This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies).

In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack one group of people, not realizing that you are making the issue worse by further escalating and blaming actual people, rather than realizing that the problem is systemic.

We have social networks like Facebook that require people to be angry, because anger generates engagement, and engagement generates views, and views generate ad impressions. We have outside actors who benefit from division, so they also fuel that fire by creating bot accounts that post inciting content. This has nothing to do with racism or people on one side. One second, these outside actors post a fake incident of a racist cop to fire up one side, and the next, they post a fake incident about schools with litter boxes for kids who identify as pets to fire up the other side.

Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division.

I hadn't heard that saying.

Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive.

Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace.

In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available.

(Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't left when a black person doesn't get a job for "culture fit" gut feel reasons.)

Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered, with the goal of discrediting the position that the fake initially seemed to support.

(Famous alleged example, in second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )

I like that saying. You can see it all the time on Reddit where, not even counting AI generated content, you see rage bait that is (re)posted literally years after the fact. It's like "yeah, OK this guy sucks, but why are you reposting this 5 years after it went viral?"

You sure about that? I think actions of the US administration together with ICE and police work provide quite enough

Rage sells. Not long after EBT changes, there were a rash of videos of people playing the person people against welfare imagine in their head. Women, usually black, speaking improperly about how the taxpayers need to take care of their kids.

Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. On one hand I admire the hustle for clicks. On the other, too many people fell for it and probably never knew it was a grift, making all recipients look bad. I only happened upon them researching a bit after my own mom called me raging about it and sent me the link.

Wut? If you listen to what real people say, racism is quite common has all the power right now.

That's why this administration is working hard to fill the demand.

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> [...] and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

Why not? Surely you can ask your friendly neighbourhood AI to run a consistent channel for you?

Or they are reposting other people's content

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

Those subreddits label content wrong all the time. Some of top commentors are trolling (I've seen one cooking video where the most voted comment is "AI, the sauce stops when it hits the plate"... as thick sauce should do.)

You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

"I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth."

Some people, quite some time ago, also came to that conclusion. (And they did not even had AI to blame)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?

> “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness?

Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.

It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.

But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.

I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

[2] https://www.youtube.com/CaptainDisillusion

The current situation is not as bad as it can get; this is accelerant on the fire and it can get a lot worse

It really isn’t that slop didn’t exist before.

It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop.

There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up.

And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment for anyone trying to figure things out.

It isn’t the same staying the same. Nothing has ever stayed the same. “Staying the same” isn’t a thing in nature and hasn’t been the trend in human history.

It's a band-aid solution, given that eventually AI content will be indistinguishable from real-world content. Maybe we'll even see a net of fake videos citing fake news articles, etc.

Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

Would be nice, but unlikely given that they are going in the opposite direction and having YouTube silently add AI to videos without the author even requesting it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using...

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)