Untitled

medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

A decent article about the really weird phenomenon of grotesquely sexual and violent youtube videos for children. They are produced by the thousands and garner millions of views, some undoubtedly from bots, but many from kids who just let shit run on autoplay on a tablet. The interesting thing, for me, is the complete lack of human control over the process. This seems to me to be the perfect way of seeing how an autonomous system (automated or not) works.

I see it as the culmination of spectacular social relations, where kids are, from birth socialised through branded images which warp their perceptions of reality and blur the line between the images and characters and real human beings. At the same time it's seemingly a product of the massive wave of bureaucratization that has occurred in the neoliberal age (ironically, and I'm paraphrasing Mark Fisher here, in an age which was ostensibly built on the premise of reducing bureaucracy). There's absolutely no human oversight happening on really any part of this. Sure we can assume that the people producing this shit know what they're doing, but even that's not really a guarantee. They abide by the algorithms just the same as youtube's Up Next feature does, and the content they create reflects this (if there even are actual people behind much of this stuff).

Anyways, what do you think? Is this what happens when "the free market" is left to its own devices, and is this is ultimate outcome of the drive for capital reproduction?

It's not surprising. Humans are weird creatures that love to fixate on violence and sexuality and bots pick up on that stuff real easily.

Fuck yeah Cube was awesome. Sequel was pretty mediocre and don't even bother with the prequel.

Those videos are merely a reflection of ourselves.

If I understood it correctly the bots just put already existing videos together so more ads can be played during it.

That's actually a pretty scary article.
This ending paragraph and the whole bots, AI and automation debates that are becoming increasingly relevant made me think. What if capital soon will not only appear to be something that exists outside human relations, but will actually exist outside humanity and become an autonomous controlling force (if it haven't already)

Banking and finance are already impressivly automated and are only becoming increasingly so. Stock market transaction already occur faster than humams can keep up and are managed by primarily by computer programs.

All of this and things like YouTube’s awful content ID system, Google’s search systems, and everything in the article and my previous paragraph are the real face of uncontrollable dangerous AI, not Skynet.

Also, what already appears to be happening is online content being created by humans, pushed by the viewer by algorythms with ads decided by algorythms to be viewed by bots and humans. In this scenario, the content creator, people owning stock in the ad firms and media platforms all earn money and have a hand in the production process. What happens when the human element is gradually (or fully) removed? Content will increasingly be created by bots, their ads generated by bots to be viewed by bots, maybe bot created algorythms will be fully responsible for trading the stocks of the media platforms the content's being created on. What happens to the internet at that point?

Posted this comment:
before reading yours, actually didn't know stock trading was already run by computer programs. Wew

holy shit, Land was right

did he really say that?

Here's the sort of horrible garbage he's talking about, in case anyone is wondering. Well these are flash games but they're the same type of mass-produced shock content only designed to clickbait small children.

It's definitely not the worst or most disturbing example either.

The idea that human creativity is being confined into preselected categories dictated by algorithms which analyze content generated by bots so it can spit out the optimal word salad that generates the most hits is absolutely horrifying. It's pure simulacrum.

Now entertain the idea that this has mostly been the case ever since the first artwork was sold and it's just that the new non-human algorithms are brutally honest about it and utterly devoid of dignity.

Very true. It's essentially the same limiter on creativity that focus groups had on the movie industry. I guess the complete detachment from the human experience is what gets me feeling queasy about it.

...

Yeah. Another thing is probably the absence of actual humor. Even (or especially) when they're making cheap genre shlock humans tend to make fun of themselves and the content they're copying. Splatter movies are a textbook example, but you can make any low-budget crap less boring with a few jokes.
Even in modern pornography, another deeply accelerated industry, you will still find a lot of movies where they felt the need to stick in a cliche barebones script for the laughs, and that's without getting into less commercialized content like japanese doujinshi or fanfics which remain artistic enough to be entertaining beyond the pornographic aspect.
However most of the industry has now turned to mindless mechanistic production of hyperstimuli, from most of the vids on pornhub to hentai patreon "artists" churning out lazy cg sets for tasteless commissioners because they determined that any time you spend being creative and thinking of something good is time you could have spent producing 10 mindless pieces.


These videos and flash games are much further gone: they're supposed to be funny, but they can only superficially mimic the content they determined to be considered funny content by humans without understanding what humor is. That's most likely what makes them so creepy.
But the true horror is in the fact that they work because they're targeted at proto-human creatures who don't understand what they're watching either. Children under the ages of 5 or so are supposed to learn human behavior by copying what they see adults doing or saying even if they don't get it.
For the same reason that toddlers are probably the best play companions for other toddlers and the mentally disabled are developmentally stunted and childlike in both behavior and tastes, this type of half-assed machine intelligence is naturally suited to exploiting the minds of toddlers, because they function exactly like toddlers.

M8, can you write this for Spectre Rouge?

This is incredible.

Nah, but feel free to take a shot at it.

...

This entire article is like a fever dream.
For me; the idea of a ruthlessly capitalist, yet human-like AI is terrifying.

This kind of shit is why I made this thread:

google Brazil

as a longtime obsessive of bizarre youtube phenomena, the "autonomous bureaucracy" concept from the first cube film, and dedicated anticapitalist, this is my favorite fucking thread i've ever seen on leftypol

cube was a metaphor about being trapped in a torturous authoritarian society full of cryptic pitfalls

cube had a much deeper epistemological point about the autonomy of human systems. a human bureaucracy created the cube, but only a result of communication errors, random chance, and a desire to keep themselves busy so they didn't get fired. nobody questioned what they were doing or why, nobody had any orders, the cube essentially created itself out of nothing. that's what's so fucking scary about the whole thing to me, and in a certain sense, that exact process is replicated here in the form of the dialectic between algorithm and disinterested humans churning out thousands and thousands of harmful videos to kids. nobody did it on purpose, nobody really cared, nobody questioned it. the structure emerged from reality to create itself.

What shock content?

sounds like a debordian wet dream

Still unsure as to why Youtube hasn't done anything about these videos.

there's something on the tips of your thumb and index finger

They are good for advertisers therefore generate profit therefore absolutely nothing wrong about them therefore please more of that and less of terrible stuff that strains Company's human resources, creates controversy and all around increases expenditure and decreases sweet sweet income.

For whatever it's worth, another thread: