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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Nicky Wolff, one of the co-hosts of The Interface, the BBC's fiercely informed, fast and funny take on how technology is changing everything. Each week we unpack the tech news stories that matter, whether they shook a government, broke the internet or quietly tipped the balance of power. Find us wherever you find your BBC podcasts.
Olin kutsunut sen digitaaliseen puheeseen, että tiedät tämän koodin, ja laitat sen täysin normaalista näyttämällä sosiaalisen media-plattformilla. Ja sitten sinun on tullut tilanteeseen tämä vihreä laaja, jossa on haastavaa hirveästä, jota muita ihmisiä eivät saa.
Hello and welcome to The Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain. I'm Karen Hao. And I'm Nicky Wolff. Today on The Interface, we'll be diving into the horrifying world of the TikTok farlands. We'll be looking at what you can find there, but also what it means for internet culture. And we'll also be looking at how AI detection tools are changing our writing.
Tom, hyvää taustaa. Missä olet? Olen Barcelonaissa. Olen menossa musiikkifestiölle nimeltä Primavera. Ja sitten Karen, sinä olet sykkynyt.
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Chapter 2: What are TikTok's Farlands and why are they significant?
Again. We're still doing the pod, though. That's how loyal we are to our audience. That is dedication. Heck waits for no one. And especially this week, because we've got what I think is a particularly crazy story. So over the past couple of weeks, I have gotten completely obsessed with something called the TikTok Farlands. And I found out about this, like I...
Reached out to Nikki, I had to get him involved right off the bat. This is, I think, simultaneously one of the most unsettling, but also hopeful and optimistic things that I've seen on the internet in a really long time. It's the whole package. It's kind of a perfect summation of what the internet is and what it's like. So,
Tässä on ideana. TikTokin algoritma on yksityiskohtainen. Se ei näytä normaalisti. Nämä videot eivät tule yksityiskohtaisesti. Jos haluat nähdä tätä asiaa, sinun täytyy löytää asiaa yksityiskohtaisemmin. Se täytyy löytää. Ja luultavasti paras tapa tulla siihen on,
is people will comment like a string of random letters and numbers, like this like secret code word, and you put that into the search bar, and it brings up this hidden genre of videos that I think is simultaneously, like this stuff is kind of,
Horrifying and scary and uncanny, but also the story and what's happening around it, I think is one of the most positive things I've seen on the internet in a while. And it's people kind of taking control of social media to use it for their own community building and self-expression.
Kyllä, tavallaan, joka menee eteenpäin, mitä appi on suunniteltu. Ja tulin siitä, että se oli freelance-reportoija ja self-described meme-tutkija. Hänen nimensä on Aiden Walker. Ja sain hänet huomioon, mitä tapahtuu täällä ja mitä tämä sanoo internetin tilanteesta. Joten ensimmäinen kysymys hänestä on helppo. Mikä on TikTok-varhaisuus?
Voit sanoa trendiä, voit sanoa fenomenoita, mutta se on tämä paikka TikTokin yläpuolella. Kerrotaan siitä, että tämä paikka on Minecraftin yläpuolella, jossa menetään tarpeeksi läpi maailmalle, jossa tietokone ei enää tiedä, miten muodostaa maailman oikeasti. Ja se on se sama konsepti TikTokin algoritmiin, että jos tekevät sen, jos tekevät sen, jos kirjoitat tarpeeksi pitkälti, se on sellaista kuin jos kirjoitat 14 tuntia, olet saapunut tästä paikasta, jossa näet asioita, joita ei ehkä pitäisi nähdä.
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Chapter 3: How do TikTok users access the hidden content of the Farlands?
Silloin löytyy videoita, joita algoritma varmasti ei ole koskaan suosittanut sinulle, vaikka olet jonkinlainen sykö- tai avant-garde-sarja. Se on tavallaan semmoinen hipsteri, että olet käsitellyt mitä suurin piirtein näet. Ja paljon sisällöstä, joka on käytössä Farlandsissa,
Se perustuu kaksi kategoriaan minulle. Se on hyvin, hyvin nykyinen kärsiväärä, joka on... Sanon, että se on tavallaan konseptiivinen taite. Ne videoedit, jotka eivät ole tärkeitä, jotka ehkä ovat hauskoja, ehkä eivät ole. Ne ovat vain tyhjää, vihreää ja hauskaa. Tai se on vähän kuin creepypasta-contenttia, joka on internet-traditio folklorista horraa, jump scare-contenttia,
Monster, pretty much, that you've reached the edge of the map, and as my friend etymology nerd says, here there'll be monsters. You're out past the known area, and you're in the zone that only the initiated know, and there's some deep crazy stuff out there.
Voitko kertoa jotain tällaista? Kuten sanoit brain rot, ihmisille, jotka eivät ole TikTokissa. Mitä me katsomme? Ja myös horroria. Onko niitä esimerkkejä, joita voit ajatella? Ne ovat participaatiivisia, yhteistyöskirjoituksia, joita ihmiset kirjoittivat online 10-20 vuotta aiemmin. Ne olisivat hienoja, hauskoja kuvia erilaisista tyyliöistä tai erilaisista yllättäviä kokemuksia. Yksi minun suositukseni Farlands-postissa on se, että se on yksi yllättävä diaphanoinen elämä, joka käy ympäri kohdalla, ja siellä on...
Spooky like owl sounding soundtrack on top of it. Sometimes it's like jump scare content. And what's interesting to me like being terminally online is a lot of these are like little ghouls or monsters that were being talked about in like 2015, you know, on like text based forums. And now they're in the TikTok firelands. And so it's a lot of that.
semmoista off-puting shock horror type stuff that has always been there on the internet. And I think for people who grew up on it, it was like, here's this little illicit thing that's going to spook my friends out. Like the digital equivalent of going in the mirror and saying Bloody Mary three times. So what's this whole thing where you need a secret code to get there?
Yeah, so I was seeing that in the comments of a lot of the Farlands videos that I was looking at. And people would just leave these codes of random letters and numbers, which to TikTok probably means nothing. I mean, nobody's like searching that. But you put it into the search bar of the platform, and you'll find a bunch of videos that are tagged with that code. So it's kind of like a little secret backdoor. Like I was calling it a digital speakeasy, that you know this code, you put it into the totally normal seeming social media platform.
Ja sitten sinun tulee saavuttaa tämä vihreä laaja, jossa on vaikeita kukkuja tai vihreä rautaa, jota muita ihmisiä eivät saa. Ei kaikki löydy Farlandsin secret-koodilla. Paljon ihmisiä saa sen FYP-koodilla, joka on algoritmallisesti suosittu. Mutta se, että koodit ovat, näyttää sitä, mitä ihmisiä pitää.
gatekeep things on tiktok because like the point of gatekeeping that is to selectively open the gate for the worthy and so people love to kind of broker the relationship with the platform on like a human to human basis and so i think the farlands and the codes
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Chapter 4: What does the TikTok Farlands reveal about internet culture?
But people find a way to use it to do all this other stuff, including scare each other with creepypastas, but also create these little spaces outside of the platform. And I always wonder if those same kinds of tools or techniques or attitudes might someday be turned towards something more substantive than just like let's scare each other or even do like crazy cool video art.
Voitaisiin käyttää sitä jollakin poliittisella vaiheella, jossa se olisi suhteellinen platformiin, koska ihmiset tuntuvat olevan siinä. Mutta luulen, että se on siellä, jossa on vähän enemmän täysiä asioita. Siellä on paljon näyttämättömyyttä, kuten touch grass, laittaa huoneen, liittyy vaihtoehtoon, ja se on todella vahva, mielestäni kaikkien generatioiden kanssa.
Mutta sitten ajattelen, että on aina ollut, vaikka yliopistossa, tämä halu, että mitä jos käytämme tätä, jotta teemme jotain enemmän mielenkiintoisempaa, kuin vain sitoutua ja kasvattaa. Ja minun mielestäni on, että jokainen tehtävä resistanssi
Ehkä tekstin vaikea projekti, jos näet sen näin, on yksi näkökulma. Se ei ole vain pysyä loppumaan. Se on myös mennä eteenpäin ja tehdä internetin asiaan, joka auttaa ihmisiä, eikä tarvitse antaa ihmisiä. Luulen, että minulla oli verrattuna, kun sanoin, että löytää tietoa siitä,
ymmärrettävän tarkoituksen, että kone, joka liittyy kaikkiin maailmassa, liittyy kaikille muille. Jos sen tarkoituksena on myöntää asioita, se on kuitenkin se, että pyrimis Gizaan tarkoituksena oli myöntää kalastuspaikkoja. Internetin tarkoituksena pitäisi olla enemmän tarkoituksia, ja luulen, että kun ihmiset pääsevät eteenpäin, jolloin platformit tekevät teille hyötyä, he saavat enemmän tarkoituksia.
I have so many questions after seeing this video, because the first thing that I want to know, I mean, Farlands is such a brilliant name. I want to know who even came up with that term. But also, what are the types of videos that are populating the Farlands, and how do they get there? Are people producing content specifically to land in the Farlands, or are they just producing bad content, and then it gets damned to the Farlands, but now there's an entire community regrouping and reclaiming the Farlands? What's actually going on?
So people are making videos specifically to go in this genre, to go in this place, the TikTok Farlands, because people are really excited about it. But then also there's this whole idea that there's like, you have to go deeper and deeper, right? You can find the stuff on the surface, which is these popular TikTok Farlands accounts, but the real stuff is...
is something you'd see from an account with only 10 followers, a video that no one else has seen before that is truly freaky and uncanny, which is not a totally new thing on TikTok. Like years ago, people would talk about deep talk, which was kind of just weird, maybe actually bad videos that the algorithm wasn't serving up to people. But why don't I show you a couple of these as an example, so we get a flavor for what we're talking about here.
This one here, it's by a guy, I talked to his name is Smorlater. There's probably some really obvious way to pronounce this, I'm not seeing. But he's sitting in a car, but the video keeps glitching. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How are AI detection tools influencing writing styles today?
Memoja ja näitä tarinoita ja estetiikkoja ei välttämättä pysy internetissä, pysy paikoissa, joissa ne on tehty. Voitte kuunnella, että viime viikolla tuli suuri horrorimovili. Se on ollut todella, todella hyvin saavutettu. Se on nimeltään The Back Rooms. Se on perustunut memeihin, jotka aloittivat 4chanin ja muiden horrorimemeihin.
Tällainen yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa, yksityiskohtaisessa,
Jos olet kuullut Slendermania, niin olet varmasti kuullut sen, koska se oli todella huono yllättäminen koulussa Wisconsinissa, jossa nämä naiset, jotka uskaltavat, että tämä monsteri antoi heille tarkoituksia, yllättäminen yllättäminen koulutuksesta, todella huonoa, suurta uutta, vaikuttaa tällaiseen maailmanpanoon, että tämä monsteri oli...
Internet-trollit, olivatko he yrittäneet saada ihmisiä tappamaan ihmisiä niin, että media ei ymmärrä kulttuurin. Mutta kun tappi tapahtui, taiteilijat, jotka yhteistyössä olivat Slanderman kanssa, ajattelivat, että he olivat saaneet todellisen monsteraan. He olivat todella, todella rauhoittuneet siitä, että he olivat...
put this thing out into the world that had become bigger than the sum of its parts. That they had collaborated to create something that had taken on a life of its own and was doing things out in the world that no individual was in control of. I thought that was really, really interesting when I was back and covering that. But it was part of a new phenomenon from the internet
of this kind of evolutionary collaborative art. And that's what the Far Lands really reminded me of. So given what you were saying, Nikki, has there been impact, either negative impact or positive impact, that has come out of Far Lands? So Far Lands, while it's kind of going mainstream now, as Tom was saying, it's still kind of early...
Tällä prosessilla on joitain järjestyneitä teemoja, joita voidaan todennäköisesti nähdä yhdessä, ja joita voidaan vaikuttaa tällaiseen elämään, mutta se on semmoinen primordiaalinen järjestyne. Mutta se, mikä on erilainen, on se, että tässä on jotain, joka on myös rebelliini alkuperäisestä algoritmista.
You mean like algorithmic curation? Algorithmic curation, exactly. The fact that you have to share and be in the know of some of these kind of codes and numbers. And now that it's kind of gone mainstream and that's no longer the case, and if that rebellion is over, what happens next? What happens to the people who have gone into it as creators with this kind of sensibility and aesthetic? Where do they take their art creation experience?
Is there a way for it to stay as energizing as it is? What it says is that the internet is still human. It's shifted where it used to be just this totally independent rebel thing, but now it's this big corporate machine. But even for all the power that the tech companies do have over our lives, it doesn't work if there aren't people going onto it
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Chapter 6: What challenges do students face with AI detection software?
Erin on hieno hieno hieno hieno hieno hieno
Jep, puhutaan AI ja vihreää asiaa. Olemme saaneet todella mielenkiintoista kommenttia kuulostajalle. Tämä on Gracein, jossa hän puhui siitä, miten hän toimii ekonomisesti vahvistuneilla opiskelijoilla maailmassa, jotka tuottaa heitä kansainväliseen koulutukseen.
She started noticing this phenomenon where students would write an essay for an application to an institution that was wholly their own. No AI assistance, no AI generation whatsoever.
Ja sitten, koska he olivat miettineet, että heidän omaa kirjojaan saattaisi jotenkin saada AI-kysymyksiä mahdolliset automaattiset tutkimustietoja, he painoivat niitä näihin AI-tutkimustietoihin itseään, jotta he pystyisivät muuttamaan niiden kieltä, jotta se näyttäisi vähemmän AI-kysymyksiä. Mutta sen jälkeen...
Changes were actually really bizarre. It wouldn't actually make the essay sound better or make it sound more human. It would just evade the AI detection software and introduce all of these new artifacts that were just actually not good writing.
And she wrote to us saying, you know, like she's tried to explain to these students, you don't have to do this, it's not necessary, but they just can't get over this fear that because AI detection software is being used more and more and all around us, and they have a higher chance of getting flagged as English as a second language speakers,
They just insist on going through this process and actually degrading and devaluing their own writing even more. They're making their own writing worse? That's so depressing. Yeah, so this gets to a really interesting question, which has been coming up a lot recently, because...
There's this new AI detection software called Pangram that has become really, really popular. And recently there's been a spate of headlines about people being accused of having their writing being partly AI-generated or even all of it AI-generated because of people pasting that writing into Pangram.
Ja Pan Graham sitten arvioi sen ja tarkoitti, että kyllä, siellä on jotain AI-generointia. Joten puhuttiin pohjasta viikossa ja hänen ensykliikkiänsä, jota rakastin. Siinä oli arvioituksia, että jotkut hänen kontenteistaan, jotkut hänen paragraafistaan, olivat 40% ja 100% AI-generoituja Pan Grahamin vuoksi.
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Chapter 7: How does the AI detection tool Pangram affect academic integrity?
Not yet peer-reviewed, but that did find that Pangram generally has a pretty high accuracy rate. Pangram says itself that it's false positive rate, so falsely identifying human-generated text as AI-generated text is 1 in 10,000.
Ja its false negative rate, Pangram says, is 1 in 70. Just so I'm following. The company itself says, if our software says something is AI, we're very, very good at that. But if you put in text and it says it's human, we're not so sure. We get that wrong all the time. Like 1 in 70 is not a good error rate.
Se on todennäköisesti siksi, että se, että joku saa falsi-politiikkaa, joku, joka käyttää AI, on huonompi käsitys kuin jos jotain loppuu, joka on AI. Se on se, mitä heillä on. Se on se, mitä heillä on.
That's a really high number still, even if it is the number that they claim is their most positive rate. This is going to affect people's lives. People are doing this on the scale of millions of times, not 10,000 times. Academic careers can be ruined by this, even at 1 in 10,000. I did a story a couple of years ago where I talked to a bunch of families where high school students have been suspended, gotten in serious trouble. This is a big thing with college students for a while. Yeah.
or getting accused of using AI. I talked to one kid whose teacher just clearly doesn't understand how the world works, like me, where they had a Google Doc where you could see in real time by looking through the history of the doc. They were writing the thing and editing it, but that wasn't enough proof because the teacher had put their essay into a piece of software that said this is AI and nothing could change their minds. This has real consequences.
This is one of the big challenges. There was this really great article in The Atlantic written by a former colleague of mine, Matteo Wong, who says that the fact that pangram is significantly more accurate than other AI detection software potentially makes the situation worse, because it garners more trust in the tool, even when the tool is still wrong. It can absolutely be wrong, and the errors...
go back to the way that this technology works in the first place. It's not like eventually the technology will improve so much that it will be correct 100% of the time. No, it will always have errors. And the reason is because of the way that Pangram actually trains its detection software. It trains it just like actually companies train large language models. It gives this detection tool...
Tons of examples of AI-generated text and then tons of examples of human written text. And the reason why its accuracy, the company says, is higher than other types of detection tools is because of the ways that it really tries to give particularly tough examples to its AI software during training. So it will take human-generated text and ask ChatGBT, Gemini, Claude, like the most
frequent commercial AI chatbots to then generate a passage that is on the same exact topic so that it has a very, very close AI-generated pair to the human written text. And that is part of the reason why it's been able to drive its accuracy higher and higher.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of AI humanizers in writing?
and academia, where some new problem comes up and they go, oh, what we have to do is catch the cheaters, when the alternative is change the system, change the way you're evaluating students. Maybe you should be writing essays in class. Maybe you should be adopting new research methods that fit within the world, which has AI in it, right? It feels like we need this
Because AI exists, there's no other way to move forward. But maybe there is. Maybe this isn't a question that is always so important for us to answer, given the potential consequences of the only tools we have at our disposal. Yeah, I've heard from teachers who are saying that they are
going to start prioritizing methods like in-class debate or quizzes or conversation within the class as a better means than the essay of testing level of education. So maybe it's just simply the essay that's kind of had its time and teaching will go in other directions and
Obviously that's more difficult in education systems from lower economic backgrounds, where you tend to have bigger classes, and it's much harder to teach in that kind of way. But I think the system has to change in some way, because you can't just have these robots trying to detect these other robots, because either way the students are losing out.
I want to read you this quote that I really liked from an essay written by a researcher and artist named Eric Salvaggio. He says at the end of his essay where he's reflecting on this pangram problem, if using AI to write is at its worst an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection at its worst becomes a surveillance system for thought. I think this goes exactly to what both of you are saying, which is that
We keep just trying in all of these ways to superficially fix or patch fundamental structural issues that AI is actually revealing in our society. It's revealing the inequities in education. It's revealing how the model of how we teach our students was some...
Not always actually designed around facilitating their learning. It was more just trying to mechanize the process of knowledge induction itself.
And what I often say when I'm speaking to journalists or speaking to educators or any institution or sector that now feels like they're facing an existential crisis with AI is now is actually the moment to ask, why do you exist in the first place? And if AI is really beginning to steamroll some of the processes or procedures that you have developed over time, maybe that's actually...
an indictment of how you were doing things, like how you started to do things, because it might not actually be getting at the core or the essence of what you were meant to be doing in the first place. And so rather than using all of these different new AI, yet more AI tools to try to patch that over, use this as an opportunity to revert back to the fundamentals and reinvent how you should be doing journalism, doing teaching, doing education in and of itself.
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