Dan O'Hara

@skeuomorphology
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literary history | philosophy of tech | EXTREME METAPHORS: Interviews with JG Ballard http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B007QOXKHI | VITAL SIGNALS http://amazon.co.uk/dp/1914953096/
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"Torazine was the most extreme magazine that has ever been published in Italy. Born in Rome in 1995 as an offshoot of the local rave scene and fueled by the most rigorous "chemical diet" of the time, for the next seven years it would infest the worst underground nightmares of distorted visions and degenerate accelerationisms, infecting with its "polychrome capsules of pop counterculture" an imagination which, at the turn of the millennium, even risked overflowing into the mainstream.
Covers in which Che Guevara's face overlapped with that of Charles Manson. Great reports on drugs, acid Marxism, unlikely conspiracies, possessed Barbies and deviant sex. Techno-comics drawn at 180 bpm. Articles praising the extinction of the human race that seem to be written by a sect of possessed Satanists. Bizarre cute incursions with perverse aftertaste. An aesthetic both seductive and repulsive, refined and repelling, imbued with the same spoiled colors as a carton of spoiled LSD.
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Torazine in the history of Italian offline publishing: the last chapter of a saga inaugurated thirty years earlier by newspapers like Mondo Beat and then continued with publications like Re Nudo, Frigidaire and Decoder, with its mockingly necrophilic breath the Roman magazine represents the pyrotechnic conclusion of an era destined to be supplanted by the advent of online. At the same time, precisely because of its apocalyptic nature, Torazine was able to anticipate many of the aesthetics that still crowd the online underworld, from the disturbing hallucinations of weird/dream/traumacore to the most abrasive forms of dark web meme-aesthetics."
https://archive.org/search?query=torazine

And that amounts to far more than just 'poisoning the well' of knowledge.

It's a reshaping of the bloodstream to favour the poison.

Empson's poem, but quickened

If LLMs are going to fulfil the role that conventional media played in amplifying fraudulent science in the pre-AI era, they'll tighten the loop of circular citation that bad-faith actors exploit
What concerns me is that we're extremely poor at combatting that pre-AI genre of bad faith 'research', and scholars who cite such are themselves unwitting victims of fraud
We're not actually short of historical examples of journalists or grifters who imitate the forms of scholarship, publishing fraud that then is promoted in the media, with the untruths finally finding their way into actual scholarship

What strikes me about this whole pipeline of

plausible-enough lookalike 'research'
> LLM regurgitation
> citation in genuine research

is that if you replace 'LLM' with 'media', it's a known problem

And lastly, the fake disease was then picked up on, and the fake research cited in genuine papers in serious medical journals
Second, within weeks the major AI chatbots were all declaring that bixonimania was real and providing analysis of and medical advice about it

There were three interesting steps in the experiment:

First, pre-prints were published about an entirely made-up disease, bixonimania

Significantly, they looked plausibly scholarly, with footnotes, citations, bibiography etc

I'm fascinated by this fake disease experiment, conducted to see if AI chatbots would pick up on and regurgitate fake science

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?