MangoCats

www.wired.com/story/ai-generated-maga-girls/

That’s the Lead Poisioned and Proud of it! unit.

I’d like to believe that most of the dumb stuff you see posted online is by bots trying to draw suckers to their echo chambers.

Unfortunately, I’ve met too many of the idiots in real life, they’re definitely not all bots.

That has worked so well for the last 80 years…

Do it like this:

Well, in a way most of the AI hype is a thirst trap for CEOs — like that you can easily replace office workers with chatbots or that software developers will become 10x more efficient and consequently you can fire 90% of your workforce.

and we’ll know you’re an AI.

What the platforms know, but don’t share very easily or at all, is how well established those accounts making the likes and comments are.

There was a time when the Facebook users count was starting to grow past the global human population…

I wonder, like others here, whether or not the same people posting the AI generated images aren’t also posting responses to make it look as if the images are convincing people they are real… those “life-like” response posts can make the images themselves more convincing, to some people.

And e-mail, and FB Messenger and the rest, but people don’t get that. People responding to posts in public forums think they are just talking with one other person because “I don’t see anybody else here” - meanwhile, the post will stay up open and searchable for decades.

What people “don’t get” is that their “private” snapchat messages are more or less equivalent to shouting in a quiet theater.

I fear that we are training our population to suppress the signs, to just “go off” without warnings. If we deploy SWAT every time somebody repeats some violent threat joke they heard in 785 movies and TV shows over the past 20 years, people are going to get better at filtering that - and actual signs that they’re about to “go postal.”

As for that, what happens when I’m watching some indie movie from a DVD that Alexa doesn’t recognize and Alexa hears the character in the movie plotting to do some (better not say it here in detail) very plausible copycat of something like Timothy McVeigh and his little truck bomb? Alexa mistakes that audio snippet for actual people in the house and reports it…

I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.

Unfortunately, as a young moldable mind, you probably would have been owned faster and harder by the unregulated internet than any school teacher ever could.

important for Americans to cross examine sources

It always was. The difference for Bush Jr was that Americans could pull up Al Jazerra, RT, and directly chat with all kinds of people all over the globe - so the press had to start pressing harder. Back with Bush Sr in Kuwait, I had a friend from Jordan who spent his evenings listening to his short-wave to get “real news” about what was going on back home - what he heard was apparently a lot more accurate and complete than what we got from TV. It has always been like that, since forever.

cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.

The “facts” on the internet evolve over time. My favorite to repeat is, God rest his soul, Scott Adams’ case of ideopathic aphasia - he lost much of his ability to speak (probably a mini-stroke, definitely some kind of brain damage) - he blogged about it openly, candidly, it was an engaging story. Then a few years later he underwent a rather strong shift of political outlook he felt he had “worked hard for all his money and shouldn’t be forced to share any of it” - his touchy feely sharing about his brain damage was expunged from the web (to the best of his ability, which, with all that money he worked so hard for, was pretty effective)… but he can’t erase the thousands of memories of people who read his writings at the time.

We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school.

My parents were teachers from the 1970s through the 2010s… my father crusaded to spread the teaching of critical thinking, he did his part, made a difference as much as anyone, but he was on the losing side through those decades. Maybe things will turn around someday, they usually do go in cycles.

utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn’t like deviance very much.

If anything has deluded you into the idea that deviance is more persecuted today than it was in the past, you have been fed a whopper of a lie. Again, back through my personal knowledge of the 1970s, the open racism, LGBQT intolerance, etc. that was widely practiced back then makes what goes around today look like playtime.

I’m neurodivergent and I’m queer

Go around saying that openly in the 1970s, you wouldn’t get far in most US towns before being beaten into a multi-week hospital stay, or worse.

I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access

I suspect a large part of our current troubles come from “the masses” having internet access, because that gives the internet access to them, and through that we got Cambridge Analytica, and much much more…

robust training in media literacy

Nice sentiment, but the who exactly is going to teach them? I think this is actually a big motivator in the destruction of the US education system.

than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).

Yeah, I don’t think those are helping anything either - more symptomatic of yet another authoritarianism flex.

that has been around since Bush, and 15 years ago it wasn’t as bad as it is today.

Real change takes time. Trickle down started with Reagan and it’s still getting worse.

no child left behind on crack now.

Revenge of the Nerds came out in 1984. 40 years later we’ve got revenge of the stupid and proud of it. NCLB started the threats of de-funding failing schools, now we’re just defunding all the schools.

obnoxious parents and admins who have no spines. Oh, and the shitty teachers who don’t teach but babysit. The whole industry is fucked.

Those issues were around in the 1970s, and probably for hundreds of years before as well - I just didn’t experience any of it personally until the 1970s - both my parents were young teachers. Obnoxious parents aren’t actually as bad as apathetic parents in a lot of ways and apathetic parents have dominated throughout history - 90%+ Admins with no spines, admins who serve the almighty dollar first last and always - I met plenty of those throughout my schooling from 2nd grade through my Masters’ degree. Shitty teachers who just babysit, plenty of those 50 years ago. And to hear my parents tell it every day after work in the car, the whole industry was fucked then too. Sexism and racism was alive and well in Florida in those years I was in school, intolerance for gays was the norm, complete denial that lesbians actually existed was another norm… there has been actual progress on those fronts, but now the revenge of the proudly stupid is trying to push back. And the proudly stupid were always there, they just didn’t have enough self-esteem to stand up for themselves as a group in the past.

As long as you’ve got somebody willing to feed you and change your diaper - you might actually be happier.

The ice pick has evolved: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37313441/

Those phone cords were a mess, always tangled and over stretched… 5GHz house-range wireless landlines were peak.

We used to be a proper society

When was that?

Digital literacy should be exactly about not getting used by tech engineered to hook you and grab your attention, instead using the tech to give you actual value.

Bad administrators are the worst part of the school systems. There’s a mix of good and bad at all levels, but a bad administrator can screw up the education of students even when the students have what would have been good teachers.

One of the more chilling moments of the ‘90s for me was when they put the child safety restraint seat laws in at federal level. Now, I had a newborn and a toddler at the time, and I was voluntarily putting them in the best safety seats we could get, but to me what those laws were was training the populace, from the earliest ages (up through age 5 I think) that they MUST COMPLY with the OVERWHELMING FORCE of adults bigger than them and submit to being physically restrained the whole time they are in a car. It’s like they were prepping the population to be less resistant to arrest and physical restraints.

I always thought homework was some employers’ wet dream about getting their employees to not only work for the company while in-office, but also to work all night long too. And I know some “go getter carreer oriented” people with aspirations to management who did exactly that for decades. Personally, I rate my work product and volume as “optimal” with around 30 hours a week of focused devotion to task, beyond that I do more bad work which has less total value than if I just did the 30 hours and knocked off to let my brain rest, refresh and reset to do another good 30 hours next week.

If you have any concern about “fair” - you haven’t experienced much of real life.