In the 2000s I went back to look at a #Usenet newsgroup which had been a major part of my online life in the 1990s. All the people had gone, but the spambots were still there. The entire contents of the group were just bot spam, automatically generated and posted at nobody to be read by no one. The bots were even replying to one another’s threads with more spam. A forum where genuine human interactions had forged friendships and fostered community over some years had dwindled to nothing more than grift machines trying to sell crap to each other.
20 years later the same shit is going down again with a new coat of #AI paint, this time with revenue and shareholders involved.
https://gizmodo.com/metas-ai-profiles-are-already-polluting-instagram-and-facebook-with-slop-2000545433
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@Rob_T_Firefly once big money gets involved, the medium is fucked
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@Rob_T_Firefly I remember all the spambots that were pushing Alex Jones show episodes into alt.binaries.multimedia.japanese in the early 2000s before Time Warner got rid of usenet entirely. Great time for fansubs, but spam filtering was such a hassle
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@Rob_T_Firefly I consider #USNET the place to meet when things go bad. Like when Lenny told George to hide in the brush near the river.
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@Rob_T_Firefly ensh1ttification happening before our eyes. Makes me feel nostalgic for Blockchain ;-)
@pluralistic
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@Rob_T_Firefly comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, ftw!
Thanks so much, #JukkaKorpela, et al.!
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@Rob_T_Firefly conversely, I went back to a newsgroup about 20 years after I'd last read it, and a lot of the same people were still there, including one who had not changed his .sig in the intervening time.
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@Rob_T_Firefly
some CEO's is going to be ai into believing humans are obsolete and superflous to 'the economy'.
Why produce anything to sell when you can just /own it all/?
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@Rob_T_Firefly
I'm curious.
AI bots have been around for a while. So have mechanical turks pretending to be genuine accounts.
Would the outrage be the same if the bot wasn't described as LGBTQ?
Would the outrage be the same if the avatar picture was white?
Would the outrage be the same if the avatar picture wasn't of a woman?
Meta is in the business of mass malign influence campaigns.
They deliberately chose an intersectional AI bot of this appearance. Ask yourself why.
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@Npars01 @Rob_T_Firefly it's digital blackface, digital elderface. digital parentface.... claiming to have birthed a child, or to have skin at all, is inherently a lie, and it is made worse when the lie co-opts space in the conversation that real Black, elder, childraising, etc. people would otherwise occupy
it's pre-theft of voices, by excluding from the space, by promoting these vacuous bots
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@datum @Npars01 I recommend this post by @cmdr_nova about that point: https://nova.mkultra.monster/social-media/2025/01/04/meta-experiments-with-digital-blackface.html
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@Npars01 @Rob_T_Firefly
well, x.com may have white heterosexual male version, spewing some ... !
good lord, i'm not in x.com service.
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@Rob_T_Firefly To what benefit even is such dumb fake person bot account?
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@Rob_T_Firefly my Facebook account only exists because of marketplace these days. Nobody I know interacts with that platform anymore outside of that. When I browse the profile of a potential buyer or seller the vast majority haven't used their accounts for anything in over 5 years. Facebook has been a zombie platform for quite a while so it's no wonder they're trying this shit.
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@ClutchAbuse @Rob_T_Firefly It depends on how you use it. I don't use marketplace, and my main use is for the BuyNothing group, but it is my only social media account where I'm connected to real-world friends. I've never met a single person I know through Mastodon, and probably never will. It was the same with Twitter. But perhaps other people have all their real world friends on TikTok? I'm old, so what do I know?
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@ClutchAbuse I am shocked you still even use marketplace. Everytime I post anything for sale I get several scam offers to 'drop off a (fake) check' for way more than my asking to 'compensate me for the inconvenience' presumably for being dumb enough to fall for that.
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@Crystal_Fish_Caves I would rather not, but that's where the buyers and sellers are in the motorcycle world. But even outside of that I've had pretty good luck selling random things. For what it's worth I haven't had many problems with scams, they're easy to spot.
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@Rob_T_Firefly
Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecology
ROBE
[#]Anathem
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@Rob_T_Firefly Meta seems to consider FB and Insta places for people to interact not with people, but with content creators. From the point of content creation, where you are often dealing with a created, curated, fairly untruthful image, it makes sense that you could just replace it with an AI. But as someone who is leary of anything that presents as "content," this is the worst possible road for social media. So it's probably the road to nowhere that we're stuck on.
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@Rob_T_Firefly @pluralistic When people were talking about AI as a danger to humanity, the picture that came to mind is that of out-of-control war drones, robots taking over etc. The reality may be much less prosaic... This swamping of social media and the internet with untrustworthy content fits perfectly in the fake news strategy of the far right, of climate denialists and other merchants of doubt. How will people ever trust information again if all they can find is AI-generated crap? (1/2)
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@Rob_T_Firefly @pluralistic Already we see that, at this crucial moment, the incoming Trump administration is likely to cut down on climate mitigation measures, instead of accelerating climate action. Elected and supported by people who are, to a large extent, utterly misinformed about this and other key global issues. The social media algorithms that lead to echo chambers, the deluge of untrustworthy content, it's all powered by AI.
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@Rob_T_Firefly There will come soft rains... of spambots.
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@Rob_T_Firefly the elder post was particularly disturbing… why would they post a fake nursing home with melted faces?
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@Rob_T_Firefly Last year I wrote an essay basically predicting this happening, but the outstanding question I had (still have!) is "do enough people care about it to sink the platform?" I suspect not, but I also think social media use will be more commonly viewed as the addictive behavior it is once any pretence of being "social" is officially stripped away.
https://www.staygrounded.online/p/future-grandmasters-of-the-attention
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@Rob_T_Firefly Could use some hacker help on a big story i'm working on. Can we chat? It's important. Even if you can't help maybe one of your fellows could.
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@Rob_T_Firefly It’s funny: when a Usenet poster got particularly tedious we used to accuse them of being an AI. So it has come to pass.
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@Rob_T_Firefly
Zuck: Engagement is up!
Reporter: What are your human-user engagement numbers?
Zuck: smoke bomb, disappears
Almost as embarrassing as when he renamed his company after vaporware that no one wanted.
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@Rob_T_Firefly
A FB humor group I'm in was deluged with off-topic posts over the last few days, after the admins had taken the group private. It seemed to be an attempt to drown the group.
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feels like advertising + ai could plausibly make the internet implode. The beauty and promise of the blog age was to have a window for interacting with real people across the world, caringly tending to things they loved simply because they loved them (and lots of other bullshit, but hey at least coming from real people). As more money is pumped into AI and it becomes harder and harder to discern real human interaction from tailored targeted advertising, the only way to get out is to opt out of the internet entirely. Sure, that could be a really good thing, given what the internet looks like to me now; but what about that original potential that was stolen by profit-seeking ?
Not to be a pessimist :gnomed:
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@Rob_T_Firefly had this exact same experience, when you look at the threads in the groups you can see the rot setting in and eventually subsuming everything.
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text/gemini