What we ‘see’ on the internet: lies, fakes, or ‘truths’?
Today I’m writing about a phenomenon which is going to define not just how we will live, how we will be governed, but ultimately who we actually are. It is about AI, about how the information, a.k.a. ‘News’, we receive, will become even more manipulated.
Before I start, let me assure you that ‘no news were omitted in the writing of this piece’! We knew since yesterday afternoon that Sunka has handed over half a billion of our money to Macron. Today’s front pages however are on one issue only: Lineker’s cronies walked out of yon BBC footie show after Auntie Beeb actually suspended him: “Newspaper headlines: BBC faces ‘revolt’ over Lineker as stars walk out” (link). Yes, that’s what ‘Teh Nation’ must be upset about, according to our propaganda MSM.
Looking at this staggering piece of ‘news’, remembering the many times I’ve pointed out inane headlines and reports, I wondered if a recent journalistic phenomenon is only restricted to local and trade press. A friend asked me if I had ever heard of ‘SEO Journalist’ because this label was used as byline for the ‘journalist’ who wrote a little piece for his local rag. I’d heard of ‘SEO’, quite some time ago. Here’s a definition (this and the following emphases are mine):
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website.” (link)
Keep this definition in mind, for later. However, I’d not heard of ‘SEO Journalist’ and neither had Debbie who certainly does know a thing or two about journalism and how a proper journalist ought to work! It appears that this is a skill which our MSM now demand:
“SEO journalists typically do not write on one set topic or area. Malvika Padin, said SEO journalist for a range of titles. [sic!] Anything that people are searching for, we write about. That could be something on the news, or breakout searches that are one-offs. There’s a framework to it, but it’s very varied.” She adds that working with SEO can be a great way to start a career […]” (link)
It’s no longer a surprise that MSM ‘journalists’ seem to be lacking in understanding the subject they write about: they simply use an SEO framework and write about anything, click-bait headlines included, because the skill is in optimising their piece for search engines. It’s no longer about researching to give proper information to the readers.
And right there we get into the truly murky waters of AI. I’m sure that by now you’ve heard of ‘Chatbots’. You might even have tried to do battle with them on websites where you were trying to complain about a product. Now this has been taken a huge step further. In November Microsoft released ChatGPT. Oh so innocent, isn’t it: helping people write. And anyway, it’s ‘learning’ …
Firstly, look at this screenshot of the latest ‘news’ this morning, relating to this app:
Now watch Paul Joseph Watson’s video on this app. Then connect the points: a ‘learning’ app which is taught to write by people we don’t know, biased by ‘progressive’ thoughts, probably using SEO journalists who can’t write or do their own research, providing ‘ SEO’ed news’ for search engines using yon ‘writing’ app. Actual, important news, won’t appear because they’ve not been SEO’ed or ChatGTP’ed and are thus not appearing in search engines.
The team at Swiss Policy Research had this to say in their report published yesterday:
“These AI bots have the ability to process the contents of the entire Internet in a meaningful way and in real-time. But much of what is written on the Internet is biassed or plain wrong, and the people who “train” these AI bots may themselves be biassed or wrong on many topics. Moreover, current AI bots are “large language models” that simply extrapolate text without any understanding or rational analysis. Numerous researchers have already found that ChatGPT often provides biased, false, or plausibly-sounding but entirely fictitious answers, a phenomenon known as “hallucination” or “confabulation”. “ (link)
In a strange sort of coincidental publishing, there was also this article published by Joel Smalley on his on his ‘Dead Man Talking’ substack page. We can already see how AI, in the form of ChatGTP, can be set up in such a way by it’s ‘teachers’ that information becomes less and less trustworthy, not just because it’s SEO’ed but because it’s written in such a way that only these AI-perfected pieces will be published. No thinking is needed, no work except using the PC keyboard is involved.
It gets worse. We all know that ‘Generation Smartphone’ – which is larger than just the 18-14 age group, sadly – relies on what is on yon ‘smartphones’. We know that apps like WhatsApp is being used by government ministers and, I suggest, their mandarin handlers, to make decisions which govern all our lives. The Lockdown Files have shown this. Since research never rests, there is now an even more sinister development, reported in The Times yesterday:
“Scientists have developed a more efficient way for AI to “read” our minds and recreate the images we see. Researchers from Osaka University in Japan trained an AI to enable it to reproduce good quality pictures of a toy bear, an aircraft, a clock and a train from brain scans of people who looked at those images. […] the study showed it could be done more efficiently, quickly and without large costs. The results were accurate, high-resolution pictures.” (link, paywalled)
Images from brainscans could be used to ‘produce AI images’ which can then be spread via smartphones: no individual effort of drawing, painting, photographing is required, and no need to even learn those skills. AI apps similar to ChatGPT dealing with creating images, photos, paintings, are already being developed for the ‘modern’ app user and are used to turn original photos, copyrighted, into something vaguely similar but ‘original AI’ and thus free of copyright.
I’ll finish with two quotes from a long essay , also published yesterday on substack. It’s by ‘Simplicius’, with the title ‘Dead Internet’. Here’s the first quote:
“The nominally coined ‘dead internet theory’ revolves around the idea that bots and AI are turning the net into an artificial goop of endlessly reverberating algorithms, which in essence create a simulacra-simulation matrix of surrogate activity, a sort of human facsimile echo-chamber where actual humans are increasingly left out in the cold looking in, as disenfranchised spectators.” (link)
This is clearly beginning to become manifest in our MSM, SEO infested as they are. There’s more though, and this is where it becomes truly dangerous:
“But the eerier usage results from pairing an AI like ChatGTP with other AI-generated products like avatars and voices, to create a full-on life-like digital facsimile […] A new generation of such surrogate ‘humans’ could soon comprise a growing moiety of online ‘discourse’ in a way that no longer allows human observers to distinguish the figures they’re following from bios and synthetes. More radical proponents of ‘dead internet theory’ believe that that critical mass has already been reached, and a majority of online colloquy has already been supplanted by bots flaming bots.” (link)
Since humans take as ‘truth’ that which they see with their own eyes, it should be clear now that all these fabulous ‘technical innovations’ are leading our society, our youth and those governing us, technically and scientifically illiterate as they are, into a world governed by AI apps – a world where what they see ‘with their own eyes’ on their smartphones is a world curated by vested interests, artificial political environments of ‘deep fake’ images, all without any connection to the real, non-internet AI world.
It’s not without irony that the grauniad had an article about how to spot a deep fake (link). It doesn’t seem to occur to those ‘news curators’ who use SEO and AI for their pieces that simply not using such AI produced writings and images would make it unnecessary to learn ‘how to spot’ them. Who knows – they might not even have proper journalists able to spot such fakes in the future.
After all, this brave new AI ‘environment’ curates news using AI chatbots, so why would they spot their own deep fakes. Moreover, this system is optimised to bring more profit to the tech giants, to Big Harma and Net Zero acolytes. Yon master of propaganda said 90 years ago that a big lie, told often enough, will be taken for truth in the end. We however don’t need no Goebbels – we’re ‘modern’, we believe our own AI-produced ‘news’ with AI-produced photos. After all, it must all be true because it’s on our smartphones and they don’t lie …
That’s all I have for today. Please hand this essay around. Enjoy the weekend.
I have, of course, shared this article with my Whats-app group to keep people aware although they are like-minded people.
It may be that (like any packaged food, manufactured goods etc) all MSM output that comes under the regulatory authority of OFCOM must clearly inform its intended viewers if any of its content has been ‘sourced’ or ‘manufactured’ via A I.
How could OFCOM and the Department of Culture Media and Sport refuse to give their wholehearted support in the interests of open, honest news reportage ????
I am afraid I do not understand most of today’s betrayal but one thing I have noticed is that for two days running google have said Independence Daily is written by Ann Farmer.
Debbie, why at 11.01 have you apparently typed the word ‘thing’, when clearly you meant ‘think’.
Viv. Why in today’s betrayal have you apparently typed ‘Sunka’ when you meant ‘Sunak’.
I am not criticising. I just wonder what is really going on here.
I canwell understand that commenters on here do not have word processing skills. Also like me they may suffer from Akismet giving them an inadequate box to type into.
I just wonder whether there is something more sinister going on.
No, nothing more sinister than a few typos, Pauline. Apologies.
Sloppy editing/proofreading on my part, Pauline – should’ve noticed it … sigh.
I’m letting it stand uncorrected, as lesson for myself.
It is great to see the beeb struggling with the trash they employ, lets hope it is the beginning of the end of the woke vomit.
I really am over joyed to see them all in the manure
A good word ‘manure’ isn’t it Michael. Surely that can not be said to ‘give offence’!
???? Pauline, at my time of life I do not care about giving offence to the wimps.
Yes, indeed Michael. Members of the public can help chivvy along the chaos, decline and collapse of the BBC by not paying their licence fee to which I have been a most enthusiastic TV licence fee refusenik for going on fourteen years. Saved a fortune – enough to pay Gary Lineker for 5 minutes airtime.
Jake, I do not know what you would call me! I do not use tv and that means I do not need a “licence”
I did have a visit from a BBC thug who did not believe a house without tv existed. He did go away when refused entry, warning me he would return with cops but never did
I am not aware that they would be allowed to use that threat anymore. Besides the police don’t get involved in TV doorstep licence disputes nowadays. They may have done in Colin Hussey’s day as a policeman but not now.
This was an interesting piece about A1.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/technology/2023/02/its-dandy-fun-messing-with-chatgpt/
Yet another thought!!
What a wonderful spy device a smartphone would be if it could be turned on remotely! The government could listen in to everything you said.
How do we know it’s not happening right now?
Yet another thought.
The present users of electronic payments can only give out money in shops/pubs etc.
You’ll know my prediction is coming true when everyone can also receive payments with their smartphone/credit card.
The payments will of course be recorded and a deduction made by the bank. (The parasitic finance industry will have a fine living.) Oh and taxed of course.
Only permitted payments allowed of course.
The popularity of entertainers who can credibly lampoon the famous indicates to me that entertainment is an equal driver for all of us.
In 1959 I went to a meeting and talk in Kentish Town. . To those who don’t know of the ORS, It’s Operational Research Society, which held that lots of scientists, working together, could solve problems. A bit like SAGE . Kentish Town is next to Camden and in those days pretty much a marginal slum.
Anyway the advertised lecturer by an elderly dignified scientist was to probe the future of AI While into the talk for a few minutes, the speaker was interrupted by an equally eminent elderly professor type., interrupted in his turn by the first. There followed the funniest half hour of my life, and I still chuckle today.
In those days, AI stands for Artificial Insemination. But to others of us It meant the modern AI. I recall a short discussion of an argumentative carrot etc. It must have been a set up, but above brilliance
Another thought.
If we only had digital currency, illegal immigrants wouldn’t be able to buy anything and would hence starve, (Or resort to an endless crime /robbery spree).
They are already given pre-paid, contact less cards which the Home Office tops up weekly and they are fed in hotels. A digital currency wouldn’t help with the main issue of raping and stabbing.
Stout Yeoman. At 1.32pm you suddenly became Stotu Yeoman. Or is it simply my antiquated equipment?
More a case of an antiquated keyboard operator (and see above for Viv and Debbie).
Does anybody else thing we are moving closer and closer to ‘The Matrix’?
More and more Debbie and few people either know, and few seem to care particularly among the young, grown up with it suppose and not told otherwise by their often brain dead parents.
Yes Debbie.
How do I know who wrote this? Is it Viv or a robot? Is PJW real? Looks like I need an APP that filters the lies/the woke/and the bias…or I wont know what to think.
It’s all about trust – another subject I’m planning to write about, perhaps next Saturday.
The PJW video provides a method of testing whether you are interacting with AI or not. Just ask something about Donald Trump then about Biden. Will probably work every time.
At present you can tell the ones under control by the current method. They’re the ones endlessly peering at their smartphones. Sensible people don’t have one. Even now, your every movement can be plotted if you have one. Only removal of the battery defeats it. Which is not easy, deliberately so.
The other means of control is the elimination of cash/shrapnel. So every transaction will be recorded and taxed. Sensible people should use only shrapnel to defeat this project. But there’s plenty of the brain dead around that can’t see this.
The next step of course is to insert a micro chip into the brain at birth that will totally control every individual.
Smartphones are at least optional. Maybe the government will start giving away free smartphones as an interim measure? A surefire vote winner!
My wife recently bought me a very expensive smartphone, she likes it as it’s her way of keeping me on a leash. She gets so p*ss*d off because I always leave it at home, I never carry it and use it as little as possible.
I recently engaged with a chatbot when complaining to an internet travel company, apparently these things are very close to passing the Turing test but I spotted it as the bot it was because there was just a little bit too much delay in some of its replies. You have to bear in mind though that these AI bots are still in the early stages of development, I can spot them because IT used to be my thing bit many will not be able to, they will get much, much better or worse depending on your perspective.
I’ve decide that the best thing to do with this AI stuff is not to interact with it and I don’t. My phone will be staying at home most of the time and probably switched off, my wife won’t like it but this is how it is going to be, I’m going to spend even more time in the mountains. In fact I’m planning to move completely off grid.
The most irritating chat bot is ‘Hannah’ that car dealersand others use ‘ Is there anything else I can help you with today’ yes actually……………………… !
NORMAN that is probably the one I’ve told yes – get lost.
Whenever I get asked this by call centre people or even a Bot I reply with something like … “yes, can you do something to stop all the immigrants please”. That tends to lead to the closure of the conversation. On one occasion I ended up in a deep conversation with a real person who agreed never to ask me that question again.
Clearly we are at war, albeit undeclared, with the enemy within. Too many people are inclined to side with that enemy, judging it on the basis of their own moral values; “they wouldn’t do that would they”.
As Goebbels knew all those years ago Jack.