I have been watching, with some horror, the spiraling descent of facebook and instagram, etc. The whole situation reminds me of an historical event that bore some similarity.
I am referring, of course, to the Battle of Stalingrad. The Germans believed, with some justification, that they had hit upon a world-winning strategy, which was legitimately good until their enemies figured out counter-strategies and Hitler’s reaction was: “that thing we used to do that worked, do it harder!” Which actually meant plunging harder into the enemy’s counter-strategies.
That’s where we are with the internets right now: the ad-driven market is losing viewers because it has to (ironically) compete against AI-generated ads, i.e.: “AI slop” – I’m not as good an AI output-spotter as Stochastic Special Agent Pierce R. Butler, but I can count fingers and toes as well as the next guy, and I’m losing all respect for my fellow man when I see some obviously AI character getting a whole chain of comments like, “I’d like to marry you”, etc. I feel like a male praying mantis telling his buddies, “no, bro, don’t GO THERE you won’t even get your head bitten off, you’ll get an ad for dick pills.”
Also, let me say for the record, it’s a disgrace that US civilization is so bad at creating jobs, that such a flood of onlyfans accounts has cropped up. I’m not saying onlyfans jobs are demeaning or anything else, but we should be resentful of what’s going on because capitalism is creating a lot of jobs that suck, and offering that instead of equality of opportunity. It seems to me that the gloves have come off in the class war, and the capitalists are no longer even pretending, it’s full on nepotism all the way, and unless you can get an “in” from someone who knows someone you can shop doordash or drive uber or assemble cruise missiles. As an evil nihilist, it offends me that you’ve got Jeff Bezos flexing subjugation over an entire city in Italy, because, why? Because he can. As O’Brien asked Winston, “how do you know that you control someone?” Winston: “you make them suffer.” At a certain point, you have enough control that even a hardened sadist wouldn’t want more – but today’s upper class aren’t going to let that go. Because they control the media (through their sponsors) they will make sure you have to “appreciate” their goofy outfits and grand guignol plastic surgery. These stars, even the ones we don’t think of as having a lot of plastic surgery, are latticed with scar tissue that is hidden except for exactly where I know to look. I’m not saying these people shouldn’t get plastic surgery (have fun, yo!) but I’m not saying I have to pretend to appreciate it and coo complaisantly when some guy walks into the room whose face is basically dangling off the front of their skull. (Sylvester Stallone, I am thinking of you) It is horrific that part of our upper class has created an environment in which this cheap shit passes for entertainment, until the feeling and thinking humans that are the grist find themselves thrown away. Oops, they didn’t really love you. Ever. They never loved you. They don’t know what love is because they price it in units of a dozen and buy the finest in Qatar.
This one caught my eye because it’s very well done. The finger count is consistent, body shape consistent, background (somewhat), but … tattoos. Check the next one.
We need to respond, collectively, by never loving the jobs they offer. By spitting in their soup, by – eventually – marching them to the guillotine in Hermes-upholstered tumbrils. All I can see, when I look at instagram now, is the wealthy taking their victory lap, running across the prone bodies of their servitors, crushing their teeth, ribs, faces, genitals, to bloody pulp and waiting for them to sit up and sing, dutifully, “thank you sir, may I have another?” I am, literally, freaked out by the young people who are attracted to this shit. Who fall for it. Who believe, somehow, that ${songster du jour} has something to say, that wasn’t carefully worked in the green room with the team first. Maybe it’s net-lag, but I don’t think it is, I saw some internet-famous “talent” strumming a guitar to the tune of “la la la” while the music played a solo. I’m probably not a great feminist ally but I’ve got to say I’m puzzled and horrified by what’s happening – it goes outside of the analytic context I am used to. “What the Fuck?” is all I’ve got.
Why did the creator of this will’o the wisp add tattoos? The freckles and smile and slightly off-ideal appearance were great. But the tattoos appear and move around rather awkwardly.
Of course now that Facebook has decided to implement any content controls at all, instagram is full of people saying stuff like “If you don’t respect an American Flag I’m gonna come punch your face”, etc. The oldest internet bluster in the book. But I’m getting too creaky to dig a foxhole and sit in it with my rifle waiting for some ‘roided up goon to kick in my door. But, it’s unsettling, the number of MAGA nuts that are willing to stand and be recognized. I’m not afraid of them, but I am worried that there are so many. So, so many. At every level of control of the system, there are political novices – ripe for the plucking.
the neck ink changes again, so does the bar. The flesh in her armpit is weird as are the folds inside her hip. But (I fancy) if not for me calling her out as AI, there would be a line of happy lovers commenting about how much they … uh, what? She doesn’t exist? Do you love an ideal, bro? This is, to me, the most anti-feminist thing I can imagine: throw away the woman and keep the web of sexual entanglement.
Aye, well, so what needs to happen? I’m no longer the kind of monstrous coder I was in the 1990s, but back then this would have been a few weekends’ work for me. But, let me outline some requirements. I don’t think this is hard. If Kurt Lidl were still alive (RIP) I’d see if he had a weekend free. There are many old internetters who know and understand this stuff. You cannot depend on corporations because their agenda is not yours. Let me repeat that: You cannot depend on corporations because their agenda is not yours.
You cannot depend on corporations because their agenda is not yours.
We don’t need a “mastadon” or “blue sky” or some other goddam thing that works like twitter. Twitter got donald trump elected. Twitter made Elon Musk a household name. Twitter deserves to be scoured in righteous flame – but if we do that, let’s not replace it with another Twitter with a different set of corporate bosses. FFS, have we learned nothing?
First off, Twitter, facebook, etc, – all are single points where the FBI can show up with a warrant and install a tap. The two big beefs between the US Government and TikTok right now are that: TikTok is a good competitor to Facebook, and TikTok is presumably backdoored by the Chinese Government, not the US Government. The FBI was frantic, and overcame many social protections, to be able to get “behind the envelope” in Facebook, and now suddenly (in their eyes) Americans are switching to a hostile system. Of course it is hostile, because in cop-land anything that is not for you is hostile. We are left with an unknown amount of manipulation by the feds, to downplay certain topics. Why on earth would we tolerate that for a second? It’s absurd. We need to give them something to really worry about.
There are similarities between the old USENET and instagram. You fire it up and you see the stuff you are subscribed to. In old USENET, that was based on groups, not individuals, but individuals were baked in via block-lists. If you hit ^-B in your client, all postings by whoever you were looking at, would vanish forever. Your “algorithm” was simple: give me all the postings in the groups I am subscribed to, minus the ones from users I have blocked. I think a new client, with an exposed algorithm that was parameterized, would be a huge hit. Sure, I actually like ads for tech-wears and cyberpunk clothes. Send them to me, and if I hit ^-B then I guess the answer is “nope.” We’d need a browser, then we’d need servers. If you look at what an instagram browser does, it’s stupid. To the same point, if you look at what a regular browser does when it encounters youtube, it’s stupid – there are giant reams of javascript and other crap that attempt to track you and get important marketing through to you. Why do we tolerate it, at all? Are the days gone when someone might write a client that deliberately ignored spoofed “add group” commands unless they came from the right people? This is simple code.
The real magic would be in the servers. Again, why do we rely on corporate servers? “Serving” is not hard – you need an article-id, and a group-id and if you’re given a group-id you respond with all the articles since ${date} then your partner drops into “sendme: ${list}” as many time as necessary. For example: “giveme: pharyngula@freethoughtblogs.com” would return a list of articles and my client
would decide what I have seen and what I want and then respond with “sendme: ${list}” my client could do it in bulk, in which case I’d catch up on pharyngula, or iteratively across all the sources I have, based on some algorithm, in which case I’d have a pretty cool news-browse. The knobs for the newsbrowse would be exposed. The logic for the “giveme:” would be exposed. If all I was interested in was “1945 2N tractors@someplace” then that’s all I’d get. But if I asked for “tagged: 1945 2n tractors” I’d get a list back that I could sort with whatever software aids I had. Or my eyeball. I’m not describing anything fancy here: this is all that instagram and facebook are, except they are rooted at the core so they can provide you politically manipulative glarp and content from the “influencers” that have recently paid.
There is a fascinating problem in the scenario I outlined, namely: protocols for being introduced to new stuff. If I am on instagram, I will be introduced to whatever their influencers have paid them to introduce. If I am on the kind of system I am describing, I could tick a box and say “yes, indeed, I am willing to listen to any musician that Neil Fucking Young recommends.” We have somehow given that whole process of introduction over to marketing people instead of the experts. If I am a follower of Roberto Ferri, I am willing to look at any artist he recommends. If he recommends clunkers, which I seriously doubt would happen, I can ^-B them, or him. What is fascinating, to me, about Facebook et al is that we have given over the most important part of our internet experience to a bunch of marketing pukes.
I’m imagining servers would be fairly lightweight. They probably wouldn’t need to run SQL, just a B+tree (for sequential matching) and a chunk file of a few terabytes. Each server could talk to the other servers every couple hours and do ihave/sendme like an old ‘C’ news system – in terms of today’s bandwidth that’s laughable. One of the premises I am burying in this, which is true but approximate, is that 90% of the traffic is ads and marketing and all of that would go away, unless someone set up a server that carried ads and marketing and someone decided to attach to it. There are baked in objections: “oh my god this system would be inherently designed for child porn and sharing nuclear secrets.” Well, I don’t know about child porn but I always got my nuclear secrets via FTP. Sure, you’d be able to match on the basic protocol and block it, but if you’re interested in monitoring a particular servers’ groups, then that’s up to your own bad self.
A big part of the problem is that we keep expecting rich people who are part of the problem, to solve it. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, I am talking about you. This is a multi-server peer-to-peer system I am talking about, that completely lacks a place where capitalists can reach in and take control over any of it. Back in the UUCP days, there was a server at UUNet: ftp.uu.net that mirrored pretty much all of the source code on the internet – except for certain very important source code repositories that it didn’t. Even then, some of us knew better than to put all our eggs in one basket.
The only joy I get is knowing that AI is going to put those marketing pukes out looking for a job. Maybe it’ll be a marketing pukes onlyfans or maybe they’ll be working for ICE. Whatever! There are times when the fact of class war doesn’t bother me that some people are going to wind up with really shitty jobs.
I’ll freely cop to one thing: analyzing AI images gives you a strong sense of what it is that you like. I would not have had my eye drawn to “allyalden” if not for that unruly mop and that goofy smile. Sure, she’d look cuter wearing a long 1930s gown and carrying a katana, but the people who created that are doing fine, as is. Since I’m tuned (somewhat) into the AI art world, I know that creating a character like Allyalden is a lot of work and someone has done a fantastic job and will probably make a years’ pay from the clicks that “she” drives. Until the economy collapses and she’s worthless, and then she’ll be gone. Will the guys declaring their love to her ever feel anything? Or feel stupid? Maybe it’s a generational thing, but in my youth we didn’t declare our immortal love until we’d at least kissed her.
Also: some billionaire could build an ad-free, government-free, uncontrolled email server for a billion people and host it somewhere like Iceland. “screw your surveillance state” – just make it open to anyone. I estimate that a system like that, tuned for 300mn users, would only cost about $10mn/year. Jeff Bezos’ new wife uses more silicone than that in a week. [PS – deadpool: she won’t last 4 years.]
Like London busses, you wait ages for a Stderr post, then two come along at once.
Allyaldenx does have an extra finger on her right hand in the second image. There are other pointers, such as the shadow cast by the light switch on the wall being way too long.
However, AI image critics miss a vital point – it will self-correct and improve alarmingly quickly, especially if people tell it what it’s doing wrong. I despise Musk, but people laughing at his autonomous landing first stages failing also missed the point and didn’t understand how failure pushes development.
In the UK many people (I was guilty too) laughed at Murdoch when he was losing money hand over fist on his satellite TV stations. Then people sneered when he was making money, but only if you didn’t count interest payments on his loans. At least I then worked out his profit trajectory.
I’m afraid AI will continue to improve until it becomes almost impossible to detect it. Then we’re really screwed. Internet users are already lost in the AI fog and often accuse real people of being bots, so soon none of us will know what’s real. Politicians caught in flagrante will whine that the charges are AI generated and we’ll soon not be able to tell.
It’s happening and it’s happening faster that we’ll be able to keep up.
I doubt the tumbrils are coming. The super-rich have such control of the narrative that we peons are grateful for the crumbs they’re thrown, rather than outraged by inequity.
Your suggestion on controlling your info inputs sounds marvellous to me. But I worry that the hard work of thinking about choosing can become an unreasonable demand when there’s an influencer to follow or a brand to live up to.
Recently, I was with some 10–12 y-o kids who had been playing each other music (from a phone, natch) and I asked what they liked listening to. The considered answer: “Spotify”.
Any favourite artists? <shrug>.
Door hinges are the new fingers. AI knows shit about DIY…
About 40 years ago, Frank Zappa wrote that future historians will describe Americans as “Those who chose cheese”. Never did a group of people have so much going for them in the beginning. Now we are merely weird.
This post also reminds me of a couple of lines from “The Sound of Muzak” by Porcupine Tree:
“The music of the future will not entertain
It’s only meant to repress and neutralise your brain”
“The music of rebellion makes you want to rage
But it’s made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age”
The most powerful invention that America ever produced was not the atomic bomb; it was modern marketing. You couple that with unfettered capitalism and a mess will follow. An absolutely brilliant book on the mindset and motivations of the uber rich was penned over a century ago by economist Thorsten Veblen. It’s called “The Theory of the Leisure Class” and you can still find it for free ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833 ).
@3 astringer
Yes, ignoring the missing bottom hinge and the lack of screws in the other ones, my question is “How are those doors supposed to work”? They are hung oddly, to say the least.
At the point of contact, whether someone is real or not doesn’t actually signify. None of this shit is real, and nobody interacts with it as though it were. You could achieve the same effect with a model and a marketing team. Ai is just cheaper.
I lack the technical background to opine usefully, so I’ll just say that I suspect the problem any competitor to Facebook et al. need to solve is volume. Sorting what you want to see from what you don’t is a really hard problem. Much harder than separating what I want you to see.
I’m curious if people think something like AdBlock or whatever it’s called, is any serious problem for advertisers. I do know that some sites won’t let you browse if you are using an AdBlock-type app. In any event, using something like that does prevent one from seeing ads, usually. I suppose things like Instagram require the person to willfully and actually engage with this type of content shown by Our Host, but on Facebook anyway, one can not see any of the ads. AI has also started to penetrate the group function on Facebook, but the mods in my groups usually get rid of it as soon as it’s spotted.
Stochastic™ doesn’t pay enough, but Chaos® won’t even make me an offer what with all the redundant agents they have in the field already.
… servers would be fairly lightweight. They probably wouldn’t need to run SQL…
Are you trying to make Larry Ellison cry? Show us your papers! And your passwords!
I haven’t spent much time in bars for a while, but I’d feel sure I’d fallen into some alt-universe if I saw a neon “BEER” sign in one which didn’t include a brand-name or -logo.
Yeah, allyaldenx looks really cute*, give or take a finger or bracelet, and those animated tats will sweep the cyberpunk scene overnite – but I don’t think I could possibly pull my male gaze away from her self-morphing bikini.
*I hope the live model on whom she’s based gets lots of royalties (but I doubt it).
“Sure, she’d look cuter wearing a long 1930s gown and carrying a katana”
Is there anyone that isn’t true for?
I wonder if ‘making thirst traps’ is a justification for a sword license here?
[Warning: long]
First off…
What makes you think those comments are from real people either? It’s long been obvious that a lot of the “engagement” on Insta is bots – and not cool AI bots either, just the boring, old-skool, completely dumb bots that just have a lookup table of generic responses. You could post a literal photo of a steaming human turd and still get a bunch of comments like “So cool, I love this! {hearteyes} {heart} {fire}” provided you post it on an account with enough engagement to start with and add the right hashtags.
Moving on to the meat of the post, you’re right that the basics of “serving” are not technically hard. The hard technical(ish) parts are figuring how how to stop your service being overrun with spammers and child pornographers, or getting accidentally DDoSed by AI scraper bots endlessly seeking more content to feed the insatiable maw of their machine god. (Isn’t it funny how the geniuses running the scrapers don’t even have the smarts to throttle back when they start getting HTTP 429? Sure, AI is going to take over the world and make all the coders obsolete… But that’s a different rant.)
But even those aren’t the actual hard parts…
The reason I’m still using FB and Insta is not that I don’t hate their product, or the lack of viable alternatives, it’s because they have hostages – namely, the people that I want to socially network with. Cory Doctorow has written very extensively on this, so I’m just going to link and quote a typical example:
Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits
Fortunately, we already know how to fix this:
My dream solution would be for some sufficiently powerful jurisdiction (say, the EU) to use competition law to mandate that all social media networks offer interoperable feeds based on open protocols. For example, you could require that they publish an RSS feed for every user (secured behind OAuth where appropriate) – they you could use whatever client you want to consume feeds from the people you want to follow, no matter what service they were using to post. We could mandate a base set of interop tests that your service must pass, based on a reference client implementation, and a common set of OAuth claims providers you have to recognise, and as long as you meet that minimum standard, you’re good. Don’t meet that minimum standard, we fine you into oblivion.
You can still offer me a newsfeed, or a suggestions feed, or whatever, and if you make it good enough I might even subscribe to it. You can still provide your own client, and if it’s not horrible, I might even use it. Open posting protocols would be nice, but I don’t think that’s essential – as long as you mandate some kind of redirect mechanism (“my RSS feed is now over here ->”) then people can switch services without losing touch with their existing followers. Suddenly they’re having to compete on the basis of actually offering a decent service again.
The legal framework already exists. The protocols already exist. Whipping up a reference client is an afternoon’s work. The hardest bit is defining who this would apply to – we don’t want to put onerous requirements on people running niche forums, for example.
Of course, the real problem is finding legislators and regulators willing to stand up to the tech giants in the first place. Answers on a postcard please!
Obviously this doesn’t address your concerns about government monitoring, but that’s a much, much more difficult problem – as we’ve repeatedly seen, they’re perfectly able and willing to go after the endpoints if no central server is available, and per James Mickens’ “Mossad / not-Mossad” threat model, once you’re dealing with nation-state adversaries, you’re pretty much fucked no matter what.
Have you seen Dave Winer’s http://scripting.com/ and https://wordland.social/ ideas?
He’s been frustrated with the Bluesky/Mastodon open social web promises for along time, and working on what it would take to make it more open: http://scripting.com/2025/06/28/211301.html
markp8703@#1:
Allyaldenx does have an extra finger on her right hand in the second image. There are other pointers, such as the shadow cast by the light switch on the wall being way too long.
I guess we’re in a situation where “sooner or later, the AI trips itself up.” I actually find this to be good sport. One of the ones I was watching triggered an observation in me: she both threw her cell phone on the floor and kept using it to film. Also, another onlyfans hottie seems to have a different cell phone every time, including some really interesting colors. And of course there is the phone that has nothing but cameras on both sides.
I’ve noticed two other big “tells” – whoever operates Allyaldenx seems to operate about a dozen AI avatars. For whatever reasons, the Allyaldenx avatar “follows” all the others. Well, that’s a heck of a giveaway. Another one that I find interesting (and none of the AI pimps seem to realize) the various video models seem to like to create 5 second loops. Humans who are fumbling for the record/stop button don’t do that. I guess it’s all part of this weird Turing Test we are giving ourselves.
I know I have mentioned this elsewhere but I’m starting to become fascinated by the guys’ reactions to these avatars. Every posting is greeted with declarations of love. I assume that these are spicy young males, who did not grow up with an awareness that on the internet, nobody knows if they are talking to a dog. I can understand someone saying, “wow you look great!” which does not quite imply that there is an emotional element. What I don’t get is saying “I love you” to a hungry alien monster or whatever these things are. If it has a large language model hooked to it, it may make witty comments or express affection, but it literally does not know what “love” is. My cynical response is that neither do the guys making the comments.
I wonder how many of them are incels in the making? To have a relationship, your loved one must be at least corporeal and capable of realistic responses. I don’t think those commenters are actually in love with the avatar; they’re just saying that as a chip to play in what they imagine is a game being played between two humans. If they don’t know how to flirt with actual people, they’re going to get frustrated when they encounter a peer who has interests of their own. It makes me wonder whether these AI avatars are going to become wedges that open the hearts of young fools to the blandishments of older, more cynical fools like Mr Tate. I know that this has already happened; in Japan there are a lot of young men who play “dating simulators” so that they can get an idea how to talk to a woman. A worse strategy, I have trouble imagining…
astringer@#3
Door hinges are the new fingers. AI knows shit about DIY…
I am really embarrassed that I never noticed that one. I tend to notice “big picture” stuff – like Allyaldenx supposedly works in a bar, except the bar changes very often. And most barmaids don’t dance around in their underwear while a customer enjoys a beer in the background. The bottles and bits of bar paraphrenalia don’t register.
I feel like I should have caught the hinges. Or, light switches, outlets, and light fixtures.
markp8703@#1:
I doubt the tumbrils are coming. The super-rich have such control of the narrative that we peons are grateful for the crumbs they’re thrown, rather than outraged by inequity.
When the food production chain starts to crumble, around, 2035-40, there will be riots and some of those riots might end in a tumbril ride or equivalent. I intend to miss all that stuff, once I see it starting.
dangerousbeans@#9:
“Sure, she’d look cuter wearing a long 1930s gown and carrying a katana”
Is there anyone that isn’t true for?
Of course the katana is all wrong.
FWIW I’ve been looking at some of the prompts that people are using. They’re crazy specific and quite huge. I usually stick with terse feature-lists but some of the better ones are page-long descriptions that bring in all sorts of side-effects. Very cool stuff. I have been doing some playing with the ChatGPT-based image editor, which allows for very descriptive changes. Interesting stuff.
@15
Try this classic: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
BTW, her wedding ring looks improperly sized. I’ll bet she takes it off when she practices her kenjutsu, or she would have lost it by now.
Another thing that changes from image to image with allyaldenx: her navel.
Reginald Selkirk@#17:
Another thing that changes from image to image with allyaldenx: her navel.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. She’s quite a gal.
If I were emperor I would make you my Image Scryer In Chief, which title comes with a heavy gold chain designed by an AI, and a pension of 30 gold/year.
Try this classic: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
Hemingway was as good as he thought he was; most annoying.