On The Internet No One Knows You’re a Dog
I saw this on Hacker News yesterday: Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination.
An idea raised in the Hacker News comments was how could a user, as a human, even tell if a comment was posted by another human, or a human using AI, or just a bot.
This tingled the part of little elder-Millennial brain where it was beat into me that we couldn’t use any information online as a valid source for writing a paper in school. Why? Because at the time it was understood that anyone could put anything online. Even for a site like cnn.com1 it was expected you could back up what you found with a physical version, either in print or a reference to content that aired on TV.
My skepticism for things posted on the Internet has never really abated. Publishing something online in 1999 was not actually as easy as my teachers made it out to be2, but with Web 2.0 anyone could write anything. That scaled to platforms like Twitter where you would struggle to tell a person from a bot, and now today we have AI posting content generated from slurping up all of that previously posted content online and making its own.
So how do you tell if content online is valid? You don’t. The first set of sources teachers allowed us to cite were .edu or .gov websites, but, is this government website a realiable source of information? Do we need a system of identifying humans online. Maybe. What if it was run by AI’s biggest shill. Do I think this situation is going to get better in the future?
lol, no.
Between people replacing search and sourcing information with AI spitting back answers and improvements in AI generated video the Internet will only continue to grow to be the largest source of information, both valid and invalid. Figuring out what’s real will continue to be a skill. Not contributing to the noise will be a virtue3.
N.B. - the title of this post and the the comic in the header image here is from a comic that ran in The New Yorker. Amazingly it was printed in 1993.
Footnotes
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For the youths out there, cnn.com was one of the first popular news sites online. Also it was a fun prank back then to download the entire HTML source of a CNN page and then modify it with your own fake news story and re-upload it somewhere else. There is nothing new under the sun. ↩
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…although people who were posting online at the time tended to either be academics posting valuable content or stuff like the Heaven’s Gate website. ↩
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Nothing here was generated with AI, but to the point of what I wrote above, can you tell? Am I lying? Does AI ask questions like this? If I just keep going on and on and on without a point does it seem more human or less or IDK…. ↩