I think I’ve asked this before a long time ago.
One of my paranoid tinfoil hat theories is that I think cringe culture was pushed by algorithms and has now has become a convenient tool for the right to groom people into policing ‘otherness’ more harshly. I think it’s because it has that particular right-wing playbook stank to it and because I can smell that style of using shame to manipulate that right-wingers love from a mile away. Hell, this site came from a part of the left that was originally a reaction to that, using bullying but instead using it to punch back at the punchers, so to speak (although we’ve changed a little and good, it’s not needed anymore because everyone bullies chuds now).
Cringe culture was big around 2016ish, while it mostly targeted blue hair liberals it often extended to making fun of whatever marginalized group you can think of.
It was always there, of course, but not enough to actually be taken seriously unless you had high-school bully brain. Anyone that wasn’t a chud or too tech illiterate to curate their algorithm tended to lose interest. Fast forward to the 20s’ and now instead of targeting specific marginalized groups or political stuff, there is a more widespread sort of bullying towards any sort of ‘otherness’. Strong emotions, being passionate, being too quirky, looking out of place, being too young, being too old. Being too much of well, anything. Let’s just say it’s not a fun time to be neurodiverengent in particular.
So we know from those files that Gamergate (and I think some Chan spaces?) were involved with promoting right-wing idiology. Well, sure is interesting that after people started posting about the Israel genocide on tiktok, the US freaked out and took control. And now we see a massive resurgence of cringe culture, again. Alongside with other right-wing garbage (think manosphere and so on)
Of course, it’s always been there and is likely just a totally organic consequence of people growing up with social media and the digital panopticon. But notice how everything that is cringe fits neatly into what the right think the left is? I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn in a decade or so that all of this was at least taken advantage of by the right as a form of social policing, a way to undo all that pesky self acceptance and understanding the lgbtq community and other marginalised groups worked so hard to normalise. It’s a way to punish outgroups while getting under the libs “safe to make fun of” radar (and many leftists too, you are not immune!) Seems like a good way for the right to bring back that repressive order they love so much and make everyone afraid to step out of their assigned role again.
LLMs are deliberately trained to make some obvious mistakes, so that you feel smart when you spot them, and think that they are accurate enough to use because “you spot the mistakes”.
Ok but let me expand on this for you.
Large Companies are engaging in purposeful data poisoning of the internet. Currently LLM generated content is over 50% of web content. If it is full of hallucinations (it is) that means 50% of what is on the web is nonsense. It can’t be trusted or verified. At a certain point you need a CONFIRMED archive of information that is untouched by LLMs. Where do you get that from? Tech Companies. They all have their massive backups of the original internet they used to train the LLMs in the first place sitting on servers.
So they purposefully release LLMs for free or near free which causes the internet as a whole to be unreliable (This even applies to things like peer reviewed papers and books now. As people us LLMs to edit/write these.) Then once everyone realizes that its very hard to verify information these days the tech companies can come out and be like “Oh shucks well here’s a subscription for 150$ a month to our archive of Pre-AI Internet stuff! Enjoy!”
It used to be that you could verify things by checking multiple sources and seeing if they agreed. But since LLMs will hallucinate and agree with eachother on the hallucinations you now have a situation where something entirely WRONG could be confirmed as “true” until physical reality sets in and we realize just how untrue it was. Like maybe all the LLMs decide the safe dosage of Tylenol is 15% more than it really is. Then 3 months later thats what the internet says and people are having livers fail left and right.
They are manufacturing a need for an authoritative source on pre-AI information while actively contaminating all the other possible sources for this by pushing LLMs as hard as they can.
Yeh I sub to this