Technology

Wikipedia’s credibility is under attack from pro-Israel critics and right-wing voices such as Elon Musk

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/MqHc4

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/53562405

Mirror: https://archive.is/2025.01.24-212950/https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/wall-street-banks-prepare-to-sell-billions-of-dollars-of-x-loans-c609beb1

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

Registration bypass: https://archive.is/3tEl0

Microsoft is a major provider of cloud services and artificial intelligence for the Israeli military, according to internal documents related to the contracts between the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Microsoft Israel obtained by Drop Site News. The leaked documents show that Israel’s usage spiked dramatically in the months following October 7, 2023 when Israel was using AI and other technology to wage its brutal war on Gaza.

The trove of documents reveals that Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli military are deeper and more lucrative than previously known, exposing the tech giant’s role in supplying advanced cloud and AI services during the war that multiple international bodies, including the International Court of Justice, ruled may plausibly constitute a genocide.

Leaked data show a dramatic spike in Microsoft cloud storage used by the Israeli military, jumping more than 155 percent between June 2023 and April 2024, and peaking just before the Rafah offensive in May 2024. Storage use is an important indicator showing the extent of AI usage, since storage usually grows along with the usage of other cloud products.

TLDR if you don't wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.

Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.

1. Houston: 88 shorts
2. Chicago: 98 shorts
3. Atlanta: 109 shorts
4. NYC: 247 shorts
5. San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)

There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.

What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for "Kamilia" would lose you "10000 rizz", and how voting for Trump would get you "1 million rizz".

In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn't necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.