darkoshi | Entries tagged with knowing the truth

Errant thought from June 13:
The world keeps seeming more and more dystopian. But it is really amazing to be able to ask a computer complex things in natural language, and get back coherent, valid responses in natural language too. My mind often glosses over that wonder because of everything else going on. And also because of knowing that wonderful achievement has its own associated dystopian aspects to it, which will just get worse and worse as they are exploited.

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Like this: The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel

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Kids growing up now and in the future may find it difficult to believe actual photos and movie footage from past atrocities, including the Holocaust. They will have no way to trust that the images are real and were not generated by AI. Perhaps if they looked through an old book with photos, and could trust that it was published in the year it said it was, before AI was capable of what it is now, perhaps that would be believable to them. But books are becoming rarer, especially old ones. Old books didn't have many photos. Were there many books with photos of atrocities? Encyclopedias would have perhaps a few photos for each topic. Certain magazines were more likely to have extensive photos. There may be digitized versions of the books and magazines available online, but then you get back to how can you trust that the digitized item you're looking at isn't a fake?

I'm already at that distrusting stage with much of what I see online. When you don't know what is trustworthy, you end up choosing to believe the things which align with your already-formed beliefs. "This aligns with my beliefs; I don't know if it is true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was." "This doesn't align with my beliefs; why spend time and mental effort considering that it might be true when it very well might not be?"

One concern I have about ChatGPT and similar things is how they will affect us being able to find reliable and useful information online.

In the last few years, I've noticed more and more webpages which appear to consist of data scraped from other places on the web. These pages contain a series of questions and answers on a particular topic. One can tell a human didn't write or compose the page, because the questions are repetitive and include many variations of the same question. The answers in one part of the page sometimes contradict other answers on the same page.

Presumably these pages have ads on them, and the people who create them do so to get money from ad-traffic. I don't usually see that due to my ad-blockers.

Now with ChatGPT, I imagine that rather than generating pages like that with data scraped from the web, people will generate pages with questions answered by ChatGPT. The text on these pages will look much more convincing than the ones out there now. The information will probably be less reliable. The reliable information sources will be greatly outnumbered by the unreliable ones, and it will be difficult to distinguish them.

Maybe it has already happened. For example, this page: Are American Toads Poisonous to Humans, Dogs, or Cats? doesn't seem like one of those generated/scraped pages. But it repeats itself multiple times which makes me suspicious. I can't tell from reading it whether I should trust it or not. I know that I probably shouldn't trust anything, especially not a random website I've come across, but for non-critical questions, it's nice to do a search and find a plausible answer that satisfies my curiosity or need-to-know, and then get on with my life. It's nicer if the plausible answers are true or at least based on what someone believes to be true, as opposed to some made-up answer.

I worry that there will be fake accounts on sites like Dreamwidth, posting content generated by tools like ChatGPT. I worry that someday I won't be able to tell which accounts are real people and which not, even when I interact with them. Will that affect my desire to interact with other people online?

I worry about art and music and poems, that I won't be able to tell if a human had a large part in making them or not. And that I won't feel as enthusiastic about them, for not knowing.

errant thought: I believe there are secretive groups of people who are promoting conspiracy theories as a means of inciting chaos and violence and destabilizing governments, among other things. I suppose that makes me a conspiracy theorist too.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-update/

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/removing-bad-actors-on-facebook/

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/more-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-takedown/

https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker-twitter-troll-farm-archives-8d5dd61c486b

https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker-facebook-uncovers-iranian-influence-operation-d21c73cd71be

https://longreads.com/2018/09/04/inauthentic-behavior/

Trying to think of what tag should I use for this topic. "Inauthentic behavior" seems too vague.
It's not always "misinformation". It's not always foreign governments doing it. It's attempting to manipulate people via social media, but that could apply to advertising too. Deceptive... misrepresenting your origin and purpose...

I think I will rename my "fake news" tag to "misinformation".

Ever since learning of these conservative fake "news" websites, I've wondered about them. There are many other similar sites, not only the ones mentioned on that page. I wondered whether there were also liberal fake news websites, and it turns out there are.

Some of main things I wonder:
Who is behind these sites?
Are many of the sites owned by the same people? How many people are there behind these sites?
Are some of the conservative and liberal leaning sites both owned by the same people?
What do they hope to accomplish by spreading fake news?
Is the purpose of the sites simply to earn advertising revenue, or something more sinister?

Do they hope to gain certain candidates more votes and support?
Do they hope to incite anger or violence?
Do they hope to destroy democracy in the United States? (Putting aside the question as to how much of a democracy we have at present, and how fair/just/etc our society is)

The more such fake news sites proliferate, the harder it may become to find reliable news. It may cause us to question any news we read, even on sites that we think are reliable. How can we know if what we read and hear is really true? Without knowing what is true or fake, how can we make good decisions? How can we have a good democracy, if the people do not have good information?

It seems obvious that the stories on many of these sites are not trustworthy, simply by the style of writing. But it wouldn't be hard to write fake news in a more convincing style. How many of the more convincing stories that I read on other sites, may actually be fake or misleading too?

People don't have time to do research on everything they read, to determine if it is trustworthy or not. They rely on other people to do that for them. If you read something on a "real" news site, you trust that it is at least somewhat reliable. You have to trust somewhat. And if multiple "real" news sites report the same thing, you have to trust that they did some research on their own, and aren't just all repeating the same story from a single source.

There have been tabloid magazines for a long time, with questionable stories. But it seems to me those were always more focused on Hollywood celebrities, not on politicians and politics. But maybe this has been going on a long long time already, and I just never noticed it much before now.

Ahah. These articles were posted just recently about the phenomenon:

Can Facebook Solve Its Macedonian Fake-News Problem?

A lot of your fake Donald Trump news is coming from millennials in Veles, Macedonia

Yet that can't explain the "conservative daily post" website described in my first link. Surely people in Macedonia wouldn't be hiring Americans to write fake news stories at $15 per article. Unless it is a scam and the writers don't get paid.

The plague of fake news is getting worse -- here's how to protect yourself - Oct 30, 2016.

Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine - Aug 24, 2016.

Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate - Oct? 2016.

The bottom line is that people who regularly consume information from these pages — especially those on the right — are being fed false or misleading information.

The nature of the falsehoods is important to note. They often take the form of claims and accusations against people, companies, police, movements such as Black Lives Matter, Muslims, or "liberals" or "conservatives" as a whole. They drive division and polarization.

This is an older article about Russian-based misinformation programs:
The Agency - June 2015.

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid "trolls" has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/671020.html

I hate that I get so tense and on edge (nervous? upset?) when discussing significant topics of disagreement with other people, that it impedes my being able to think and respond calmly and intelligently to the other person's arguments.

I'm much more likely to lose faith in my own arguments in the middle of a discussion, than other people are of theirs. After all, what do I really know about anything? Things I've read and heard, mostly. What can anyone be sure of? Hardly anything. Even when there have been studies and when there are facts and figures, it often turns out that the conclusions are biased, the facts and figures have been massaged, and/or the studies themselves are flawed or contradictory. How can one feel comfortable claiming something as fact in a debate, if one doesn't even remember the source of those facts? I don't remember the source of most of the things in my brain, and I'm sure most other people don't either. It's all hearsay, unless one tracks down sources and references. Other people don't seem to be bothered by that when they state their view of the truth.

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Anyway. So supposedly, Christians are more discriminated against in this county, than LGBT people are. Supposedly, Christians can't even openly profess their faith without being attacked.

Hmmm.

All I can think, is that society must be improving, if the people who comprise the vast majority of the population, and who've had the law on their side for so long, are beginning to feel set upon.

Then again, some people seem to generally feel set upon.

Current Mood: oh god i'm so tired
Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/483635.html

Slugs must have a good sense of smell. On wet days, if I leave the dogfood out too late, they crawl onto the porch, into the black plastic outer bowl, through the "moat" of water that I keep in the black plastic bowl to discourage ants, and into the inner bowl which has the dogfood.

Did you know that slugs are hermaphroditic, with both male and female sex organs? And that supposedly* there's this thing they sometimes do, called apophallation?

* Sometimes I wonder how much of everything I hear and read is really true. I assume that a lot of it has at least some truth to it, but I don't have personal proof, so most of what I "know" is based on hearsay. And sometimes things that are widely thought to be true later turn out to be wrong.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/441058.html

I wish there were someone wise enough to tell me what the meanings beneath my words, thoughts, and emotions are. Because I can't figure myself out a lot of the time. I experience thoughts and feelings, and I try to make sense of them, and it seems not much different from trying to make sense of someone else. I try to come up with plausible, logical explanations for my thoughts and feelings... explanations for what I'm feeling and why... and when I have done so, that becomes my momentary "truth", my momentary understanding of myself. I think I've figured myself out, until something else makes me question my previous conclusions. But my understanding of myself isn't necessarily any more accurate than my understanding of anyone else.

There are some things for which my mind tries to find answers for... I want to get to the heart of things and know the absolute, simple TRUTH of the matter. But like most of existence, there probably isn't any single simple truth to be found, no matter how many facts I may learn or how much time I spend thinking about it. How I feel about things varies from day to day. My reasons for doing things, my interpretations of past and current events, and my mood and emotions change from day to day. Something may seem to be true one day, but something very different may seem to be true the next day (or minute or hour). And those truths may be mutually incompatible, even though they are/were both valid in their own time. It's the same for other people too, I'm sure. Trying to find one overall Truth of a matter is therefore impossible. Some things are complex and cannot be made simple. Even if one tries to condense history and determine which truths were most prevalent, and base a simple answer upon those, is to deny the other incompatible truths/viewpoints, even though they are/were just as valid.

Well. That thought came to me this morning, and I thought it would make a good poll question. My initial thinking was that I would of course choose the Be-Happy answer. I mean, what's the point of knowing the truth about something, if it made me permanently unhappy? Isn't happiness, even when based on untruths, better than not being happy?

But then I was thinking... I'm a vegetarian. I made the choice long ago to not enjoy eating food just because it tastes good, if the truth is that there is suffering involved in producing that food. I made the choice not to ignore a truth, even though one might think that doing so made me less happy, for not being able to eat good-tasting things which I had previously eaten without any concern.

But... once I had discovered the truth about meat and factory-farmed animals, etc (naturally, what I consider a truth, you might not; I don't really know THE TRUTH about anything), I didn't really have an option of going back to my previous state of not-knowing. So I didn't really CHOOSE to know the truth and be unhappy.

And another thing about that, is that changing my diet didn't make me UNHAPPY, nor would have continuing to eat animal products have made me HAPPY (even if there was no suffering involved in producing them). It's just food, for goodness sake, and vegetarian food tastes as good to me as non-vegetarian food used to.

But what if it were something important... what if I was happy because I didn't know about something that was going on, something which was causing other people to suffer... and what if, by knowing the truth of the suffering, it might make me in some way change my actions in order to try to alleviate some of the suffering? I think in that case, even if it meant me not being able to be happy, I would choose to know the truth. After all, that's why I listen to the news, etc. To be informed. It's surely not because listening to the news is a happifying thing to do.

So, I suppose my answer then is "It depends". And if everyone else's thought-process is similar to mine, and would also choose "It depends" or "Don't know", well maybe it's not such a great poll after all. Because there just aren't any clear-cut answers. Or questions.

But then again, if knowing the truth about things meant I would really never ever ever be happy, would I really ever choose that? Or is it that it's just a stupid theoretical question which isn't useful to have an answer to, because we can't ever really know that we could only _either_ know the truth _or_ be happy. Because in real life there is always the possibility, at least, of both knowing the truth and being happy (one would think).

And another thing - why should being happy depend on outside things.... shouldn't it be internal? Why should knowing the truth about external things affect one's internal happiness? Yet, I don't seem to have any purely internal happiness, at least at this stage of my life. But is that because of my reaction to my interpretation of external things, or not?