I was looking for information on insect vision for a report I’m writing and came across an internet article. The first thing I noticed is that there was a picture under the header that the article called a mantis, but the anatomy was all wrong. It was covered in ocelli, for one.
Then I started reading, and as someone that has used chat GPT before… Yeah it was clearly written by an algorithm…
This is the site. https://healingpicks.com/
Look at the pics closely and you’ll see they’re messed up.
How long until the whole internet is just this shit? This is why there needs to be rules and shit about this, I don’t care if it stifles the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ of AI or whatever. The droves of lazy copy and paste style news and ‘top ten’ sites were already bad enough, but this shit is bringing the internet to a new low in quality.
I can’t wait until this shit is banned by China or something.
I used to think the cyberpunk genre trope of finding information online being some difficult task requiring a trained professional to be quaintly anachronistic, but the proliferation of AI generated nonsense has given the concept a new life to the point that “ok yeah soon enough it really will take a skilled professional with up to date detection tools to actually parse through this sea of literal nonsense won’t it?” actually seems like a realistic future.
And yet all the discourse on it gets narrowly focused into the useless dead end of fucking property rights, a fight that’s lose-lose for the public, win-win for business, and does nothing to stop ad farming/well poisoning/astroturfing spam bullshit at all. Like the property rights thing needs to be solved by making generative AI a poison pill that prevents a work from being copywritable at all and is retroactive poison against it as well (Disney used a deepfake AI in Star Wars once? Star Wars is public domain now, because fuck you; a script used AI autofill? The entire property and all licenses attached are now public domain, because fuck you), and the rest has to be solved by criminalizing ad farming spam and making the use of generative AI in it an escalating factor that turns it into a more serious crime.
What I know from playing Cyberpunk 2077 is that being a fixer is half figuring out Google results and half putting together slick 3D powerpoints and putting them on a datashard in a fancy little box that you present ceremoniously to someone
The other part of your job is knowing a guy. Tbh, full time job.
How do I get the job of just being the guy who others have to know? Sounds like a sweet gig
Know a lot of guys who would stick their necks out for you. No joke, this is how a lot of underground networks work.
Get s job managing technical people. It’s not s necessary job or even moral but you basically just have to know which knowledgable person can usually do something best and you get paid well in this dumb system. I know all my managers have had this exact gig.
A Cyberpunk fixer is just a venture capitalist for violence.
in the cyberpunk franchise’s universe there’s actually the blackwall on the net, which is a firewall meant to keep AIs away from the net. it’s interesting because the people responsible for the blackwall is netwatch, which works closely with corporations and is kinda a corp itself i think. in real life, corporations and capitalists are accelerating the AI takeover of our internet. kinda shows how even cyberpunk (the genre) writers cant even make fiction close enough to how fucked up the reality of capitalism really is.
It’s not really a plot point but Phantom Liberty makes a point that Netwatch happily looks the other way for the NUSA and large corps fuck around beyond the Blackwall, and the main quest of the base game makes it clear they are also lying both about the nature of the Blackwall and its efficacy.
Also, the Peralez quest line implies that AIs are manipulating human behavior very directly. There is layers to the lore if you look deeper, but the game puts so much emphasis on style over substance it’s easy to miss it.
Those AIs are more like intentional cyberweapons turned into eldritch horrors (leftover from one of the apocalypses that have happened in the timeline) than just nonsense factories trying to get ad money. Elsewhere, however, there’s a reference (I think on the radio) to an “AI author” that’s supposed to be award winning and extremely prolific, including a blurb and summary to convey to the player that it’s clearly just generating nonsense, so your point about how even their attempts to satirize what was clearly coming fail to be as shitty and absurd as the reality is dead on and something I’ve thought about myself too.
Another place they fall short is advertising: there’s less of it and it’s less intrusive than real advertising. Although that’s honestly not surprising: the artists and writers they had could only devote so much time to making awful memetic spores, and had concerns like “style” and “humor” to think about, whereas real advertising has large dedicated teams working round the clock to churn out the most heinous and infectious memetic spores imaginable.
Im gonna be a netrunner