My first stop is always the comments to see if some kind soul has already read the article and left a comment with pertinent quotes. If no one has, I often try to do it myself, though with my own weird commentary or warning about the site's credibility that is usually not very well received.
The outlook is grim. AI "leaders" have already started talking about slowing down development to ensure proper guardrails are in place to prevent catastrophe. If you take it at face value that means frontier models are vastly more dangerous than we thought if the move-fast-and-break-stuff crowd is advising caution. On the other hand there is a dire gap in what has been promised by these folks and what AI is able to deliver. I believe currently the number is something like $10,000 invested for $1 in profits. That kind of gap is unsustainable so the "slow down it's too dangerous" message could be a cover for a difficult to monetize product so investors don't crash the markets.
As to the future, it's difficult to predict, but if we take current trends forward we'll see a massive reduction in the overall usefulness of the internet. AI bots will eventually greatly outnumber human users on social media, AI generated content will be ubiquitous, and the algorithms will begin optimizing for AI material to the point that human created media will fall to the wayside.
The impact on society will be profound and immeasurable. We're already seeing a shift in how algorithms are controlling information. They are surpressing resistance movements, atrocities, and any stories that threaten the status quo. Moving into the future that stuff will be burried under AI generated content that is indistinguishable from reality. Political movements will be entirely fabricated from whole cloth while real ones become impossible to find. Fakes of politicians and leaders making speaches they would never give or moments that never happened will flood the zone and drown out any real information.
What's of most concern is that the ecosystem of the internet is almost entirely controlled by colonial capitalists and their fascist cronies so they will be the ones setting the tone and direction.
Honestly, I don't know. The app had been really spotty for months, I didn't check about updates or anything, I just jumped ship. If the maintainers abandoned it though, that would explain why it broke.
I was using Sync for Lemmy until a week or two ago. It was nice and familiar because that was my reddit app of choice prior to api-gate, but for some reason it kept frequently erroring out and not showing posts or images. I switched to Voyager and so far it's been pretty good
I got from your original post that your desire was to expose the system you describe, and I understand what you're saying about wanting anyone to be able to check your work, but there is a way to tell the story without potentially putting children at risk. Teaching new people how to access that material would absolutely increase the risk for children online. Don't think of it as censorship, think of it as harm reduction. It's a difficult needle to thread, but it's possible.
Have you tried reaching out to journalists? That's going to get a lot more exposure than the tens of people that might encounter your post here. Get a list of 50 news sites you trust big and small and then hit their contacts pages. 99% of the time they have contact information for individual journalists and if you send it out to enough people, someone will follow up. If it's as widespread and dark as what you describe, a lot of reporters would kill for a chance to write that story.
I know you needed to get all that off your chest, but I would strongly encourage you to go back and edit your post to remove the specific instructions like terms, hashtags, apps, and platforms that others could use to access that content who didn't already know. You've basically written a primer on how to find csam online and I'm sure that's not what you intended.
I like to say better out than in, so I hope that was helpful for you. Pedophilia is a cruel curse for many. I've known a few people who suffered from it greatly. My ex-brother-in-law molested his younger cousin when they were both under age and later was arrested for distributing csam material online because he was seeding torrents. I visited him in prison a few times with my ex and he had gotten into a program for pedophiles that he said really helped him. Another guy I grew up with felt he needed to come out to me after I came out to him as trans. We talked a lot about it and he really hated the idea of hurting kids so he made sure everything he pursued was animated. I saw recently too that a federal judge ruled AI generated stuff is legal as long as you don't share it. Either way I hope you can find a healthy way to deal with the attraction and impulse.
I have been staring at the cover for a good ten minutes to see if there is some kind of meaning in the design to justify the jumbled composition. The best I've got is the designer is maybe trying to evoke the setting sun and/or Saul Bass movie title cards. It's got all the right colors to stand out in the bookstore/online store so it's probably not that deep.
A new movement is definitely not required for progress. There are a lot of movements out there already working towards the goals you imply. There are pretty much groups doing exactly what you want in every western country, many of them have multiple groups all working towards similar goals, like 50501 in the US.
The problem is, you probably haven't heard of them, because most people haven't and for good reason. The true power is held by capital and their fascist cronies. They own social media and control the algorithms. They own the legacy news institutions. They own almost every platform or tool that people could use to grow an opposition movement and actively silence anyone who threatens the status quo. They run vast networks of AI-powered chatbots that flood pro-social and anti-social media alike with bean soup theory, whataboutism, and a host of other rhetorical techniques designed to undermine the exchange of ideas.
Any new movement would have to figure out how to overcome all of that, whereas an existing one has already had some experience with it. This could be taken as doomerism or at least obstructionist, but personally, finding a way to counter the bots and message suppression is the only way we're going to see progressive messaging spread to enough people and be believed by enough people that any change will happen.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm curious about your bibliography and research methods. I wanted to learn more about the issue but was surprised to find a new york times article, a Wikipedia page, and a substantial amount of sources there were your other articles. It's my understanding that it's bad form to cite yourself, especially if your own work is the majority of the bibliography? Only a couple of the sources cited seem to be actual published research. Is that normal for this kind of piece?
They're down voting because I said the problem hasn't been happening at scale yet. It's an opinion I've shared before that has been met with similar reaction. We're very much still in the technology can be misused broadly, we haven't gotten to the technology is being abused at scale yet.
It doesn't fit the Lemmy hivemind worldview though which requires it to be a tangible current problem rather than yet another credible future problem.
If you're looking for general news I subscribe to Grist, The Conversation, Mother Jones, and ProPublica. They have a mostly neutral bias. I also have some leftie sources: Vox, The 19th, and Jacobin. And one right wing news source that is more libertarian than MAGA: The American Conservative, just to keep an eye on them. All of those have a US bias. The EFF's Deep Links and Open Culture are also great but are more niche.
We've got a lot of tech that has the potential to be misused or used to go after ordinary citizens lying around. This, traffic cameras, ad id tracking, and a few others but so far it hasn't really been used at scale. There are tens of victims so far rather than hundreds, thousands, or more.
Though the article did mention that the pigs were using a technique called parallel construction, which is when they have evidence of a crime that has not been obtained legally and they use that to look for other, legal means to collect evidence to prove the crime in court. So maybe this happens all the time and we just don't know it yet.
Obviously this will eventually be weaponized against citizens and that will be a bad day when it happens. But like if you're dumb enough to be committing crimes and putting the money into the banking system without laundering it, you've kind of got it coming. At least squirell it away in an anonymous crypto wallet, those stupid machines are everywhere.
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
I guess we just add it to the list? It'll never happen anyway. There are about 249 million American adults currently so that's like $1.2 trillion, which would need congressional approval in the form of a spending bill. I guess we shouldn't be surprised after Musk did the same thing in the Wisconsin supreme court race last year and in 5 battleground states during the 2024 election.
I'm a trans Texan and I will still be voting for him enthusiastically in November. It's sort of a problem of the Republican's own making because if they hadn't banned hrt for minors in Texas there would be no issue. But it's very hard to repeal a law and it will be a decade at least until Texas' state government is blue enough to even have a chance at it, if they make it a priority. In the mean time, trans girl athletes do have a demonsterable advantage in sports over cis girls because without HRT they have a functionally male body, assuming both girls are in peak athletic form.
In a perfect world there would be no gendered sports. Instead there would be 2-3 weight and height based categories students were clumped into. Failing that, each student athlete is already given a physical before joining a school's team so adding a little bloodwork to check hormone levels and maybe trans kids need a doctor's note saying they've been on hrt for 12-18 months.
That would screw over the kids that decided to wait until they're 18 to medically transition or those that decided not to medically transition at all. There would also be cis kids who fail thier hormone test too, but that's an indication of a medical problem in cis individuals so they could get treatment and try again the next year. But like there are maybe a few hundred trans athletes nationwide across all age ranges and probably tens of those are waiting or not medically transitioning. It just might be the case that those kids don't get to participate in the way they want to, but there are plenty of other kids in the same boat like those with coordination issues, kids with asthma, or other differences that keep cis kids off teams. It sucks but it's the hand they were dealt.
Talrico walking back his already tepid acceptance of trans people on a hyper-polarized wedge issue isn't really that big of a deal. In Texas, where he's running, a lot of Democrats don't support trans girls in sports. I'm not sure that particular group would ever consider switching to Paxton over the issue, but there are a shocking amount of Republicans who would vote Talrico if he were more centrist about culture war issues. If this gets him in office, I'm all for it. I'd bet if the issue came to him in the Senate he would either vote with the other Democrats or abstain on the issue. I can't see him voting for it though.
My first stop is always the comments to see if some kind soul has already read the article and left a comment with pertinent quotes. If no one has, I often try to do it myself, though with my own weird commentary or warning about the site's credibility that is usually not very well received.
The outlook is grim. AI "leaders" have already started talking about slowing down development to ensure proper guardrails are in place to prevent catastrophe. If you take it at face value that means frontier models are vastly more dangerous than we thought if the move-fast-and-break-stuff crowd is advising caution. On the other hand there is a dire gap in what has been promised by these folks and what AI is able to deliver. I believe currently the number is something like $10,000 invested for $1 in profits. That kind of gap is unsustainable so the "slow down it's too dangerous" message could be a cover for a difficult to monetize product so investors don't crash the markets.
As to the future, it's difficult to predict, but if we take current trends forward we'll see a massive reduction in the overall usefulness of the internet. AI bots will eventually greatly outnumber human users on social media, AI generated content will be ubiquitous, and the algorithms will begin optimizing for AI material to the point that human created media will fall to the wayside.
The impact on society will be profound and immeasurable. We're already seeing a shift in how algorithms are controlling information. They are surpressing resistance movements, atrocities, and any stories that threaten the status quo. Moving into the future that stuff will be burried under AI generated content that is indistinguishable from reality. Political movements will be entirely fabricated from whole cloth while real ones become impossible to find. Fakes of politicians and leaders making speaches they would never give or moments that never happened will flood the zone and drown out any real information.
What's of most concern is that the ecosystem of the internet is almost entirely controlled by colonial capitalists and their fascist cronies so they will be the ones setting the tone and direction.
Honestly, I don't know. The app had been really spotty for months, I didn't check about updates or anything, I just jumped ship. If the maintainers abandoned it though, that would explain why it broke.
If it still drives limp it to my mechanic, if it doesn't remove/scratch off the vin plates and etchings and set it on fire and report it stolen.
I was using Sync for Lemmy until a week or two ago. It was nice and familiar because that was my reddit app of choice prior to api-gate, but for some reason it kept frequently erroring out and not showing posts or images. I switched to Voyager and so far it's been pretty good
I got from your original post that your desire was to expose the system you describe, and I understand what you're saying about wanting anyone to be able to check your work, but there is a way to tell the story without potentially putting children at risk. Teaching new people how to access that material would absolutely increase the risk for children online. Don't think of it as censorship, think of it as harm reduction. It's a difficult needle to thread, but it's possible.
Have you tried reaching out to journalists? That's going to get a lot more exposure than the tens of people that might encounter your post here. Get a list of 50 news sites you trust big and small and then hit their contacts pages. 99% of the time they have contact information for individual journalists and if you send it out to enough people, someone will follow up. If it's as widespread and dark as what you describe, a lot of reporters would kill for a chance to write that story.
I know you needed to get all that off your chest, but I would strongly encourage you to go back and edit your post to remove the specific instructions like terms, hashtags, apps, and platforms that others could use to access that content who didn't already know. You've basically written a primer on how to find csam online and I'm sure that's not what you intended.
I like to say better out than in, so I hope that was helpful for you. Pedophilia is a cruel curse for many. I've known a few people who suffered from it greatly. My ex-brother-in-law molested his younger cousin when they were both under age and later was arrested for distributing csam material online because he was seeding torrents. I visited him in prison a few times with my ex and he had gotten into a program for pedophiles that he said really helped him. Another guy I grew up with felt he needed to come out to me after I came out to him as trans. We talked a lot about it and he really hated the idea of hurting kids so he made sure everything he pursued was animated. I saw recently too that a federal judge ruled AI generated stuff is legal as long as you don't share it. Either way I hope you can find a healthy way to deal with the attraction and impulse.
What was the name of that weird cat lady who lived above us when I was a kid? Eh I guess it doesn't matter.
He definitely likes you and it's 50/50 whether he thought your midnight call was a booty call. Get you some girl.
Behold the banality of evil.
I have been staring at the cover for a good ten minutes to see if there is some kind of meaning in the design to justify the jumbled composition. The best I've got is the designer is maybe trying to evoke the setting sun and/or Saul Bass movie title cards. It's got all the right colors to stand out in the bookstore/online store so it's probably not that deep.
Sort by scaled is pretty decent too.
A new movement is definitely not required for progress. There are a lot of movements out there already working towards the goals you imply. There are pretty much groups doing exactly what you want in every western country, many of them have multiple groups all working towards similar goals, like 50501 in the US.
The problem is, you probably haven't heard of them, because most people haven't and for good reason. The true power is held by capital and their fascist cronies. They own social media and control the algorithms. They own the legacy news institutions. They own almost every platform or tool that people could use to grow an opposition movement and actively silence anyone who threatens the status quo. They run vast networks of AI-powered chatbots that flood pro-social and anti-social media alike with bean soup theory, whataboutism, and a host of other rhetorical techniques designed to undermine the exchange of ideas.
Any new movement would have to figure out how to overcome all of that, whereas an existing one has already had some experience with it. This could be taken as doomerism or at least obstructionist, but personally, finding a way to counter the bots and message suppression is the only way we're going to see progressive messaging spread to enough people and be believed by enough people that any change will happen.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm curious about your bibliography and research methods. I wanted to learn more about the issue but was surprised to find a new york times article, a Wikipedia page, and a substantial amount of sources there were your other articles. It's my understanding that it's bad form to cite yourself, especially if your own work is the majority of the bibliography? Only a couple of the sources cited seem to be actual published research. Is that normal for this kind of piece?
They're down voting because I said the problem hasn't been happening at scale yet. It's an opinion I've shared before that has been met with similar reaction. We're very much still in the technology can be misused broadly, we haven't gotten to the technology is being abused at scale yet.
It doesn't fit the Lemmy hivemind worldview though which requires it to be a tangible current problem rather than yet another credible future problem.
If you're looking for general news I subscribe to Grist, The Conversation, Mother Jones, and ProPublica. They have a mostly neutral bias. I also have some leftie sources: Vox, The 19th, and Jacobin. And one right wing news source that is more libertarian than MAGA: The American Conservative, just to keep an eye on them. All of those have a US bias. The EFF's Deep Links and Open Culture are also great but are more niche.
We've got a lot of tech that has the potential to be misused or used to go after ordinary citizens lying around. This, traffic cameras, ad id tracking, and a few others but so far it hasn't really been used at scale. There are tens of victims so far rather than hundreds, thousands, or more.
Though the article did mention that the pigs were using a technique called parallel construction, which is when they have evidence of a crime that has not been obtained legally and they use that to look for other, legal means to collect evidence to prove the crime in court. So maybe this happens all the time and we just don't know it yet.
Obviously this will eventually be weaponized against citizens and that will be a bad day when it happens. But like if you're dumb enough to be committing crimes and putting the money into the banking system without laundering it, you've kind of got it coming. At least squirell it away in an anonymous crypto wallet, those stupid machines are everywhere.
-18 U.S. Code § 597
I guess we just add it to the list? It'll never happen anyway. There are about 249 million American adults currently so that's like $1.2 trillion, which would need congressional approval in the form of a spending bill. I guess we shouldn't be surprised after Musk did the same thing in the Wisconsin supreme court race last year and in 5 battleground states during the 2024 election.
I'm a trans Texan and I will still be voting for him enthusiastically in November. It's sort of a problem of the Republican's own making because if they hadn't banned hrt for minors in Texas there would be no issue. But it's very hard to repeal a law and it will be a decade at least until Texas' state government is blue enough to even have a chance at it, if they make it a priority. In the mean time, trans girl athletes do have a demonsterable advantage in sports over cis girls because without HRT they have a functionally male body, assuming both girls are in peak athletic form.
In a perfect world there would be no gendered sports. Instead there would be 2-3 weight and height based categories students were clumped into. Failing that, each student athlete is already given a physical before joining a school's team so adding a little bloodwork to check hormone levels and maybe trans kids need a doctor's note saying they've been on hrt for 12-18 months.
That would screw over the kids that decided to wait until they're 18 to medically transition or those that decided not to medically transition at all. There would also be cis kids who fail thier hormone test too, but that's an indication of a medical problem in cis individuals so they could get treatment and try again the next year. But like there are maybe a few hundred trans athletes nationwide across all age ranges and probably tens of those are waiting or not medically transitioning. It just might be the case that those kids don't get to participate in the way they want to, but there are plenty of other kids in the same boat like those with coordination issues, kids with asthma, or other differences that keep cis kids off teams. It sucks but it's the hand they were dealt.
Talrico walking back his already tepid acceptance of trans people on a hyper-polarized wedge issue isn't really that big of a deal. In Texas, where he's running, a lot of Democrats don't support trans girls in sports. I'm not sure that particular group would ever consider switching to Paxton over the issue, but there are a shocking amount of Republicans who would vote Talrico if he were more centrist about culture war issues. If this gets him in office, I'm all for it. I'd bet if the issue came to him in the Senate he would either vote with the other Democrats or abstain on the issue. I can't see him voting for it though.