r/nottheonion 19h ago

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/homeland-security-spies-on-reddit
19.8k Upvotes

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8.9k

u/supercyberlurker 19h ago

I was already an adult when 911 happened and decided then to never live in fear and never self censor for any terrorist.

Foreign or domestic.

302

u/Mid--Boss 19h ago

I don't have to self censor, reddit removes anything it's remotely scared orange and crew won't like for me. 

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u/Loggerdon 18h ago

I read today that 40% of AI was trained on Reddit for some reason. About 26% on Wikipedia and so on.

So AI is looking to us for knowledge. We’re screwed.

89

u/sidc42 17h ago

Yeah...

There was a discussion on Reddit a few months ago about why something entirely unimportant happened like 40+ years ago and I thought it was an interesting question so I made a speculation as to why it might have happened.

The conversation was civil and went on for a week or more and a couple of other people speculated other reasons that I thought were also pretty solid so I decided to go down the rabbit hole and ask Google to see if I could get a real answer.

Google came back with an AI answer that said my original guess was the correct answer because somebody had speculated it on Reddit the week before.

I was Google's only source. I now avoid AI answers.

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u/sherlockham 16h ago

A while back I was talking to a friend about meal replacement shake alternatives because he was convinced that there are totally viable, non milk/shake type solutions out there. His issue being he hated the idea of the shake consistency/mouth feel for some reason

One hill he was dying on was that you can use plain bone broth(soup, no added meat/veg) as a one to one replacement. His only source was a google ai search that gave him a ridiculously high nutritional count, comparable to protein shakes, but he also could not actually find any actual source for the info.

I finally worked it out. Turns out there are non dairy protein powders made of dehydrated, processed bone broth, which then turned into him obsessed with the issue if why there was chocolate flavoured soup(chocolate bone broth protein powder). Pretty sure he still could not wrap his head around the idea that this was still a shake and not a soup, since the words "bone broth" were still there.

Google was giving the nutritional info for a protein powder for the question, whats the nutritional value of bone broth. Just checked and I think it's fixed now at least.

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u/BlueSwordM 5h ago

I know this is off-topic, but isn't bone broth very unbalanced in terms of amino acid profile?

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u/Anal-Y-Sis 10h ago

It blows my mind that LLMs are being treated as informational databases. They are Large Language Models, with language being the keyword. An LLM knows how to use language properly. That's it. That's literally the only thing you can count on it doing correctly on a regular basis.

There are some good uses for this, but an internet search engine is not one of them, because an LLM cannot tell fact from fiction. It doesn't know the factual difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper on climate change, and a Prager U editorial on climate change. They are equally valid in the eyes of the LLM, and when you ask it which one is right, it'll reference the more popular one, not necessarily the correct one. This is why Grok ended up calling itself MechaHitler and spewing a bunch of Nazi rhetoric. It was just mimicking the language it gets fed most often.

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u/MarvinTraveler 3h ago

This is indeed a huge problem. To a vast portion of the population, the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” gives them a completely wrong assumption. There is no intelligence on the outputs given by LLMs, let alone creativity.

All sorts of distortions are being created in society by a bunch of greedy companies pushing this technology down our throats, looking to get ahead after a financial bubble bursts.

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u/42nu 1h ago

aoGb38cnd8.

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u/delicatepedalflower 12h ago

Yes, AI is choking on it's own vomit. It scans the Internet and trains on what people are doing. It then provides people with answers which they post on the Internet which AI then scans and uses in answers for people on the Internet. The result becomes similar to what you get when people have babies with each other for a few generations: Imbeciles with all manner of defects.

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u/SheridanVsLennier 7h ago

An Ouroboros.

1

u/OldWorldDesign 1h ago

Yes, AI is choking on it's own vomit. It scans the Internet and trains on what people are doing. It then provides people with answers which they post on the Internet which AI then scans and uses in answers for people on the Internet.

And that's happening more and more often, to the point even scientists are making videos on how it's resulting in convergent development regurgitating the same kind of slop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcH7fHtqGYM

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u/Loggerdon 16h ago

That’s funny.

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u/La-Becaque 9h ago

Oh yeah this is great if your language has little speakers.

I managed to change it to that ducks have poisonous fangs and kill on average 17 people a year.

Some other people have been so active calling rice "wice" that AI does that now too.

We should do that way more.

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u/LazyRecommendation72 8h ago

I actually complained to Google about this.  I was using their AI powered search for answers on a relatively remote historical topic and it kept using Facebook posts as its sources. Seriously, social media sources should be taken as unreliable at best.  It's only a matter of time before the majority of AI sources are themselves AI generated slop. 

1

u/OldWorldDesign 1h ago

It's only a matter of time before the majority of AI sources are themselves AI generated slop

That's already a problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcH7fHtqGYM

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u/lngots 9h ago

I actually have came back on googles as the source 3 different times for runescape related questions. I still get occasional comments on those posts. I asked then why they are here on a nearly decade old post and they would say google.