The dead internet - and Skirt Cafe

[moonshadow]

(Link to video below)

A video came up on my feed tonight and it covered at topic that I've been somewhat suspicious of for several years now. It's about most of the content of the internet being made up with fake articles (from A.I.). The video goes into a lot of different scenarios such as social engineering, election tampering, and just flat out making various people [politicians] out to say things they may have never said.

The question remains, unless you actually physically witnessed someone say something in the same room as you, how can you be truly sure it was ever said?

I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand it's comforting to know maybe the world isn't actually as bad as it's depicted online (assuming most of the news coverage is greatly exaggerated if not outright fake). On the other hand, it's concerning that there is really no way to know for sure exactly what is going on, what is real and what is fake.

I trust that most members here are the real deal, several I have spoken with and met in real life. It's almost like sites like Skirt Cafe and other little "mom and pop" forums are really human islands in a sea of artificial internet bullsh!t. It really makes me wonder, are major social media platforms such as Facebook, Tick-Tock, even YouTube effectively useless for online engagement? How can one truly know if they are interacting with real humans or just a line of code designed to keep you on the platform?

It makes me wonder how many articles we've posted on "News and Advocacy" that are completely fake?

I've often wondered why so many of my comments on social media go unnoticed and ignored... perhaps it's because I'm talking to am empty room?

Quite honestly, it makes me want to spend less time online. It seems like a waste doesn't it? I mean, if there's no "social" in "social media" anymore than what's the point of wasting endless hours, days, months, and years, contributing to nothing more than an algorithm where nobody is actually engaging other humans? We're all just feeding a machine that profits off our eyeballs.

Suddenly my collection of old books seem like something I should really cherish. I even wonder about new books, are they even written by real people anymore?

In all my musings about mankind killing ourselves off, our prejudice, our bigotry, our hatred... what if it's all fake. What if everything is fake? What if I'm fake? Maybe... it's already too late. I find the notion very bothersome that everything humanity achieved and stood for...our entire legacy... gone... nothing but a drop of water in an endless sea of made up nonsense.

I need to take a walk in the woods.

Lots to mull over...

https://youtu.be/mlR9fCXfWyM

[Coder]

Moonshadow, I understand your concerns and they are valid. The rise of artificial intelligence has made it possible to generate fake articles, videos, and even deepfake audios that are indistinguishable from real ones. It is a worrying trend, especially since these fake contents can be used to manipulate people's opinions, spread false information, and undermine democracy.

However, not all content on the internet is fake, and there are still trustworthy sources of information out there. It is important to learn how to distinguish between fake and real content and to verify the sources before believing or sharing any information.

Regarding social media, it is true that many platforms have algorithms that prioritize engagement and keep users hooked. But that doesn't mean that all interactions on social media are meaningless. There are still real humans behind those profiles, and you can connect with them, share your thoughts, and learn from each other. It is important to use social media in moderation and to be aware of the risks of addiction and manipulation.

In terms of books, there are still many real authors writing real books. It is true that there are also computer-generated books out there, but they are not as common as you may think. You can still enjoy reading and learning from books, both old and new.

In conclusion, while there are valid concerns about the authenticity of content on the internet, it is important not to give up on it entirely. We can still use the internet to connect with real people, learn new things, and make positive changes in the world. We just need to be mindful and critical of what we see and hear, and always verify our sources. And taking a walk in the woods can certainly be a good way to clear your mind and find some peace amidst the noise of the internet.

[Coder]

(to be perfectly honest, I asked ChatGPT to respond to moonshadow's concerns, the post above was from the language model/AI)

[Coder]

It makes me wonder how many articles we've posted on "News and Advocacy" that are completely fake?

Does it matter who wrote them? If they discuss real things - celebrities really wearing skirts to events - or stores carrying men's skirts - or a male journalist wearing a skirt for a day - they are verifiable to a degree. Opinion pieces will always be shrouded in mystery, and you just have to assume the writer has the best intentions and isn't lying to you.

I've often wondered why so many of my comments on social media go unnoticed and ignored... perhaps it's because I'm talking to am empty room?

Or people are so focused on their own lives, that your post doesn't generate enough emotion in them that they will take time out to respond? I've posted numerous times on reddit, sometimes to be met with a few random upvotes and nary a response. It's a very defeating feeling. I've noticed a trend over there - if the topic is controversial people SWARM to it and respond/upvote. And reddit forces these stories on the "home" feed which is a default you cannot change.

This is also why I stopped reading the news years ago - I generally feel news is written with an aim to get people incensed so they keep coming back to that same network.

Quite honestly, it makes me want to spend less time online. It seems like a waste doesn't it? I mean, if there's no "social" in "social media" anymore than what's the point of wasting endless hours, days, months, and years, contributing to nothing more than an algorithm where nobody is actually engaging other humans? We're all just feeding a machine that profits off our eyeballs.

Yeah, basically. I think the internet has been a great boon for knowledge-sharing, learning about other people, connecting like-minded individuals... but social media took a turn for the worse and if it was ever "good", it certainly isn't today.

[rode_kater]

(to be perfectly honest, I asked ChatGPT to respond to moonshadow's concerns, the post above was from the language model/AI)

Haha, nice one. I wouldn't have immediately twigged, but now you mention it, it's different tone from your normal posts. Well played.

Moonshadow, this is the reason I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. Reddit only non-default subs (except perhaps /r/europe which is strongly moderated). There are a number of news organisations I'll trust. Not that I know for certain they cover everything, but I know they don't deliberately make stuff up. Almost everything I look up otherwise is tech related and it's a bit hard to make up completely fake tech stories.

[moonshadow]

(to be perfectly honest, I asked ChatGPT to respond to moonshadow's concerns, the post above was from the language model/AI)

Holy crap I fell for it! Though I admit something seemed "off", it didn't look quite like you're writing style. Compared to your response below the difference was clear.

I've often wondered why so many of my comments on social media go unnoticed and ignored... perhaps it's because I'm talking to am empty room?

Or people are so focused on their own lives, that your post doesn't generate enough emotion in them that they will take time out to respond? I've posted numerous times on reddit, sometimes to be met with a few random upvotes and nary a response. It's a very defeating feeling. I've noticed a trend over there - if the topic is controversial people SWARM to it and respond/upvote. And reddit forces these stories on the

The guy in the video actually touched on this... You see most of my comments on social medial platforms are one of "peacemaking" and generally playing emotions down and/or asking honest questions about both sides of an issue before making a knee jerk reaction.

As you can imagine, these comments are almost always ignored. In fact, it's one of the main reasons I don't maintain social media accounts anymore, even ones like Flickr. I have almost 0% real engagement with others, 99% of accounts that interact with my content you can tell are bots, so eventually you just have to ask yourself, "what's the point?". Even in the small number of actual engagements I have with real people, they are usually so angry, with people calling me all sorts of nasty things, telling me to kill myself, etc, its horribly toxic.

And I think about why so many people are SO ANGRY online all the time... frankly I wonder how much of their anger was whipped up by an A.I. article?

I do know of several conversations I've had with various right wing acquaintances of mine where I happened to know for a fact what they were ranting about was nonsense... even my own mother fell for it a few times.

It makes me wonder how many articles we've posted on "News and Advocacy" that are completely fake?

Does it matter who wrote them? If they discuss real things - celebrities really wearing skirts to events - or stores carrying men's skirts - or a male journalist wearing a skirt for a day - they are verifiable to a degree.

To me? Yes. You know when I finally worked up the courage to don a skirt for the first time? In 2015 when I lived in a small town, completely cut off from the world. We had no internet, no TV service, no newspapers for almost two years. It was a very peaceful time.

Anyway, I noticed [male] Appalachian trail hikers occasionally wearing skirts, kilts, and even dresses on the trail! It gave me the inspiration.

Sometimes... oftentimes I think the internet is WAY overrated.

[Barleymower]

(Link to video below)

A video came up on my feed tonight and it covered at topic that I've been somewhat suspicious of for several years now. It's about most of the content of the internet being made up with fake articles (from A.I.). The video goes into a lot of different scenarios such as social engineering, election tampering, and just flat out making various people [politicians] out to say things they may have never said.

The question remains, unless you actually physically witnessed someone say something in the same room as you, how can you be truly sure it was ever said?

I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand it's comforting to know maybe the world isn't actually as bad as it's depicted online (assuming most of the news coverage is greatly exaggerated if not outright fake). On the other hand, it's concerning that there is really no way to know for sure exactly what is going on, what is real and what is fake.

I trust that most members here are the real deal, several I have spoken with and met in real life. It's almost like sites like Skirt Cafe and other little "mom and pop" forums are really human islands in a sea of artificial internet bullsh!t. It really makes me wonder, are major social media platforms such as Facebook, Tick-Tock, even YouTube effectively useless for online engagement? How can one truly know if they are interacting with real humans or just a line of code designed to keep you on the platform?

It makes me wonder how many articles we've posted on "News and Advocacy" that are completely fake?

I've often wondered why so many of my comments on social media go unnoticed and ignored... perhaps it's because I'm talking to am empty room?

Quite honestly, it makes me want to spend less time online. It seems like a waste doesn't it? I mean, if there's no "social" in "social media" anymore than what's the point of wasting endless hours, days, months, and years, contributing to nothing more than an algorithm where nobody is actually engaging other humans? We're all just feeding a machine that profits off our eyeballs.

Suddenly my collection of old books seem like something I should really cherish. I even wonder about new books, are they even written by real people anymore?

In all my musings about mankind killing ourselves off, our prejudice, our bigotry, our hatred... what if it's all fake. What if everything is fake? What if I'm fake? Maybe... it's already too late. I find the notion very bothersome that everything humanity achieved and stood for...our entire legacy... gone... nothing but a drop of water in an endless sea of made up nonsense.

I need to take a walk in the woods.

Lots to mull over...

https://youtu.be/mlR9fCXfWyM

Moonshadow I am not a chat bot, I am dismayed and very surprised when I read Coders chat bot which would have had me if I was not told about it.

I want to make a difference. I dont want to just sit here and meekly accept that I can do what I want but I will be hated, rejected, ignored, sniggered at. I'm going to do something. I'm not a big voice opinion but I'm going to try anyway:

1. I'm going to write to the government equalities office and ask them to update their document "Dress codes and sex discrimination – what you need to know". I will ask them to include with their examples an example of a man in a skirt.
2. There was a case in Rngmer Community College in 2004 where a boy was forced to sit in a empty room for wearing a skirt. He fought back and said it was discrimination. I looked at the schools uniform page now in 2023 and they now are clear that they dont discriminate and children can choose. The skirt is also now called a kilt. I am going to ask them to include photos of both boys and girls in the kilt and in the trousers on their web page.
3. I'm going to write to the BBC, ITV, CH4 and CH5 and ask them to run features on MIS and empasise that bringing the genders closer with skirts will have positive outcomes.

[Coder]

A thing I've noticed over the past two to three years. I do a LOT of internet searching - part of it is for DIY knowledge, other times it's for work searching for a product or comparison between products. A lot of the SPAM sites you get in search results:

1) are increasing at an alarming rate
2) read like ChatGPT wrote them
3) have glaring inaccuracies in them

The first page of Google results are now usually worthless - even page two or three are getting useless. I'm increasingly filtering by site - ie site:reddit - when I'm looking for a human discussion about, say a 3D printer. Even then, I will wonder: is the person who wrote this glowing review a paid shill?

[Coder]

Oh, one trick I used to do would be to include "forum" in the search keywords. Often this would get me results from small, dedicated communities like skirtcafe, where you could get a sense you were reading a human posting something. This doesn't work as well anymore, and the number of dedicated forums seems to have shrunk, or engagement with has. If I do get a result, it's often worthless and out of date by years.

[crfriend]

(to be perfectly honest, I asked ChatGPT to respond to moonshadow's concerns, the post above was from the language model/AI)

Please do not do that again.

I read that, and immediately smelled something fishy (and it wasn't pleasant). The tone was, "wrong". It was flat, almost as if in a monotone. One of the things that sets humans apart is that we all have rather distinctive writing styles, and after a while we can identify someone by their writing style.

Is it "plagiarism" to use a 'bot to write something for one's self for publishing?

[Coder]

I read that, and immediately smelled something fishy (and it wasn't pleasant). The tone was, "wrong". It was flat, almost as if in a monotone. One of the things that sets humans apart is that we all have rather distinctive writing styles, and after a while we can identify someone by their writing style.

Sorry! Yes - AI / ChatGPT has a very inhuman writing style.

Is it "plagiarism" to use a 'bot to write something for one's self for publishing?

I would consider it cheating if the AI truly was "intelligent". I would consider it plagiarism if the AI was based on other author's prose (which ChatGPT is doing, essentially).

[moonshadow]

I read that, and immediately smelled something fishy (and it wasn't pleasant). The tone was, "wrong". It was flat, almost as if in a monotone. One of the things that sets humans apart is that we all have rather distinctive writing styles, and after a while we can identify someone by their writing style.

Isn't it amazing how we each cultivate our own "digital fingerprint" the more we write? I too had the sense that something was "off" to the point that I actually had to read it very slowly and before I read coder's next comment, my initial thought was "ghee, what's gotten into coder today?"

It's comforting to know that even my own, somewhat vulgar writing style can help members know if it's really me or not. From my semi-poor grammar, to my southern euthamisms, my "local pride"... indeed if I write too many post and don't mention how backeard Russell County is, how much Tennessee sucks, or naming out U.S. highway numbers when speaking of my weekend getaways, then you know you might not be talking to "moonshadow", and I might have been hacked.

Carl, coder, AL, sinned, kirbstone, even new members like Scot and barleymower have all developed distinct writing styles that I can now recognize and possibly compare it against an imposter.

For instance, I know AL likes to post feel good memes in off-topic, he is pretty well rounded, and usually stays to himself on most conversations. But if ever a day when Al's account promotes A.O.C.... then something ain't right.

Kinda like if I ever hear crfriend say something positive about the Reagan years... that's suspect...

[Coder]

Carl, coder, AL, sinned, kirbstone, even new members like Scot and barleymower have all developed distinct writing styles that I can now recognize and possibly compare it against an imposter.

I've actually been contemplating what this means for a while now - could one develop a "writing style" search engine, where you feed it a user's profile, and then have it identify other things they've written under different accounts on the internet? Something like this probably exists, if not commercially, certainly law enforcement has it (NSA?).

[crfriend]

Carl, coder, AL, sinned, kirbstone, even new members like Scot and barleymower have all developed distinct writing styles that I can now recognize and possibly compare it against an imposter.

I've actually been contemplating what this means for a while now - could one develop a "writing style" search engine, where you feed it a user's profile, and then have it identify other things they've written under different accounts on the internet?

Writing style is something that seems to be deeply personal, and varies only very slowly over time. Several months ago I read the first paragraph of a trip-log I kept on a 1995 train trip to Atlanta, GA and Huntsville, AL to the woman I was hoping to forge a relationship with, and she commented almost immediately, "I recognise that -- it's you!" based on our modern conversations. Very little "juvenilia" from me still exists, but some of the things that do survive from my high-school years read eerily similarly to my modern style.

Something like this probably exists, if not commercially, certainly law enforcement has it (NSA?).

I'm not sure what sort of application such a notion would have commercially, but I'm fairly certain it exists in lawn-forcement [sic] circles [1]. Of course, if one is trying to cover footsteps, one will tactically take on a chameleon aspect in one's public writings. The NSA has a bottomless budget and does not require such mundane things as warrants (witness the wholesale gathering of telephone-call data (which likely includes audio) and Internet traffic (e.g. Project Prism) so it has to be using AI (or AS, who knows) in dealing with that vast mound of noise.


[1] Since the USA is no longer a nation of laws.

[familyman34]

(to be perfectly honest, I asked ChatGPT to respond to moonshadow's concerns, the post above was from the language model/AI)

I don't want to seem to be crowing, but I immediately guessed the response was from ChatGPT; the tone was so bland and conciliatory - there was no trace of real character behind it.

After my several (five and a bit) years on SC, I feel that I know many of you quite well, with your quirks of personality, etc. That response from ChatGPT didn't match my previous view of Coder's outlook on the world.

However, once ChatGPT is more fully trained on the postings of each of us, it may become far more difficult to distinguish the real from the fake.