• she/her

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mogwai-poet
@mogwai-poet

About ten years ago I saw an anonymous Wikipedia user who had edited dozens of articles about Mario, Sonic and Putt-Putt, rotating their names so that the articles about Mario were now about Sonic, the articles about Sonic were now about Putt-Putt, etc. I'm sure those changes were noticed and reverted almost immediately.

Looking deeper into this user's edit history, I found a series of edits to articles about films, changing their running times by adding or subtracting a few minutes. I have no idea whether these changes were ever noticed, but Wikipedia absolutely depends on the kind of person who'll obsessively go through their VHS collection and check each movie's Wikipedia sidebar against the info on the back of the box.

It's impossible to fact-check everything we read, and it's impossible to be aware of every kind of scam, so we rely on heuristics to guess whether to trust any given source. One of the heuristics I've found most useful is to consider what the author has to gain by lying, but sometimes I think about the guy randomly adjusting movie running times and I just have to lie down.


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in reply to @mogwai-poet's post:

not to make everything about the current bullshit but if LLM generators are unleashed fully on the internet, it will be equivalent to an army of millions of guys doing things similar to maliciously changing random hard to notice and verify facts on wikipedia.

This phenomenon was present (but not dwelled upon) in Anathem by Neil Stephenson. Basically any fact put into the equivalent of the Internet is immediately repeated with permutations by SEO farms.

The solution that has emerged, rather than un-fucking anything, is an additional protocol layer on top the AI-generated bullshit which uses more AI to extract what is most likely the original ground truth. I am deeply disturbed how plausible that sounds.

there was a concerted effort spearheaded by SA forum FYAD posters circa 2008 to make these kinds of inconsequential stealth edits intermixed with lots of valid, useful edits to make the vandalism harder to notice. it was usually targeted at pages they considered to be amusingly over-detailed (often things like second-by-second recaps of every single sonic cartoon episode) that eventually got purged & extracted into external fan wikis anyway. but there are almost certainly still traces left from that "game" and its copycats