sleepundertheleaves

At this point, I'm thinking about the silver lining. If a web of federal and state laws require everybody to prove their identity to some central identity broker, in order to prove they aren't underage, before creating an account on Facebook or YouTube or TikTok, that's going to interfere with a lot of spambot and AI garbage.

It's a horrible privacy violation, of course. But at this point, with AI chatbots that are indistinguishable from humans, I don't see how we can effectively restrict account creation to humans without some sort of oracle confirming an online account is an actual human being.

the UN gave them money to research ways the UN could use AI, so that is what they did

No, no, no, that's not an excuse.

If they were, in good faith, researching ways the UN could use AI, this fucking horrible idea would have been thrown out in the first round of brainstorming.

This is a horrible idea. This is a stupid idea. We live in a world where most of the privileged wealthy West is desperate to pretend that refugees aren't real, or don't matter, or deserve to live in poverty. And creating fake AI refugees just gives the privileged wealthy West another way to excuse themselves, by dismissing what the AI says is fake, by telling themselves there aren't any real people in situations that bad.

If you're getting to the point where you're implementing an obviously horrible idea and asking for public feedback on it, you don't get to blame the people who told you to come up with ideas. You should have thrown that bad idea out. You should not have implemented it. That's on you.

It’s one that is sure to be controversial, considering that the UN itself says a major problem facing refugees is their dehumanization for political gain or convenience.

No fucking shit.

Privileged people in the West already struggle to believe that refugees are actually people.

So the UN creates another barrier to understanding, and lets privileged Westerners tell themselves "this is only a simulation, actual people don't have it that bad"?

Silencing the real voices of actual refugees seeking help, and replacing them with a fucking autocorrect algorithm?

I feel like I can handle most AI bullshit calmly and objectively at this point. But AI generated fake refugees? I didn't think I could get this angry about AI anymore.

And I can't even wish horrible fates on the assholes who implemented these AIs because I feel like they had the best of intentions, to raise awareness about actual refugees and so on and so forth. They were just so fucking stupid they thought this was a good way to do it.

Jesus fucking Christ.