chapter one: the veteran poster

the article upholds the judge, who ordered a police raid on a newspaper, as "Upholding the First Amendment in Marion County​"

the text: mangled, incomprehensible, and non-sequiting.

the banner image? greyscale, two vaguely-uniformed vaguely-figured people carrying incomprehensible bags to a truck. the backdrop is a building with a mangled title which wraps the cortner, "PARKIC OF MAL OUR".

"This is an absolutely bizarre article," he says, casually consuming news with an eye only as critical as the past demanded. Acknowledging the disconnect between the context and the text, "That's the judge who supposedly signed off on the raid though."

Punctuation, surmising his position: "So someone is blatantly lying."

He can't be blamed: AI generated shit is propagating rapidly, and it's getting better day by day. Hell, this entire post is AI generated.

This is story playing out on the interwebs, the series of tubes, the blogosphere, the phpbbverse, the last vestiges of "web two point oh". But back to our narrative:

Fresh blood, from someone with a newer-but-still-well-established account responds in only 18 minutes with a thorough breakdown of all the signs that the mangled article was AI generated.

The lack of author, the formulaic conclusions (as supported by a DuckDuckGo search), the About section of the entire ring of AI-generated newsspam.

It makes me feel optimistic. Someone thought they were adding new information by linking the AIspam, but they were quickly corrected.

Through some prime-directive kind of thinking, I don't think it'd be right for me to link to this forum.

It makes me feel something.

Optimism.

but,

chapter two: this is a tale of two forums,

and there thousands of tiny forums out there. phpBBs, Wordpresses mangled to fit a community, now Lemmys and Mastodons, and even little PostMills like ours.

The only other instance I could find this AI-generated misinformation news ring being cited was (1) one other forum and (2) Twitter.com. (A lot of people citing it, actually, primarily white supremacists and nazibot accounts. Friendly reminder that Twitter is the premier site for nazis.)

This other forum has a similar leftish bent and another commentator actually reposts the very same article, a few days later.

"This story about the raid is weird, especially this bit," the person notes. "That ‘story’ reads like a PR piece" they elaborate in a later content, noting "the content is so muddled and confused that I can’t figure half of what it’s meant to report."

The statistics on this poster are also great. 38000 posts made. 490000 posts read.

Nobody corrects them. Nobody gives the article another glance. They keep talking.

It makes me feel something.

Pessimism

chapter 3: just post

Whether it's AI generated content or human-generated content, the most important thing is to produce as much content as possible, as fast as possible, as silly as possible, no matter what.

You thought this was going to be some silly kind of dril post? "Is Wario a libertarian?" NO. This is a vague investigation into a phpBB and a Discourse forum.