wrote:
| The internet is way bigger than PhysicsForums. That was my
| point, but your response seems to confirm what I said about
| discourse declining though.
| inasio wrote:
| Talk about burying the lede! Near the bottom of the story the
| site owner confirms that it was him that added the backdated AI
| comments (perhaps it should have been obvious...)
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I couldn't find it. He was trying to seed the site ?
| pbronez wrote:
| Experimenting with using AI bots to respond to questions that
| had been open for a long time with no response.
| econ wrote:
| I like the assumption that it was a real account originally.
|
| It all seems so unthinkable but when running a forum or a blog
| with an active comment section.. what would you do/think if your
| users show up, browse around and not say anything for a week? You
| start out by making topics in your own name, write helpful
| replies.. until you look like an idiot talking to yourself.
|
| Forums with good traffic and lots of spammy advertisement no
| doubt consider it when visitors leave because nothing new
| happened.
|
| I once upon a time, on a rather stale forum, created two
| similarly named accounts from the same ip and argued with myself.
| At first I thought the owner or one of the other users would
| notice but I quickly learned that no behaviour is weird enough
| for it to be ever considered.
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