To add on the point above: the whole panic is overblown. Majority of people have always been susceptible to blatant lies and manipulation. In my country there was an internet meme "Capital's sewer system as a tool of Judaism and quackery aimed at destroying the farming industry and extermination of local population". The thing is, that's a title of an actual essay printed 100 years ago. Someone genuinely believed this. In my father's village local peasants burnt down one guy's house because he used a scythe instead of a sickle on his own field, believing that this would lead to some curse or whatever.

The point is, people are stupid, have always been, and finding yet another way of generating obvious lies won't change anything in the big scheme of things. Reminds me of a South Park quote that goes along like this:

- I'm worried that you won't like me anymore

- We never liked you in the first place

- So... nothing changes?

- Nothing changes.

That's the second time I've read this phrase on HN this week (earlier, it was in reference to the ad-supported Internet).

The race-to-the-bottom of zeroing out people's empathy to grab fractions of a penny (at scale) also reminds me of the Malthusian trap (aka "rats on the island") in slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch". Whatever little nooks exist where some micro-pennies can still be found, will be farmed (at scale).

But then I've also seen a far larger number of channels which use text-to-speech to make audiobooks from public domain works. I recently listened to a couple of Plato's works on a channel like this. The text-to-speech did a fairly convincing reading, with Socrates and his companions each having their own distinct voices. These videos had tens of thousands of views, which might not be great, but if you can put out a few hundred videos like that in less than a year it might be worth it to the right person.

I also suspect most of the film summary channels have been using AI in similar ways since before it was even popular. Those videos get into the millions of views and in my opinion they are not bad as far as low-effort content goes.

As a result, life revolves around Facebook. All day, every day. It's how you shop, you contact each other, you 'google things', it's everything. And being rather high unemployment areas, people tend to spend all day there.

So given that you've essentially captured an entire demographic with little to no money that spend all their time on your platform, it's no surprise that's where the scams come from, whether it's outright or through such slop. Who can blame them?

And FB doesn't care, they just report 10 million user growth, without telling the actual truth that they're in a roundabout way, paying those users.

It is like these "life hack" cooking recipes that don't work. They are wasting kids enthusiasm in cooking and trust in people.

Propaganda spreads faster and affects more people in denser and larger population sizes. And when propaganda affects more people it starts feeling less like propaganda and starts feeling believable.

The powerful stuff will play your little mind like a piano. One glance and you're lost.

Now I'm confused, was it AI-generated or not?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/deep-fake-det...

Seriously though, I completely understand. AI slop tends to have a "when you see it, you can't unsee it" issue, but on first glance they're pretty compelling. Only when writing this did I notice how uncanny the 42 year old woman's thumbs were.

FB is functionally dead for many people, unlikely to meaningfully grow. So they’re trying to reduce costs and make sure new platforms and ones that still have some growth potential get the effort instead. I’d rather work on the Threads or Instagram Reels teams than the FB one. And who knows, maybe the VR revolution Zuck wants really will happen.

But when I re-read it with "did AI write this?" in mind, there's plenty of stuff in there that I would find it rather difficult to get an LLM to write if I tried.

FWIW, I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat-earthers to try and understand what the appeal is (spoiler: it's often some variant of "if the Earth were a ball hurtling through space, that would be too terrifying")... maybe I should just stay away from this one :D

I struggle to explain, but I feel like our data-obssessed society has completely thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to these things. No one labels themselves with a religion or political party because there is a flaw in each one and anything with a flaw can't be correct, scientifically, so we just don't believe in any grand purpose to our lives, don't believe in any world leaders, don't believe in any shared tenets, and basically are all lonely and weak (because we abandon every group with a flaw).

The result of critical thinking shouldn't be a worse off society...

However, they also share the road with you, help decide what content/messaging gets spread, and vote with their dollar (and political vote), just like you.

While I agree with your opinion, although it may be their fault, it easily can spread to become everyone's problem.

Ye it is pure toxic and made me stop using Facebook.

At some point in time a was fed "people falling and hurting them self a bit" videos. And I hovered over them and tried to find the blacklist button. So Facebook started to feed me more of those! And a hate those kind of videos.

I recently discovered how to make very realistic images - you simply ask for your image, then you use the follow-up prompt "make it more realistic" and, most shockingly, it actually works. I never thought of doing it before because it's so stupid.

I am betting on relationships with people, and avoiding public Internet, except for shitposting on here.

This can be modelled as the back half of a whalefall. The Internet used to be a magic place where you could just stumble into community, useful information, etc. Now it's been over-exploited and game is becoming scarce.

The information is saturated with crap and mass media was never a substitute for friendships. Even though it's the hardest thing I've ever done, I'll have to make real friends.

What you wrote sounds a bit "out there", but, like Margaret Atwood's work, it's actually not too far away.

> Who is vulnerable? Who is immune?

I'm reminded of Hiro Protagonist (living in a storage unit), or Ready Player One protagonist (living in some impoverished mobile home stack) -- these are the "vulnerable".

As for "immune", it's the people who "control the supply":

https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out...

P.S. Like all real-world examples, we have an exception -- Felon Husk, who gets high on his own supply, making him simultaneously victim and perpetrator.