We don’t know who the hoaxer was here, or their motives. Seems fairly amateur-hour, tbh, given the current state of AI tools. A properly motivated and funded disinformation campaign would know how...
We don’t know who the hoaxer was here, or their motives. Seems fairly amateur-hour, tbh, given the current state of AI tools. A properly motivated and funded disinformation campaign would know how to make its fake badge and research paper less detectable as such.
The real danger of stuff like this is not that it slanders the good name of Uber Eats, but that it decreases our ability to discern truth from falsehood. In a few years we’re all gonna be so fatigued from questioning everything that we just believe nothing anymore. The zone will be utterly flooded with shit — with zero hope of ever draining it again. Which of course creates an environment for malefactors to prey with impunity, because everyone has conceded their ability to defend against it.
Market manipulation could be an easy movitation. Buy some cheap, out-of-the-money put options on Uber, post the 'whistleblower' report, and hope that the news media picks it up. If the story goes...
We don’t know who the hoaxer was here, or their motives. Seems fairly amateur-hour, tbh, given the current state of AI tools. A properly motivated and funded disinformation campaign would know how to make its fake badge and research paper less detectable as such.
Market manipulation could be an easy movitation. Buy some cheap, out-of-the-money put options on Uber, post the 'whistleblower' report, and hope that the news media picks it up. If the story goes viral and especially if it catches the attention of regulators or politicians, the stock could drop 10-20% in a profitable manner.
In a few years we’re all gonna be so fatigued from questioning everything that we just believe nothing anymore.
As I see it, AI content generation as gotten good enough that we should no longer trust unauthenticated sources or evidence without a known chain of custody: unverified comments should have all the credibility of "my uncle works for Nintendo and told me how to capture Mew."
It's a crying shame, but I think that this is the inevitable consequence of having a giant mixing vat of human attention without other defense mechanisms; blaming AI for this is like blaming the salmonella for colonizing the raw chicken left out on the counter.
You might be onto something there. Honestly we’re so up to our eyeballs in scams, grifts, and pump-and-dumps these days that it’s legitimately tempting to join in. Feels like shooting fish in a...
Market manipulation could be an easy movitation. Buy some cheap, out-of-the-money put options on Uber, post the 'whistleblower' report, and hope that the news media picks it up. If the story goes viral and especially if it catches the attention of regulators or politicians, the stock could drop 10-20% in a profitable manner.
You might be onto something there. Honestly we’re so up to our eyeballs in scams, grifts, and pump-and-dumps these days that it’s legitimately tempting to join in. Feels like shooting fish in a barrel and these modern fraudsters rarely face any consequences (on the contrary, they get elected President and amplify their grifts by factors of magnitude… but I digress). I’m over here struggling to make an honest living for my family when I fully believe I could be raking it in by ripping people off if I just ignored my conscience. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night but damn if I’m not a teensy bit jealous of the crooks these days.
I mean, reddit has been a place for creative writing exercises for way longer than AI has been around, longer than I've been on this site, hell longer than most of my adult life. People love going...
We don’t know who the hoaxer was here, or their motives. Seems fairly amateur-hour, tbh, given the current state of AI tools. A properly motivated and funded disinformation campaign would know how to make its fake badge and research paper less detectable as such.
I mean, reddit has been a place for creative writing exercises for way longer than AI has been around, longer than I've been on this site, hell longer than most of my adult life. People love going on there and just writing bullshit (e.g. r/amItheAsshole and such), doesn't have to be for a coordinated nefarious purpose.
I don't think reddit has been a usable website for a long long time outside of some VERY niche hobby subs maybe. Even the likes of r/rpg destroy a lot of discussion because of the upvote mechanism...
I don't think reddit has been a usable website for a long long time outside of some VERY niche hobby subs maybe. Even the likes of r/rpg destroy a lot of discussion because of the upvote mechanism and of course the most popular ones are just karma farming simulators. I genuinely prefer places with no personalities, no virtual currency and little moderation. Sadly there's very few such places left.
Years ago I posted a fake story on reddit that went viral. I was actually contacted by the podcast Reply All, about doing an episode about my story. But I had the sense to come clean and not try...
Years ago I posted a fake story on reddit that went viral. I was actually contacted by the podcast Reply All, about doing an episode about my story.
But I had the sense to come clean and not try to lie my way through an interview
I don't remember the exact title and it was on an old alt account I don't use anymore. But basically the story was about a guy using a program that sends messages to people after you die. Except...
I don't remember the exact title and it was on an old alt account I don't use anymore. But basically the story was about a guy using a program that sends messages to people after you die. Except he screws it up and all the messages go out early. So all of his friends and family are getting heartfelt messages that say he's dead.
It will hopefully go the way of the phone call. Phone calls go unanswered and filtered except from trusted sources unless you are looking for a job. The entire medium has been rendered nearly...
but that it decreases our ability to discern truth from falsehood. In a few years we’re all gonna be so fatigued from questioning everything that we just believe nothing anymore
It will hopefully go the way of the phone call.
Phone calls go unanswered and filtered except from trusted sources unless you are looking for a job. The entire medium has been rendered nearly useless because of garbage spam calls.
I won't be so egotistical as to say I totally clocked them immediately, but I was sceptical of the comment when I read it. The sensationalised, dramatic writing put me in mind of a similar...
I won't be so egotistical as to say I totally clocked them immediately, but I was sceptical of the comment when I read it. The sensationalised, dramatic writing put me in mind of a similar anecdote of someone watching a monetised torture video on the dark web - while instantly assuming that wild stories are too dramatic to be true is a mistake, reality is more often than not banal in its goods and evils. I'm reminded of Dan Olson in his documentary on GME Ape noting that their conspiracist worldview is doubtless more interesting and engaging than the truth of Wall Street simply being filled with greedy assholes. Then again, it's easy to say this in retrospect.
Bare minimum. It never made sense to be so concerned about opsec while declaring that they gave 2 weeks notice in a way that would make them immediately identifiable. Some of the rest of the stuff...
Bare minimum. It never made sense to be so concerned about opsec while declaring that they gave 2 weeks notice in a way that would make them immediately identifiable. Some of the rest of the stuff I wouldn't have known whether or not to believe as I have no tech background. But it was all too evil for evil's sake
When I first saw the post, I was suspicious (but didn't wholly dismiss it as fake) mostly bc they claimed to know too many things from unrelated parts of the company. Some of the dynamic pricing...
When I first saw the post, I was suspicious (but didn't wholly dismiss it as fake) mostly bc they claimed to know too many things from unrelated parts of the company. Some of the dynamic pricing stuff they mentioned was weird even from the perspective of someone who worked in unrelated ML fields and has friends-of-friends in this industry, and a lot of what they described would be questionably legal at best, but companies like this have done plenty of questionably legal stuff that we do know for sure happened and the ML stuff they described was still possible even if weird af. I was willing to dismiss a lot of red flags that would be sketchy or illegal as US companies being uniquely awful. But the red flag that most stood out in retrospect (that is, knowing it's fake) is that the writer claims knowledge over stuff that someone on the software engineering side just would not know about in a big company like this. But this wasn't really enough for me to dismiss the post as a sure fake when I first saw it, I'll freely admit.
But ultimately I shrugged and scrolled on and didn't consciously think more about it until I saw that it was confirmed fake. I suspect a lot of people did that.
So I feel like there are some interesting points worth pulling out of the article (instead of the now deleted reddit post) and later on So understandably, reporters do not have the knowledge and...
So I feel like there are some interesting points worth pulling out of the article (instead of the now deleted reddit post)
I wish I could tell you that I immediately clocked the document as a fake. The truth is that it initially fooled me. Laden with charts, diagrams, and mathematical formulas, the document closely resembled many AI-related papers that I have read (and perhaps half-understood) over the past few years. I lacked the technical knowledge to discern that, as plausible as it may have looked in some places, the document was nonsense.
and later on
I shared the document he had sent me with a former ridesharing company engineer I know, and he pointed out various mistakes the whistleblower had made. Companies just don’t talk like this, or work this way, he explained. They run experiments and describe their findings in narrowly focused documents. They do not outline sinister plans for human exploitation and regulatory evasion in writing.
So understandably, reporters do not have the knowledge and experience to tell legitimate documents from fakes, but those in the industry do. So why not just ask for expert opinions right away, well the answer is simple:
The whistleblower, for his part, worked to amp up the pressure. He told me he had shared the document with other reporters, putting me into a competitive crunch. He asked when I thought I would publish.
Those who are fabricating it understand that publishing it first matters to reporters. There is a time crunch that limits the ability to send it off to others to dissect the jargon that these documents use to obfuscate the nothingness of the document.
from the social media age: you should always be at your most suspicious online when someone is baiting you into outrage.
I have never heard of this quote before, but it is something more people should be paying attention to. I have been aware of manufactured outrage on the internet and try to steer clear of it (but it sometimes sucks me in). So this is something that I should try more to be aware of. But then the question becomes when does outrage become legitimate?
We don’t know who the hoaxer was here, or their motives. Seems fairly amateur-hour, tbh, given the current state of AI tools. A properly motivated and funded disinformation campaign would know how to make its fake badge and research paper less detectable as such.
The real danger of stuff like this is not that it slanders the good name of Uber Eats, but that it decreases our ability to discern truth from falsehood. In a few years we’re all gonna be so fatigued from questioning everything that we just believe nothing anymore. The zone will be utterly flooded with shit — with zero hope of ever draining it again. Which of course creates an environment for malefactors to prey with impunity, because everyone has conceded their ability to defend against it.
Market manipulation could be an easy movitation. Buy some cheap, out-of-the-money put options on Uber, post the 'whistleblower' report, and hope that the news media picks it up. If the story goes viral and especially if it catches the attention of regulators or politicians, the stock could drop 10-20% in a profitable manner.
As I see it, AI content generation as gotten good enough that we should no longer trust unauthenticated sources or evidence without a known chain of custody: unverified comments should have all the credibility of "my uncle works for Nintendo and told me how to capture Mew."
It's a crying shame, but I think that this is the inevitable consequence of having a giant mixing vat of human attention without other defense mechanisms; blaming AI for this is like blaming the salmonella for colonizing the raw chicken left out on the counter.
You might be onto something there. Honestly we’re so up to our eyeballs in scams, grifts, and pump-and-dumps these days that it’s legitimately tempting to join in. Feels like shooting fish in a barrel and these modern fraudsters rarely face any consequences (on the contrary, they get elected President and amplify their grifts by factors of magnitude… but I digress). I’m over here struggling to make an honest living for my family when I fully believe I could be raking it in by ripping people off if I just ignored my conscience. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night but damn if I’m not a teensy bit jealous of the crooks these days.
I mean, reddit has been a place for creative writing exercises for way longer than AI has been around, longer than I've been on this site, hell longer than most of my adult life. People love going on there and just writing bullshit (e.g. r/amItheAsshole and such), doesn't have to be for a coordinated nefarious purpose.
I don't think reddit has been a usable website for a long long time outside of some VERY niche hobby subs maybe. Even the likes of r/rpg destroy a lot of discussion because of the upvote mechanism and of course the most popular ones are just karma farming simulators. I genuinely prefer places with no personalities, no virtual currency and little moderation. Sadly there's very few such places left.
Years ago I posted a fake story on reddit that went viral. I was actually contacted by the podcast Reply All, about doing an episode about my story.
But I had the sense to come clean and not try to lie my way through an interview
I'm deeply curious what story it was now
I don't remember the exact title and it was on an old alt account I don't use anymore. But basically the story was about a guy using a program that sends messages to people after you die. Except he screws it up and all the messages go out early. So all of his friends and family are getting heartfelt messages that say he's dead.
ooh I can see why you got traction with that, it sounds extremely Podcastable.
I miss that podcast, they would’ve done a great job with this debunking story
It will hopefully go the way of the phone call.
Phone calls go unanswered and filtered except from trusted sources unless you are looking for a job. The entire medium has been rendered nearly useless because of garbage spam calls.
I won't be so egotistical as to say I totally clocked them immediately, but I was sceptical of the comment when I read it. The sensationalised, dramatic writing put me in mind of a similar anecdote of someone watching a monetised torture video on the dark web - while instantly assuming that wild stories are too dramatic to be true is a mistake, reality is more often than not banal in its goods and evils. I'm reminded of Dan Olson in his documentary on GME Ape noting that their conspiracist worldview is doubtless more interesting and engaging than the truth of Wall Street simply being filled with greedy assholes. Then again, it's easy to say this in retrospect.
Bare minimum. It never made sense to be so concerned about opsec while declaring that they gave 2 weeks notice in a way that would make them immediately identifiable. Some of the rest of the stuff I wouldn't have known whether or not to believe as I have no tech background. But it was all too evil for evil's sake
When I first saw the post, I was suspicious (but didn't wholly dismiss it as fake) mostly bc they claimed to know too many things from unrelated parts of the company. Some of the dynamic pricing stuff they mentioned was weird even from the perspective of someone who worked in unrelated ML fields and has friends-of-friends in this industry, and a lot of what they described would be questionably legal at best, but companies like this have done plenty of questionably legal stuff that we do know for sure happened and the ML stuff they described was still possible even if weird af. I was willing to dismiss a lot of red flags that would be sketchy or illegal as US companies being uniquely awful. But the red flag that most stood out in retrospect (that is, knowing it's fake) is that the writer claims knowledge over stuff that someone on the software engineering side just would not know about in a big company like this. But this wasn't really enough for me to dismiss the post as a sure fake when I first saw it, I'll freely admit.
But ultimately I shrugged and scrolled on and didn't consciously think more about it until I saw that it was confirmed fake. I suspect a lot of people did that.
So I feel like there are some interesting points worth pulling out of the article (instead of the now deleted reddit post)
and later on
So understandably, reporters do not have the knowledge and experience to tell legitimate documents from fakes, but those in the industry do. So why not just ask for expert opinions right away, well the answer is simple:
Those who are fabricating it understand that publishing it first matters to reporters. There is a time crunch that limits the ability to send it off to others to dissect the jargon that these documents use to obfuscate the nothingness of the document.
I have never heard of this quote before, but it is something more people should be paying attention to. I have been aware of manufactured outrage on the internet and try to steer clear of it (but it sometimes sucks me in). So this is something that I should try more to be aware of. But then the question becomes when does outrage become legitimate?
This is a classic strategy by almost any variety of scammer, so I suppose it's not a surprise to see it being deployed here.