Pass It On

I was reading the most recent posting on Schneier on Security, when I found a weird, rambling conspiracy theory in the comments. The general thrust of it seems to be that "an American Citizen," who is never named, was unjustly imprisoned after the were attacked by "a Muslim" who is named on more than one occasion. It's a pretty clear attempt to slander a person, who was likely the actual victim of whatever crime occurred, by casting them as the perpetrator, and to slander the local law enforcement and judiciary, by claiming that they're in on the scheme. Oh, and there were allegations of antisemitism thrown in as a follow-on. Ho hum, nothing to see here.

But it seemed like the sort of thing that one might find posted, verbatim, in other places. After all, it had exactly zero to do with a proposed law to stop 3D printers in New York from making firearms parts, so it stood to reason that someone had taken their copypasta hatchet job on the road, and dropped the text into the comment sections of other weblogs. This is, after all, a way of spreading the message and getting it in front of more people.

So I found a snippet that came across as likely to be somewhat unique, and dropped it into Google, framing it within double quotes so the search engine would understand that I was looking for the exact string. I was somewhat surprised that it didn't seem to pop up anywhere. I was more surprised to see the generative automation overview synthesize the allegations and present them as "recent reports."

Names redacted, because I don't intend to help spread this inanity...

Also interesting was that it linked to a prior post on Schneier on Security, even thought the conspiratorial comment could not be found there... presumably, it had already been deleted, if not for being crazy, for being completely off-topic. But the overview states that the allegations appear on the blog. Which is technically true, I suppose, but there is a difference between a blog and its comments section, especially for public blogs like Schneier on Security, where pretty much anyone can post.

To be sure, this is an edge case and a half... I found the results that I did because I was looking to see where else the wild allegations and conspiracy had been posted, so I'd clipped directly from the text to drop into Google, which would have really narrowed the pool of possible things that the automation would find as matches.

But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem, especially given that names are not unique identifiers of people, and the fact that the automation clearly had access to a cached or archived version of previous posts. The automation simply rolls out a list of names.

And I think that this is what people are getting at when they point out that the generative automation companies are pushing to be first and best to market, and leaving the safety aspects of things until later, or to someone else. Because this isn't a problem of "A.I. slop;" this is a matter of the automation repeating random things it finds on the web. And given that web sites are seeing less traffic, as people simply take the overviews and go, it wouldn't take much for something like this to take on a life of its own, divorced from the comments section(s) in which it was first planted.

Thaw

So there's a local company that uses their street-facing sign mainly for political messaging. In the entire time I've noticed what it's said, it's pretty much never been about business. Usually, the signs have small government or simply anti-Democratic Party messages... whoever runs the place seemed to have really had it in for Governor Gregoire, back in the day. But the last couple of messages have been different, and the most recent one really stood out.

Not that there has ever been any explicitly Trumpist messaging on the sign in the past, but the obviously Republican leaning of the previous signs had given me the impression that this was someone who, if not a staunch supporter of the current administration, could likely always be counted on to direct their fire elsewhere. The fact that even this person, whoever they are, felt the need to take a stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement speaks to the difficulty that the Republicans may have in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Of course, the chances of a Republican carrying the 1st District of Washington are don't even make it to slim. Zero seems like a much more accurate number, to be honest. But that's never stopped the owner of Chain Saws Plus from railing against the generally Left-of-Center political consensus of the area. And, given that they're still in business, there are people who don't hold that against them. So I'm fairly certain that this isn't a business decision; made as a peace offering to the more Liberal elements of the Eastside.

Instead, this seems like someone who's actually willing to come out and be critical of "their" side in all of this. And while I doubt that would translate into a vote to re-elect Representative DelBene, it does seem like one fewer vote for any GOP challenger(s). (Not that I'd expect any Republican candidates to make it out of the primary, absent a large, and fractured, group of Democratic candidates.)

Reliance on low-propensity voters has shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, even if President Trump doesn't seem to be aware of the fact. If the Republicans can't count on people who have defined themselves in terms of negative partisanship against the Democrats to turn out, the President's concern that another impeachment is headed his way may turn out to be correct.

Degenerated

A connection of mine made a post on LinkedIn about the use of generative automation in the gaming industry, and how that's become basically cover for bad management.

Someone who saw the post took offense, not at the post itself, or its theme, but at the fact that it struck them as having been artificially generated. (I decided to drop the text into a few "GPT Detector" sites, by the way, and even my favorite false positive generator came back with a "0% GPT" score.)

Pointing out the patterns in writing that one believes that LLMs have been trained (intentionally or not) to favor is a different task than pointing out patterns in writing that are unique to LLMs. I think that there is a tendency to become caught up in the idea of "the flaw of averages," the idea that the "average" of a group of people, even a large group, won't actually match any given individual in that group. Applied to detecting LLMs and GPT-created text, it presumes that some artifacts of the training data that come out in generated text are unique to generated text; observe enough people and you'll see something like a given phrasing or sentence structure come out of the data, but the precise phrasing or structure exist nowhere in the data.

Which is reasonable, but to actually validate that for any given piece of text, one would need an in-depth understanding of the training data. To claim, for instance, that only generative automation uses emojis to mark bulleted lists is to make a pretty sweeping claim about quite a lot of human social media posting; one that's effectively impossible to empirically support. And I have it on pretty good authority that ChatGPT didn't invent the m-dash.

Big picture, I understand the feeling that generative automation is equivalent to "low-effort." I've seen my share of generated artwork, and come away with the impression that the person felt a need to have some sort of illustration, but not anything worth investing significant time, effort or money into, and so it felt perfunctory... the Social Media Gods say that text with pictures gets more Engagement, so here's a picture: please Engage now.

But I'm not sure that angry call-outs do anything productive. (Not that there's anything wrong with simply venting on the Internet, mind you.) People can snipe at one another for a supposed unwillingness to treat online posting with the respect that it deserves, but in the end, that sort of feeds the very Engagement beast that sits at the heart of the problem. And because spending the time to write posts oneself is the norm, there's little drive to step up and comment on that fact. It's not much different from the reasons why rage-bait outperforms more positive postings: the "Must. Denounce. Now." impulse feeds into the incentive structure of social media more broadly. (Which, of course, makes them an attractive mode on online interaction themselves.)

What makes things on social media go away isn't vitriol, it's apathy. (Another sentence structure supposedly coined by LLMs, by the way.)

It's likely overstating things to claim that the use of generative automation in social media is reaching the level of a moral panic, but I suspect that the number of people who feel actively slighted by it is growing. And sensitivity to slights can produce the perverse habit of seeking them out, in order to respond to them. Which, in turn, can lead to one's slight detector is perfectly calibrated.

For my part, I've come to realize that I don't naturally analyze text for signs of automation. I think that I'm okay with lacking the skill to do so; I'm unconvinced that learning to do it well enough to be accurate is time well spent.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match?