#plausible deniability

[mysharona1987]

#journalism #free palestine #democrats #republicans #politics #twitter #usa news #plausible deniability

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

TONIGHT (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/

Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.

AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.

Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?

A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:

a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and

b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and

c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.

AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.

Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.

Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.

Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:

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

That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

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

In Europe, Google's vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.

Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.

Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.

This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.

AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"

The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #twiddling #ai #ai search #enshittification #discipline #google #search #monopolies #moral crumple zones #plausible deniability #algorithmic feeds

[queerjokeriscanon]

The Joker: Devil's Advocate Writer: Chuck Dixon Artist: Graham Nolan Publication date: 1995 - 1996

Context: Batman is visiting Joker while he is on death row

#Joker #the joker #Canon evidence #plausible deniability #batjokes #batman comics #dc comics #dc #detective comics comics

[glutenfree-rootbeer]

throwback

#worth the post or nah? #dont let this pic go to waste #plausible deniability #this may or may not be me #again… i literally use to think i was very LRG and now im like GIRL WHERE SHOW ME WHERE #i cant believe i just looked like this lol #the face is definitely weird but idk why i hated it so much #do not repost #do not steal my content #i own this photo #me #selfie #girls who smoke weed #cannacommunity #stoner girls #the art of women #18+ blog #wlw #lgbtqia+ safe space #bisexual #lgbtq

[moreespressoformydepresso]

Imagine if the Corries killed Palpatine, but on accident. Like- an unknown allergy or a reflex gone wrong or something. And they’re all panicking because they just killed the chancellor but hey they have each other’s backs and no one expects “meat droids” to even know how to deny a request let alone commit high treason so they’ve got this. Corrie Command organizes everything to run smoothly as they clean up the “crime” scene and scrub any evidence of them being around the Chancellor at any point during the incident. CorSec sucks at their job so the Jedi are called in and suddenly the Chancellor’s sithy business is being uncovered. The rot in the senate is cleaned up, the war stops, and the chips are discovered and removed but CorSec is still trying to figure out how the chancellor died in the first place because that was the chancellor so it’s still treason in their eyes (the Jedi are trying to stop them). All the while the Corries are just hanging in the background like “damn, what a mystery. Who could have seen this coming? Not me, no sir, we weren’t there. Who knows? Maybe the force was done with his sith-ness and finally intervened? That’s my best bet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

#star wars #clone wars #star wars: the clone wars #coruscant guard #fix it au #fix it fic #palpatine #palpatine dies #that bitch #he deserved it #accident #accidental death #whoops #denial #plausible deniability #pro jedi #corsec sucks

[lbibliophile-sw]

See No Evil

Cody and Obi-wan stare into each other’s eyes.

It is not a contest; they blink freely, their gaze without challenge.

It is not an accident; they are fully aware of where their unwavering focus lies.

It is not romantic; they prefer their dates in rather more private settings.

It is not… Partly, it is a silent conversation, well-practiced.

Cody and Obi-wan stare into each other’s eyes.

They are studiously not looking at the other occupants of the room: blue and gold, troopers and padawans – scheming younger siblings, all.

They do not see. They do not acknowledge. They take NO responsibility.

---

Also on AO3

For: @codywanweek - day 2: little brothers @clonefandomevents - 501st bingo: amnesia

#cww2023 #501st bingo #commander cody #obi-wan kenobi #codywan #501st legion #plausible deniability #bingo fill #drabble

[fuckyeah-beringandwellsfics]

Plausible Deniability

submitted by: anonymous

Plausible Deniability (21282 words) by @paddingtonfan69 Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells, Steve Jinks, Pete Lattimer, Claudia Donovan, Christina Wells, Artie Nielsen Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - You've Got Mail Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, You've Got Mail AU, Fluff, Romantic Comedy Summary: Myka Bering is on a mission to save her independent bookstore from the corporate Wells Emporium opening up across the street, owned by the charming and infuriating Helena Wells. Completely unrelated, she has struck up an email correspondence with an enthralling woman under the pseudonym HG Wells, who she finds herself rapidly falling for. aka Bering and Wells You've Got Mail AU

Please tell us why you like this fic so much!

The tension! The eagerness but caution! This is so so good!!!

---

Remember that you can submit fics to be featured here, too! Here's the link to the submission form (Google Form)!

#warehouse 13 #wh13 #w13 #bering and wells #bering & wells #myka bering #helena wells #helena g wells #plausible deniability #paddingtonfan69 #anonymous submission #published 2020 #submitted 2024 05 #2024 #may 2024

[miriam-heddy]

Top: Screencap from Starsky & Hutch: Hutch reaching over Starsky’s date to grab Starsky’s popcorn.

Bottom: Steve with his arm around Danno on the sofa as they share popcorn. Grace is beside Catherine, who’s ’s been relegated to the farthest side of sofa.

#a fine bromance #plausible deniability #slash #starsky & hutch #hawaii five 0 #McDanno

[oni-official]

Hey ONI, what's the current procedure on dealing with a S-IV that keeps dropping some solid confidential documents and details to one up another near non-official civilians? I swear I heard one kept speaking of dropping a 'Nova bomb' on a hingehead world.

If you go over the roster, you'll find that such Spartan IVs have never existed.

They've never existed.

#halo #oni #spartan iv #midnight facility #plausible deniability

[awesomefringey]

I CAN'T WITH THEM .

I knoooow… 🫠 They make me crazy!!

My brain each time when trying to play down bluegreening with plausible deniability:

#bluegreening #little freak #high in california #ask #plausible deniability #anyone?! ANYONE?! #lmaooo #im just kidding #they’re lunatics and so am I

[cuspidgoddess]

The Greatest Gift is Loving You Chapter Playlist

Chapter 8. January: The Good Doctor Is In @savi909

#Doctor Natsuo Todoroki #St. Sebastian's Home for Troubled Boys #yew family lore #Mahazael Yew #But just Haze is fine #the virtues #Usagi and Cerberus #Natsuo and Fumikage alliance #Subspace natsuo #the flock of villain #plausible deniability #the greatest gift is loving you #ao3 #ao3 fanfic #ao3 fic #ao3 mha #bnha fanfiction #Spotify

[queerjokeriscanon]

The Dark Knight Director: Christopher Nolan Screenplay Author: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan Cinematographer: Wally Pfister Release date: July 14, 2008

Context: Batman has come to interrogate joker about the whereabouts of Harvey and Rachael

#Joker #the joker #Canon evidence #plausible deniability #batjokes #batman movies #dc comics #dc #detective comics #detective comics comics

[lilydalexf]

Hi, you linked to a story called "Assurances" by PD (PlasuibleDeniability? I vaguely remember her fics from when I was young) in the past. The link is now a 404. The site owner must have had a robots txt file that blocks Google's bots and Internet Archive from caching anything. I've been trying to find a working link - do you know where I could find it please? Thanks!

You can find Assurances by PD here. I also posted an updated link with my original fic rec.

PD and Plausible Deniability are 2 different authors who were posting new X-Files fics around the same time. I thought I'd answered an ask about that before - I was right, I did so here if anyone is curious.

#xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #pd #plausible deniability #asks #justpostinganask

[gumisgirl]

i think the int'l anime community needs to reflect on the amount of internalised homophobia it so casually perpetuates. it is internalised in society as we know it and grew up with, and while great strides have been made in the world today, in many places especially east of the world (I live east of the world) it is still illegal to be in a same sex marriage.

such relationships are highly frowned upon and openly ridiculed. people still use being called gay as an insult. misogyny and toxic masculinity is the norm. and thus being comfortable in your own skin even as a cis man is impossible cs if you're not toxic you're gay, so imagine life as a queer individual..

and because of such, a lot of queer people can only express their love in private. queer artists can only express themselves through their work. through their art. and even then, very few do it outright. some are extremely subtle about it, for fear of negative feedback, or worse. hate crimes

anime and manga as a form of media and art originates on a continent where queer marriage is illegal. does that mean there are no queer people on the whole continent?? manga/manhwa artists are not gonna always explicitly say that their original characters are in a way queer, but reading comprehension also exists.

any author, manga or not, expects (hopes) that their audience has a decent amount of intelligence to extrapolate information for themselves and draw certain conclusions without them explicitly stating so. and most people are able to draw those conclusions themselves eg when people deep dive marvel movies and connect things from different scenes and movies to come to an assumption, no one bats an eye. and if straight people in any movie are simply nice to each other, it's okay to ship them. but if you try to even insinuate that two men or two women with chemistry, especially in an anime, may like each other more than friends, all of a sudden you're forcing things.

you could provide very straightforward evidence and actual words and scenes from a show, but people suddenly cannot read cues or read between the lines. suddenly everyone needs an outright confession. it's exhausting actually..

why do i have to prove that they're in love? did we read the same work? why don't you prove that they're not in love for a change..

the best example I can think of is itafushikugi. kugisaki and itadori have such a great friendship, and so do kugisaki and megumi. and in canon they're just friends (it's ok if you ship them, that's not the point). but in canon there's quite a lot of evidence of itafushi. satosugu as well... and other animes too.. but circumstances out of authors controls will stop a lot of them from explicitly making queer relationships canon..

#love is love #anime #queer #jujutsu kaisen #bunguo stray dogs #haikyuu #kuroko's basketball #19 days #manga #manhua #manhwa #pls be kind #i just needed to get this off my chest #rant #plausible deniability

[jonjaydami]

So I thought of a soul mate au and needed to know if it was any good cause it's different.

So stick with me as I hash through this half cooked idea that I'm hopefully planning on finishing. But it's an au that we're every intrusive/ impulsive thought you have is you soulmate. Like can you imagine just being in a store and out of nowhere your like "what if I stuck my hand in an oven" and then you stand there all confused cause what was that?

And maybe you can feel a strong sense of emotions for a couple of seconds after that. Almost like a bond sort of situation so it's nothing but confusion being sent to the other person before it cuts off. So your own intrusive thought could happen and then it's nothing but hysteria being sent to you.

It would be pretty funny though with an impulsive action cause you'd being sitting there and have the sudden urge to shave your head and then you just do it. What would be even better if you are standing in a store and someone comes around the corner and you both have the same exact haircut and you both side eye each other until you start talking and your bond starts to grow and you realize-

"This is the little shit who's been wanting to stick their hand on a hot stove 👀"

No idea if this is plausible but this leaves more ideas to be talked about for characters and in some level could work for even work for friends.

Cause for those aro/ ace baddies we gotta figure that maybe it's go varying levels with other people especially when you and your friends share one brain cell and it got left at a target for 3 weeks.

#they are so silly #teach me how to dougie #the dynamic duo #other ships #ao3feed #ao3 fanfic #ao3 #ao3 writer #soulmates #soulmate au #chat am i tweking? #or is this idea cooking? #comics #gay men #gay women #lgbtq #aroace #jonjaydami #transformers #plausible deniability #batman #merlin #arcane #bbc sherlock #the hobbit #no objecting in the court of krypton #lets go #your honor they're gay #idk how to tag this #your honor they are autism and adhd coded

[stuckstucktrolls]

Why does Markab keep that mutant male troll around shouldnt he have turned him in

"Yeah I could huh? My superiors probably wouldn't even get me in that much trouble for doing it late. I'm not exactly fast on the uptake right? Not like I'd know the difference between normal maroon and mutant red."

He shrugs, smiling.

#Markab Pegasi #Hidden Hues #plausible deniability