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How do we stop AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images?

(redasadki.me)
14 points redasadki | 2 comments | 23 Oct 25 16:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gjsman-1000 ◴[23 Oct 25 17:19 UTC] No.45684386[source]▶
HN, and tech libertarians in general, have been trying to square multiple values together:

1. Decentralized

2. Anonymous

3. Trustworthy

4. Immune (from bad actors)

History has shown that these values are incompatible. Not a little incompatible - completely incompatible. We only have three decks of cards open to us:

1. Open and anonymous (and hopelessly corrupted by bad actors to the point of uselessness - phase 1 - Google only got popular in the first place because people couldn't dig through the manure)

2. Closed (held hostage by Big Tech curation - you are here - phase 2 - but corruption causes government intervention)

3. Open and accountable (identities tied to the real world, with real world accountability - incoming phase - but at least you don’t need to worry about DDoS as much)

There is no other option that works, any more than 1 + 1 + 1 = 4, no matter how badly we wish it existed.

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1. bodiekane ◴[23 Oct 25 18:12 UTC] No.45684967[source]▶
> with real world accountability

So the government can neutralize every journalist, political opponent, whistleblower or whoever by whatever means are most effective in their particular jurisdiction (China- disappear, Russia- jail, US- arrests, lawsuits, firing).

We need better tools for filtering out the bad actors, not just throwing the baby out with the bath water and accepting totalitarian control from a handful of dictators and wannabe-dictators.

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2. gjsman-1000 ◴[23 Oct 25 18:38 UTC] No.45685239[source]▶
> We need better tools for filtering out the bad actors

We've spent 30 years trying, and still haven't figured out. This is the mice all agreeing that they should put a bell on the cat, but they can't agree on how, because there's no actual way to accomplish that goal (and even if they did, there's always another cat, or an adult who takes off the bell). Saying "we're so close" or "we just need better tools" in 2025 is like saying "we've almost invented the perpetual motion machine, we just need to get rid of that last 2% of energy loss! It's just 2%!"

Everybody is focused on trying to make it work, but nobody sat down and thought: Is a system that is decentralized, anonymous, permissionless, censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving, bad-actor-resistant, misinformation-proof, CSAM-proof, all the mandatory requirements, and a place people want to be, even possible on paper? (It isn't. This is easily demonstrated by thinking even a little adversarially against all proposed solutions.)

Unusable hellscape of spam; centralized corporate walled gardens; or identity-verified government-level walled garden. We can only pick one. And the first option was already tried, fell flat on its face, and built Google (which curated the open web).