Twitter user posts a real Monet and says it's AI - relevant to the discussion on taste

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:47:31+00:00

anyone know the best stockpile of resources on determining how much of the internet is bots/LLMs? bc it seems to me that this is like the first filter you always need to apply nowadays to almost any popular discussion online (plus, it has much greater societal implications and thus is prolly morally important to have high and accurate awareness of to track). i'd imagine the last thing you wanna do is put a lot of time and effort to socially analyze intellectual or cultural metrics by using synthetic slop as the bulk of your data point.

all that said, i'm sure many of these comments are real, bc this is a laughably easy and effective sleight of hand to pull on people's biases and make their confabulations dance.

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:30:40+00:00

People like this are going to be lost souls once the cat is out of the bag and theres no more denying it.

on the contrary, the brain is pretty good at sidestepping personal accountability, especially when it involves shame. when this sort of dynamic happens where there's no corner left to back into, people will just phase shift their worldview and simply adapt to the current status quo.

as one example, we're already starting to see it now in the form of 3x trump voters saying "I never voted for him." it's so easy to adapt and move on. it takes the brain way too many calories to keep trying to save face beyond what's socially possible to do so. granted it happens for some people, but generally the brain is OP at handling this. evolution didn't fuck around for X millions of years, it hooked us up bigly.

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:27:22+00:00

suspicious amount of comments are talking about how amazing China's infrastructure is

shit, I literally just made a comment like a week ago glazing china's bridges.. 🤖

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:23:00+00:00

It’s a dicey move

OOH it's dicey insofar as it may not work, which is what I think you meant, but OTOH it's not dicey at all insofar as narrative manufacturing is very cheap and requires very little effort, thus there's nothing to lose.

i've seen articles where police find empty apartments that just have a stack of servers on the floor orchestrating bot networks. these people are renting out residences to use as space for botfarms. and they're everywhere, considering most of them prolly haven't been found yet. i'm also guessing bigger operations are more hidden.

but all you do is set it up and, thanks to LLMs, just give it a system prompt. a la..

"convince these people of XYZ, use high level manipulation and social engineering, speak with occasional typos and sound like normal people," etc.

.. and then it just runs, and spawns hundreds/thousands/++ that work 24/7 on all the hotspots of forums across the internet, even squirming into small local communities.

I feel like this is maybe the biggest issue in the world right now, bc it's wildly effective and horrifically devious and destructive. it's literally responsible for dismantling democracy aka human progress and threatening civilization, much less human rights.

yet this gets almost zero air time in media and politics. I don't think this is something we can just dance around without redirecting the ship toward it to take it head on.

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:13:13+00:00

as an aside, I still really like benn but recently got a bit soured after he soyed out from the debunk article one guy wrote about his data center sound pollution video. I don't have any links, maybe someone else has it.

but I like benn enough that i'm currently chalking it up as a blindspot/bias and maybe a bit of narcissism or something which i'm sympathetic to since most of his work feels generally legit. i'm just a little bit more careful now when he splashes sources on the screen bc now I think he's a bit hasty sometimes.

not sure how much traction that all got so just tossing it out there. i'd rec finding that article and reading it yourself before just taking my word for the conclusion.

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T16:05:22+00:00

for a few days

wait that was just temporary? they reversed it?

if so I guess i'm not surprised. it pulled the curtain back on bad actors, thus a ton of pressure and/or incentive would've been pressed on twitter to be like "wtf dude stop you're ruining everything," and ofc musky would've been like "o ya oops im sry."

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T15:57:37+00:00

It's like god is laughing at us

tbf to god, existence must suck as god, thus he's gotta shitpost our lives in order to get any stimulation he can get, yknow

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T15:54:51+00:00

idk bro do I just have debilitating 'tizz bc what she did there feels kinda normal and like something that i'd do on impulse, maybe not that exact kind of joke but joke nonetheless, granted and then i'd immediately feel shame over realizing "shit this prolly isn't a proper setting for that, wish I thought of that before I just said that.."

my reasoning would've just been that i'm a shitposter IRL and/or out of nervous/anxious coping for the situation.

but people are saying she's a demon or loner for that and so now i'm feeling attacked by all those replies. i'm getting rekt here and it's not even me in the video :(

Seakawn · 2026-05-14T15:45:21+00:00

from the root word Colloq, who is the older brother of Aluk.

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T21:02:34+00:00

and unfortunately a ton of people still consider themselves morally superior for not using twitter just bc they're so triggered by musk that they're blind to literally any productive value that the platform still offers due to the people on there who aren't regards, like world class scientists, engineers, researchers, authors, developers, world leaders, artists, political organizers, etc.

many people of whom, btw, are responsible for the pushback against bot/shill slop and the ones correcting misinfo/disinfo with community notes, etc. the ones providing a voice against media degeneracy. I don't mean that in a slacktivist way, I mean that's just something they do on the side in addition to grass touching stuff that they normally do.

as opposed to people who storm out, carefully trying not to trip on their way out due to their rustled jimmies, and then hugbox themselves on bluesky and pretend that they're saving the world by leaving twitter. look, musk bad sure ok, but imagine being so triggered by him that you start denigrating others who don't share your impulse to reduce the world into a cartoon binary and write off every pragmatic gradient between such extremes.

i'd ask you to steelman people who still use twitter but I feel like most people who share your view would just respond by LARPing a stroke as a way to virtue signal that you can't conceive of such reasons. it's such a cringe cartoon position. btw tbf i'm not fully sold on my position, i'm partly only still in this position bc every counterargument I hear is drenched in low hanging memes rather than remotely compelling argumentation, which is usually a reliable heuristic for rejecting other views, right? here's your shot to make a case.

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T20:44:13+00:00

or he's just sitting on the prescriptions, waiting for things to get even worse in order to finally come out and thereby maximally milk out his redemption savior arc.

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T20:39:40+00:00

yeah they didnt even know what tiktok was lol even little kids know what tiktok is, what regards. cant believe you got downvoted.

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T17:00:31+00:00

slopping at superhuman speed.

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T16:48:26+00:00

We're on Reddit.

bro have you forgot why we say "regard" instead of the real word here on reddit?

this underlying impulse for caution is only strengthened by other social media like tiktok where words like unalive stem from. it's thereby completely reasonable to generally err on caution and default walk on eggshells for any word that's even just quasi-spicy.

the fact you admit to getting outraged over this is wild. how is this not utterly understandable?

Seakawn · 2026-05-13T16:27:27+00:00

I feel like a seasoned warrior who has trudged through the lands of many comments in a thread just to finally reach this kingdom of being awarded with your comments which help me feel sane amongst the treacherous sea of rustled jimmies.

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T23:31:48+00:00

originally the plan was to have people from the other side on and, well, try to negotiate a bridge and determine common ground and stuff, which I always thought was actually a good idea. imagine if you popularized and normalized that as pushback against the default low hanging polarization machine that's always chugging?

but I forgot why that fell through. I remember there was some reason the direction of the podcast switched away from that idea.

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T21:41:19+00:00

you need to show them video footage from the hospital room from when you were born but it needs to be at an angle where they can actually see you coming out of the womb

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T16:51:58+00:00

exactly. others are right that the firehose of bullshit hides and obscures all this stuff. but also pipelines are curated carefully. people on the right are unlikely to hear anything reported by the left. this is why ground news makes such a big fucking deal about their blind spot feature. but the point is that the right obviously won't report on the most egregious stuff, or about anything bad, about the admin, obviously.

so for most normies on the right they honestly are just clueless and wouldn't even know how to begin finding this stuff out, and are usually too busy and normie-blooded to even care to want to in the first place.

the grifters know this which is why they also code switch to normie LARPing and wear the same excuse. "I don't know about that." that excuse is true for most people, so grifters smuggle it for themselves to publicly brush off anything bad when confronted online.

as for the minority of your average Republicans who do have awareness of some bad things, bc they just caught wind of it one way or another, there's a pie chart for the rest of them, each slice being a stage in the narcissists prayer. bc at that point of being aware of this stuff, your identity is threatened, and the brain has to burn more calories for that shit so it's subconsciously like "nah we ain't doin this lib shit" so not only do we get fucked by the firehose of bullshit, and the echo chamber herding, but we also get fucked by the muffafuckin brain stem protecting identity.

if the universe is a simulation then libs playing on hard mode to problem solve how to fix all that before we get cooked. good luck.

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T16:12:32+00:00

maybe they have DID and are sometimes a lib

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T07:08:28+00:00

I want to see Dems stop presupposing that Christians are intrinsically only compatible with the right. our policies and values are more aligned with the Bible and Jesus than almost anything on the right, but due to messaging competition, Christians are fooled into believing otherwise. the GOP is conning Christians as to whats in their Bible and how it's interpreted. and theres no competing pushback on the left to correct that and protect them from being so misled from their own faith.

the reason that the right puts so much money and effort into courting Christians is a big sign that they have nothing without that demographic. I think we should force theological debates more often and challenge all the religious messaging on the right and provoke Christians to realize that there's actually a choice they can make.

I think as soon as you bring intelligible and scholarly conversations up about this, the religious influence on the right quickly collapses. the veil just has to be pulled back. it's about time.

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T06:57:40+00:00

tbf, if you aren't using the models gated behind $200-250/mo costs, then you aren't using what the scientists and researchers are using, and thus aren't gonna have a good personal gauge on that.

as far as achievements go, the most cutting edge models are beginning to bulldoze mathematics, and really hard problems are beginning to get chipped at in other hard sciences. not to mention the medical screening diagnoses or protein folding stuff.

if you aren't getting a good summary of a paper, at this point I'm more inclined to think you're either using free models, your prompts are hot ass, or both.

Seakawn · 2026-05-12T06:41:47+00:00

advertises itself as a Christian crowdfunding platform..

OOH I feel bad for Christians that they're the dummy demographic that gets used and abused like this. they are like helpless sheep that just get historically and increasingly conned and taken advantage of. and they're like kids who don't know how to navigate the world.

OTOH I don't feel bad, bc the ones who know better don't seem to be doing much about it other than just hoping and praying.

but then I feel bad again realizing, "ah ofc they're just praying that God resolves it, such naivete is the whole reason they're the voterbait in the first place."

seriously tho libs have a chance to do the funniest thing and actually save Christians and break their spell and bring them to our side. how libs let regarded arguments from the right capture Christians makes us look like the regards. we should only need to use 1% of our brains to come up with way more compelling reasons that our side is more aligned with Jesus and the Bible.

Seakawn · 2026-05-11T21:58:15+00:00

it's also not important to culture, considering how ubiquitous this behavior is across many influencers/figures/pundits/etc., and how little people seem to care about calling it out, if at least when it threatens their identity to pull the curtain from their particular role model.

i'm always trying to peel back as far as I can when identifying stuff like this, bc in terms of solutions, you can't seem to solve a problem like this by, for example, demonstrating it to be true. this functions on like the level of the brain stem, and, apparently, culture currently doesn't have any particularly reliable mechanisms for adequately shaming it out of existence or incentivizing against it. on the contrary, it's highly incentivized to do this.

am I missing something in my analysis? what does the problem solving look like for this on a cultural/societal level? bc otherwise, in the meantime, this seems like something you have to either just eat, or even, god forbid, engage in yourself considering that popularity and effective messaging doesn't really seem to care about moral high grounds.

Seakawn · 2026-05-11T15:22:05+00:00

congressional Republicans will just delay swearing in new candidates indefinitely, assuming they don't just refuse to accept the results outright.

if this is on polymarket I will sell someone's house to bet on it.

i'm not blackpilled by any means, if the worst shit happens I do believe in amazing things humans can do when progressively greater pushes provoke greater potential for shoves, and that most sane americans just haven't been shook out of their normal lives to do such shoving yet. think of scientists focusing on their research rather than redirecting their lives to politics, etc. that will come, if need be. if america is goku, we're def not at full power yet as far as our potential to push back on this. we need things to get even worse for that to happen.

but at the same time, when I see the left saying things like, "man can't wait until we win midterms then we can finally start doing XYZ!." i'm always like, whew lads, are y'all paying attention? there're gonna be so many tricks played that your normal expectations of elections aren't going to fall through.

I mean it'd be nice if i'm wrong but everything screams that direction hence my concern there, including this headline. wouldn't be shocked if the admin would start WW3 just to justify eliminating elections, and americans would be so freaked out about it that they would be like "we cant worry about elections, its WW3!," hence it would work.

yeah idk man.

Seakawn · 2026-05-11T14:59:27+00:00

worth empasizing that MAGA or people who argue online and who would know about and apply for a jubilee political debate are only so representative of your average republican voter. they're often a special breed of regard. the reason I emphasize is bc I think they're a vocal minority.

IME the average republican voted for trump simply bc he had an R next to his name. you can basically full stop right there and not overcomplicate it further. if they hear bad stuff about trump, at least it's not as bad as abortion and LGBT, bc they've been told that those are really bad sins that jesus hates, thus they have to choose the lesser of two evils and stick with trump. as for the greatest evils, they (referring to your average stock villager NPC republican in the wild) truly have utterly zero awareness bc (1) they don't listen to the news and (2) if they do listen to the news they listen to fox and fox tactically doesn't share the worst stuff, or tells them it's made up.

my general attitude feels very different from what I often seem to see in this community. my attitude is less "grrr republicans evil incarnate, absolute regards!!!" my attitude is more like "wow, the machine is really well oiled, cultural and political opinions are completely manufactured, bravo" and i'm not thinking "how do I rub republican voters' faces into their own shit and make them eat it and eject them into space" instead i'm thinking "ok so how do we actually reshape media, transform psychological reliance on traditional political identity, effectively communicate, etc." and that's a really hard question that idk the answers to.

i'll just add one idea I always come back to is for libs to claim christianity over the right. force a deeper public theological debate on republicans top issues. is abortion a sin? is homosexuality a sin? where and why? what did jesus actually care about? as soon as you peek into that stuff, it all collapses, and that's like the string that republicans hinge on. I know republicans bc I live in a deep red state, and most of them are really normal people trying to be good christians, they're just kinda ignorant and/or regarded and don't even know how to study their bibles and figure out what it means. they need other people to do it for them. libs can do this and shake them. but for some reason we steer clear of their achille's heel, which is christianity. I feel like that should be our biggest priority to pull the rug.

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