Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots to praise their own products on Reddit. Thanks to training on genuine comments, some models are very good at sounding like a human commenter, and can easily generate a comment history with diverse interests to appear human, making them basically undetectable. So it seems like this method will, at some point, not identify the company with the best knife, but the one with the most ad spend on bot comments.
This narrative has been popularized all over social media for the last couple years.
Obviously it's true and not a surprise to anyone familiar with the history. But no one is asking more complex questions: why is it being pushed by algorithms and networks ultimately controlled by the same powers? Is it a "limited hangout"? Well poisoning? What does the "CIA" gain from revealing a sliver of its past activities and discrediting (both directly and by insinuation) a large number of radical artists and thinkers?
My brain tingles when I hear "three letter letter agency did X"
But my take on the question: "why is it being pushed by algorithms" is that it is a property of the medium of "algorithmic feeds".
YT, shorts, etc. are a great medium for attention grabbing in a way that is district from TV. Broadcast TV caters to the "average" viewer, ex. Sienfeld, Johnny Carson show. "Algorithmic TV" caters to specialized viewers. Fringe ideas and science, "the truth about X". The crown prince of "algorithmic TV" (IMO of course) is Joe Rogan. For every niche quest he has on, there's many more YT channels on that topic. Weird history, ancient aliens, psychedelics.
So I don't really think the "algorithms" are controlled, rather they "algorithm" elevate weird ideas more than other mediums.
As the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed, the social network algorithms can be used to send political messages according to your psychological profile. (Political messages shown to you, can be different from political messages shown to your neighbor).
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Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign used the harvested data to build psychographic profiles, determining users' personality traits based on their Facebook activity. The campaign team used this information as a micro-targeting technique, displaying customized messages about Trump to different US voters on various digital platforms. Ads were segmented into different categories, mainly based on whether individuals were Trump supporters or potential swing votes. As described by Cambridge Analytica's CEO, the key was to identify those who might be enticed to vote for their client or be discouraged to vote for their opponent. Supporters of Trump received triumphant visuals of him, as well as information regarding polling stations. Swing voters were instead often shown images of Trump's more notable supporters and negative graphics or ideas about his opponent, Hillary Clinton. For example, the collected data was specifically used by "Make America Number 1 Super PAC" to attack Clinton through constructed advertisements that accused Clinton of corruption as a way of propping up Trump as a better candidate for the presidency
Except that was the whole problem with the CCP having hooks into TikTok. It's thing to be "oh it's just the algorithm", but if China's involved, they're gonna have a finger on the scale, but then when it's up to the US, we're supposed to think that no one's not messing with the algorithm to do... something? It's a comforting belief to think that there's some grand master plan and we're not all out here doing the best we can with what we've got and it's all up to random chance, but at the level where there is YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, it's hard to believe that there's no one guiding the algorithm for some purpose that isn't just make more money. Or maybe money is it and it's all an application of Goodhart's law.
One idea - these days there are many MANY more players using the same strategy - maybe the CIA wants us to be aware of the technique to limit its effectiveness.
Simple enough mechanism used that everyday people on YouTube can grasp, vague nationalistic bend, and plenty of people who don’t know about it, all makes great YouTube clickthrough rates.
Not a direct response to your question; I figure you or others reading this may be interested in the thoughts of the host of The War on Beauty (best found on youtube).
The issue seems to be what's defined as "work", given the amount of time he claimed to work, and not necessarily how much he is paid per hour.
Sitting in a cruiser playing candy crush counting as "work" is funny when you compare it to the fact that flight attendants only get paid for the time when the door is closed on a plane.
You really think he was working 23 hours one day and then 15-16 for the rest of the week? That sounds like timecard padding to me. No way he's not spending a significant portion of the job asleep, unless he's severely abusing stimulants.
Doing the job asleep is actually possible in some cities. There's a book called "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner about his 3 years starting in 1985 as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's office fresh out of law school.
The new ADAs were started working on the vast number of minor crimes that occur daily in NY that result in an arrest but that will almost certainly end up resolved with just a fine after a short (a few minutes often) bench trial.
The courts that handle these run 24 hours a day. The ADAs operate in shifts. He describes how when arriving for his shift he'd have to step over a large number of sleeping police officers in the hall.
The officers are there either to give a statement to the ADA or to give a statement in court when the case of the person they arrested comes up.
It can take many hours between arrest and an ADA starting to work on the case or it getting called in court so as soon as the officer finishes their regular work shift they come and wait at the ADAs office. That waiting time is on the clock and all overtime.
He would often arrive for a morning shift and there would be officers who had been waiting since the end of the day shift the day before, or longer, if I remember correctly.
Two or three of those in a week and an office could get a lot of overtime, most of it spent sleeping.
I agree that in this case its VERY likely to be fraud.
However, there are many jobs where you might be stuck at work. Being at work == getting paid. Thats not really that shocking of a thing. My wife's dad worked at a children's 'training school' (kid jail) and they often had lock downs or were legally required to have certain number of people on site for certain operations. So he might be there and simply couldn't leave, but might not be 'working'. He was paid for those hours, which I think is pretty reasonable.
Yeah this is “butt on chair” definition of working at best. I’ve worked 80 hour weeks, doing 15-16 hour days consecutively will obliterate you, and also hopefully you live upstairs because commute times start eating into your sleep time quickly
How many AI companies are doing this? Say there are only 5 copies of a book left out there but 100 different companies want to shred it. Rare items could effectively vanish from the market. "Rare" meaning inclusive of high-quality items, disregard the bot opinion that mass book destruction is fine because most books are worthless anyway. And are any safeguards in place to make sure scanned books get saved in their original form for posterity before being recycled into trainingslop? Aside from Google's quasi-legal/ethical mass book scanning operation of course.
This is the citation needed that is missing from every report so far, including this one which deliberately refuses to reveal anything about these books.
You’d think if there were examples of actually valuable, rare books being shredded that the journalists would at least be able to name one such example. Instead it’s always vague posting about the destruction without ever naming any examples.
I think it’s because if they named some example titles, everyone would see that they don’t care about these books being shredded.
On the contrary these companies should be publicly listing the name/info of every book they destroy and use as training data.
If the books are really worthless as you say then their case would be proved transparently.
This article presumably had to maintain confidentiality to protect the seller who agreed to place a tracking device in the shipment.
I would say the burden of proof is on the companies destroying human cultural heritage en masse, not the handful of journalists calling for attention to the matter.
> I would say the burden of proof is on the companies destroying human cultural heritage en masse, not the handful of journalists calling for attention to the matter.
You're literally assuming the conclusion. The exact topic under contention is whether they are "destroying human cultural heritage".
I do work adjacent to the AI book scan-shred pipeline. There are definitely significant books that aren't "Windows 95 for Dummies" which are getting down to single-digit remaining copies.
I just looked for one novel, which wasn't a fantastic book, but it is the first use of a pithy and fun phrase that is so ubiquitous that you'll probably read it a couple of times today. I argued with Claude, GPT and Gemini for ten minutes just now, even knowing the title of the book, to even prove the book exists. It took me years to find a copy originally and then I lost it in a move. I found one more copy today from a rare book seller, but it just sold (to Amazon?).
Is the book valuable? Not particularly, but I feel it's noteworthy and important. I don't want to name it either, because now I have some searches out and the next copy that pops up I'll scan and put on IA. There can only have been a few thousand copies originally published in 1947, it's only in hardcover. I know of a couple of other copies in private hands, so it's not zero copies, but it has to be single-digits.
I have one periodical issue that I know of only one other existing copy (Worthpoint only shows one copy ever sold in their database) and if you look on collector sites there is a blank because nobody even knows what the cover looks like. I can't explain it, since the publication routinely printed hundreds of thousands of copies of each issue, but here we are. Perhaps all the copies were withdrawn and pulped immediately after publication for some reason? It's in my scan pile, so I'll have it uploaded soon. Is it significant? Not hugely, but every other issue of this title has been scanned already, so it's scratching an itch to get this one done.
There's definitely rare stuff getting scanned and shredded. Someone in a comment above said it's not like Nazi book-burning since they were trying to destroy information. But it is like that if you consider there remain no other physical copies and all the electronic copies are locked up in a way that nobody can access except to trick an LLM to spit out a paraphrased copy from its training data.
It looks like the "tampering" was mostly just removing the username of the person submitting the links, so they wouldn't get banned by paywall sites, and archive.today has always done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
And it looks like in some instances they changed their own alias to the name of the blogger they're in dispute with, in a fit of pique.
You have to scroll down to get hints because the conversation has been redacted, and the evidence is not provided with side-by-side comparisons.
I understand the ethical concerns about linking to the site but the blanket accusations of "tampering" seem a bit disingenuous, since no article content was ever changed afaik.
In addition to that kind of “benign” tampering, there was also tampering other webpages to insert the name of the person who was doing the exposé on archive.is. Either to slander that person further (in addition to the DDOS archive.is was already attempting) or to dox the person.
Thanks I had edited my post once I saw that - buried deep in the discussion.
I don't get why they couldn't just say what they did instead of disingenuously implying that article content had been "tampered".
Given the breadth of misinformation out there today, shoddy evidence and misleading language makes people give archive.today the benefit of the doubt, and actually hurts the case against them.
Or they wanted it to happen again. Worst case outcome, the US Congress spontaneously grow backbones, spite their sponsors and unite in a bipartisan effort for effective regulation because a few people got hacked? Likelihood low - the hacked companies might even oppose any meaningful AI regulation because it hurts their inflated profit forecasts. More probable outcomes: Useful real-world testing, free headlines about AI breakthroughs, scare USG into providing more free money ("look how scary it is - what if China develops this faster than us?")
In day-to-day work life or a meet-and-greet, yeah. But this was an executives-only retreat where they were apparently encouraged to drink and made a big deal out of getting everyone to open up to each other.
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