William Furney

• Return to Earth
• AI development will exacerbate this in myriad ways
• Enter Marginalia

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Return to Earth

Earlier this week the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx returned a sample of the asteroid Bennu to Earth. The YouTube comments on many such stories really need to be seen to be believed ¹.

Here, for instance, we see a member of the retreival team beginning to inspect the payload:

YouTube Comment Exchange:
"They expect us to believe that's a real Hazmat suit with the hair showing, lol"
"Dude that's a sweatshirt"

Another such discussion involved an artist's rendition of the probe gathering the sample, the comments were filled with things like, "there's no way that's real" and "they can't possibly think that we would believe this". YouTube community post comments for major news outlets are an absolute goldmine for this kind of stuff — and this is not a minority of the comments — it's a loud majority. It could be NASA missions, someone having a heart attack ("musta been the jab"), or whatever else.

AI development will exacerbate this in myriad ways

Even if all future development of LLMs, StableDiffusion, DeepFake technologies, etc, were halted today, we are still in for a world of trouble with what's already available.

People won't only believe that AI generated content is human-generated, but they'll believe, with probably increasing ferocity, that real content has been faked. If the majority of content on the internet is still created by humans, that won't be the case for long.

Enter Marginalia

With outside-the-box approaches we can develop tools to help fight against some of this in the short-term. Search engines like Marginalia can be used to do 'reverse SEO' searching to find some old-school human content. This type of search is a welcome reprieve from the modern internet's litany of listicles, AI generated spam, and bloatsites.

The purpose of marginalia search is primarily to help you find and navigate the non-commercial parts of the internet. Where, for sure you’ll find crack-pots, communists libertarians, anarchists, strange religious cults, snake oil peddlers, really strong opinions. Yes all manner of strange people.. If you are looking for facts you can trust, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

About Marginalia Search

As for the ancillary issue, well... people have always believed wacky things, right? Yes, conservatives are going a little bit crazy right now ², and they're louder and more radical on the internet, but we can always hope for a bit of ebb with the flow.