Is the 'Net jam-packed with lies?

[Swammerdami]

I think most people who read the thread title will think "Yes, obviously it's full of lies"; and move on to another thread.

I just stumbled on a YouTube story about an innocent man (Ryan Hale) who was framed for a robbery and sentenced to 60 years until the judge (Malcolm Brewer) did his own research and found that Hale was framed by a detective.

Some of the details made little sense. (Simple arithmetic -- which I doubt the liars bothered to check -- meant that Brewer became a judge at age 28: Unlikely?)
I Googled and found no mention of this case. "Judge Malcolm Brewer" pointed to no such judge except the lying YouTube itself. (I pose thread title as a question on the off-chance that I'm confused and the story actually is true.)

I see lots of clickbait stories that are obviously fiction. But this wasn't clickbait for ads. It was by "Black Struggles" -- touting injustices so important that truth is irrelevant? -- and the description was

102,523 views Dec 21, 2024 #heartwarmingstories #inspiringstories #reallifestory
Judge Sentences Innocent Black Man to 60 Years, What He Learns Next Changes Everything

A young Black mechanic is sentenced to 60 years in prison for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Judge Malcolm Brewer, a veteran of the courtroom, believed the evidence was airtight—until a shocking discovery ...

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

 

[rjh01]

A lot of what is published is rubbish. Not only on social media but everywhere. This includes scientific papers. It is up to the reader to work out what is rubbish and what is valuable information.

 

[Elixir]

for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

+1
I certainly had higher hopes for it as well. Alas, it has enabled fiction to dominate our collective decision making. It takes ten times longer to ferret or verify a really reliable “fact” or factoid to which it is often necessarily reduced. But that’s still hundreds of times faster than going to the library and looking stuff up, and probably more up to date.
People love to hear what they wish or fear to be the case.

 

[bilby]

"AI" is making this problem much worse.

It generates very plausible sounding nonsense, often based on other nonsense on which it was "trained".

The technical term for this tendency to confidently spout utter tripe is "hallucination", but that's just a euphemism for "lying" or "confabulation".

As if humans weren't already prone to make shit up, rather than admit ignorance, we now have machines to automate that process.

What an inspiring future we have built for ourselves.

 

[Elixir]

"AI" is making this problem much worse.

It generates very plausible sounding nonsense, often based on other nonsense on which it was "trained".

The technical term for this tendency to confidently spout utter tripe is "hallucination", but that's just a euphemism for "lying" or "confabulation".

As if humans weren't already prone to make shit up, rather than admit ignorance, we now have machines to automate that process.

What an inspiring future we have built for ourselves.

An exciting time for sure. Especially if you're a machine automating the process.
What could go wrong?

 

[Jarhyn]

I think most people who read the thread title will think "Yes, obviously it's full of lies"; and move on to another thread.

I just stumbled on a YouTube story about an innocent man (Ryan Hale) who was framed for a robbery and sentenced to 60 years until the judge (Malcolm Brewer) did his own research and found that Hale was framed by a detective.

Some of the details made little sense. (Simple arithmetic -- which I doubt the liars bothered to check -- meant that Brewer became a judge at age 28: Unlikely?)
I Googled and found no mention of this case. "Judge Malcolm Brewer" pointed to no such judge except the lying YouTube itself. (I pose thread title as a question on the off-chance that I'm confused and the story actually is true.)

I see lots of clickbait stories that are obviously fiction. But this wasn't clickbait for ads. It was by "Black Struggles" -- touting injustices so important that truth is irrelevant? -- and the description was

102,523 views Dec 21, 2024 #heartwarmingstories #inspiringstories #reallifestory
Judge Sentences Innocent Black Man to 60 Years, What He Learns Next Changes Everything

A young Black mechanic is sentenced to 60 years in prison for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Judge Malcolm Brewer, a veteran of the courtroom, believed the evidence was airtight—until a shocking discovery ...

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

So, once upon a time I saw a flier on a pole.

It was an astroturf effort to confound a ballot amendment to reform the police by black-facing their shady Facebook group.

I think I even made a post about it after seeing it?

A lot of events like these are used to invent an event to later go on such astroturfing adventures, scams, fake legal defense funds, all kinds of things.

Did they link a go-fund-me? Or can you find one?

The fact is that while the Internet is full of such lies, these elaborate sorts are usually done for a profit motive.

 

[Politesse]

I think most people who read the thread title will think "Yes, obviously it's full of lies"; and move on to another thread.

I just stumbled on a YouTube story about an innocent man (Ryan Hale) who was framed for a robbery and sentenced to 60 years until the judge (Malcolm Brewer) did his own research and found that Hale was framed by a detective.

Some of the details made little sense. (Simple arithmetic -- which I doubt the liars bothered to check -- meant that Brewer became a judge at age 28: Unlikely?)
I Googled and found no mention of this case. "Judge Malcolm Brewer" pointed to no such judge except the lying YouTube itself. (I pose thread title as a question on the off-chance that I'm confused and the story actually is true.)

I see lots of clickbait stories that are obviously fiction. But this wasn't clickbait for ads. It was by "Black Struggles" -- touting injustices so important that truth is irrelevant? -- and the description was

102,523 views Dec 21, 2024 #heartwarmingstories #inspiringstories #reallifestory
Judge Sentences Innocent Black Man to 60 Years, What He Learns Next Changes Everything

A young Black mechanic is sentenced to 60 years in prison for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Judge Malcolm Brewer, a veteran of the courtroom, believed the evidence was airtight—until a shocking discovery ...

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

To concur with both you and Bilby above, AI has made this situation even worse; I regularly read student responses that are obviously AI-generated and just as obviously fictive. Sometimes inventing "likely" facts about other cultures that draw on colonialist tropes about foreign tribes, or well worn literary tropes applied to imaginary family and community scenarios. A lot of Frankenstein blendings of true and false, or people and cultures that are real but who have been put in a blender. Sometimes with fake citations from fake scholars backing them up. Sometimes with real papers and scholars cited, but reporting "facts" that those scholars never said or wrote, nor would have. Fake and sometimes upsetting quotations abound.

It's getting harder and harder for even a well-informed and well-intentioned person to tell truth from fiction. No one has time to triple fact check everything they read, but how else can you contend with a world in which a fifth of the things you read were written by a digital algorithm designed to produce plausible sounding sentences whether true or not?

 

[bilby]

It's becoming a serious time-waster in software development, where AI generated "bug reports" are plausible enough to demand significant effort, particularly where they identify spurious security issues.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's becoming a serious time-waster in software development, where AI generated "bug reports" are plausible enough to demand significant effort, particularly where they identify spurious security issues.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/

That said, it's also making some people in the fuzzing community a LOT of money by helping expose systematic problems in common network and device APIs

 

[Jarhyn]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

More ability, sure, but it does seem to be getting buried, and to be fair, Politesse sees a LOT of the slop because he's a teacher and students (and a lot of professors) are lazy.

I can absolutely see a separate structure of citation, reference, and fact checking that may become sadly necessary in academia.

Ironically enough, that layer may itself be an AI trained explicitly to fact check stuff accurately, rather than as others say, "trained to spit plausible sentences".

 

[bilby]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

Nah.

Pre-Internet, we had authoritative sources. Libraries (and librarians); Universities; Experts.

Nutters with wild ideas were able to propagate those ideas as far as the guy on the next bar stool, and not much further.

Errors by experts were extremely difficult to correct quickly, but were fairly rare - and were typically corrected once the hidebound old farts who insisted on them died off, and the new generation got the chance to put their case.

All of this still exists; But the man on the Clapham Omnibus no longer goes to the library or a university if he seeks knowledge - now he goes to YouTube where the answers he likes can be found, proving his genius, and he can share them and build a large online community of batshit crazy anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, 9-11 truthers, or whatever.

It took much more effort to spread nonsense before the Internet than it takes today. And it still takes a lot of effort to spread the truth - and even more so to spread the truth in a way that is clearly distinguishable from the bullshit.

The Internet is hugely egalitarian. Where once it took decades to become a recognised expert in a given field, and only having done so were you likely to get on TV (or be interviewed by newspapers, magazines, or radio shows) to spread your knowledge, today any arsehole with an opinion can (and does) have a YouTube channel, and if there is a kernel of truth anywhere in there, it is buried under a mountain of chaff, all of which is equally convincing to the Clapham commuter.

The very idea, that there are truths that are not just loudly stated opinions, is now rare.

We have moved from aristocracy to democracy, which is probably a good thing in politics, but is a dreadful disaster in education. Popularity is OK as a decision making criterion when no better criteria exist - for questions such as "who would be the best President?" - but it sucks for questions such as "How many R's are there in 'strawberry'?".

 

[Swammerdami]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

Nah.

Pre-Internet, we had authoritative sources. Libraries (and librarians); Universities; Experts.

Nutters with wild ideas were able to propagate those ideas as far as the guy on the next bar stool, and not much further.

Errors by experts were extremely difficult to correct quickly, but were fairly rare - and were typically corrected once the hidebound old farts who insisted on them died off, and the new generation got the chance to put their case.

All of this still exists; But the man on the Clapham Omnibus no longer goes to the library or a university if he seeks knowledge - now he goes to YouTube where the answers he likes can be found, proving his genius, and he can share them and build a large online community of batshit crazy anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, 9-11 truthers, or whatever.

It took much more effort to spread nonsense before the Internet than it takes today. And it still takes a lot of effort to spread the truth - and even more so to spread the truth in a way that is clearly distinguishable from the bullshit.

The Internet is hugely egalitarian. Where once it took decades to become a recognised expert in a given field, and only having done so were you likely to get on TV (or be interviewed by newspapers, magazines, or radio shows) to spread your knowledge, today any arsehole with an opinion can (and does) have a YouTube channel, and if there is a kernel of truth anywhere in there, it is buried under a mountain of chaff, all of which is equally convincing to the Clapham commuter.

The very idea, that there are truths that are not just loudly stated opinions, is now rare.

We have moved from aristocracy to democracy, which is probably a good thing in politics, but is a dreadful disaster in education. Popularity is OK as a decision making criterion when no better criteria exist - for questions such as "who would be the best President?" - but it sucks for questions such as "How many R's are there in 'strawberry'?".

I've quoted this post in its entirety because it is SO VERY apt. And the opposite (and very wrong) opinion is so often offered in discussions of this sort.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

Nah.

Pre-Internet, we had authoritative sources. Libraries (and librarians); Universities; Experts.

Nutters with wild ideas were able to propagate those ideas as far as the guy on the next bar stool, and not much further.

Andrew Wakefield has entered the chat.

There were fewer problems, but nothing stopped a kook from becoming popular.

 

[bilby]

As I said, most of you reading this are nodding your head and saying "Tell us something new." But for me this account of a totally fictional injustice was a reminder of how unfortunate it is that the "Information Age" has morphed into the Age of Lies. And of course it is this culture of lies that led to the calamity on November 5th.

Did I post in the right forum? If the destruction of society by a culture of ceaseless lies isn't an issue for social science, I don't know what is.

And there's something new about this? If anything it's the other way around--the internet has given us more ability to refute such things.

Nah.

Pre-Internet, we had authoritative sources. Libraries (and librarians); Universities; Experts.

Nutters with wild ideas were able to propagate those ideas as far as the guy on the next bar stool, and not much further.

Andrew Wakefield has entered the chat.

There were fewer problems, but nothing stopped a kook from becoming popular.

Wakefield wasn't a kook; He was a fraudster. He stood to make a LOT of money from his lies. And he was an expert - he used his platform for fraud, but it wasn't a platform many fraudsters (or kooks) could have accessed.

Any system can fail; The fact that Wakefield stands out is indication enough that he was an exception, not the rule.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Andrew Wakefield has entered the chat.

There were fewer problems, but nothing stopped a kook from becoming popular.

Wakefield wasn't a kook; He was a fraudster. He stood to make a LOT of money from his lies. And he was an expert - he used his platform for fraud, but it wasn't a platform many fraudsters (or kooks) could have accessed.

Any system can fail; The fact that Wakefield stands out is indication enough that he was an exception, not the rule.

Yes, he was a fraudster but that's just kook for gain, doesn't make him not a kook. I used him as an example because it was so widespread and so well documented. However, look at leftist causes--what positions people were actually taking look an awful lot like Moscow was behind it. And it would be pretty hard for someone without a reasonable background in science to figure out the problems. No rebuttal readily available to a well done query. No ability to look up claims to see if they refer to real things. Just look at popular opinion about nuclear power--the exact opposite of what the science says.

It's easier to put kooky ideas out there, but it's also easier to expose them without a lot of effort. Whether the proportion of ideas that are kooky has increased or not I don't believe we have a way to tell.