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About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality
by eloeffler 5y ago
About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low.
The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles.
The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.
It's people but they work like bots.
- jpicard 5y agoBloomberg and other news orgs publish bot-assisted articles, for example to summarize financial reports the moment they appear. https://archive.fo/1EjSu https://archive.fo/1EjSu
- hef19898 5y agoRegardless of automation, there will always be jobs that are so "dumb" but still expensive to automate that people can do cheaper then machines.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoWithin the last 6 months I’m seeing a rise of very good NLP content farms that almost have what I’m looking for but not quite. I think what they do is start off a transformer based NLP with example queries that others have searched for and it generates a realistic looking answer that’s usually wrong. The scale and breadth of these could only be done by machines.
- hombre_fatal 5y agoWriting SEO content isn't necessarily one of them anymore. Check out AI content services like https://www.frase.io/ https://www.frase.io/. You can also generate things like product descriptions inside the GPT-3 playground.
- londons_explore 5y agoClassic example of this kind of content... Try searching "How to use X to get stains out of Y". You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And they will all have wording like "Put some X on the stained Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!".
- api 5y ago"how to use jet fuel to get stains out of my yak" Nope, nothing relevant. Found a counterexample.
- useto075 5y agoNothing relevant yet
- bryanrasmussen 5y agohow to use blood to get stains out of my heart, I had hoped I'd at least find a country song with that as a lyric.
- divs1210 5y agoThis is how to use jet fuel to get stains out of a yak: Put some jet fuel on the stained yak... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!
- ballenf 5y agoHow can you be sure that you're not a bot?
- fsflover 5y agoBy solving a captcha obviously.
- rhacker 5y ago42
- jonathankoren 5y agoReminds me of an old The Parking Lot Is Full comic. > Little-known Fact #839: There are only twenty-three people alive today, and you're one of them; everyone else you know just looks human to lull vou into not searching for the other twenty-two. Lonely? You should be. https://images.app.goo.gl/aSexFX2Gy4hdAnYh9 https://images.app.goo.gl/aSexFX2Gy4hdAnYh9
- romwell 5y agoEh, if that's the case, I'm cool to be one of the few remaining humans among billions of wonderful whoever-they-are. Beings so acceptive of others as to make me oblivious there's a difference? That's far more than humans ever accomplished.
- technothrasher 5y agoBecause I'm nervous my neighbors will realize my sheep is electric?
- IIAOPSW 5y agoI pay rent therefore I am.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoNice
- deleted 5y ago
- JKCalhoun 5y agoArticle agrees: > Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake. Fake plastic trees.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y agoThat job is probably months away from being automated by GPT-3 and its ilk, supposing it hasn't yet been. Right now, I don't think you can tell it to use some specific terms in the text it generates, but it doesn't sound like a difficult extension.
- rhacker 5y agoI mean then is DIT really a conspiracy theory? I know that people in HN have already started doing replies with AI in some threads. (only because they tell people). Wait a few more years and there will be no way to know if forums are just bots generating content. I guess HN would be a weird outlier, because there are no ads. Except maybe the bots would be useful after all when various "Show HN" or "Launch HN" and have the bots cheer those companies and get random publicity.
- malka 5y agoI sometime use GPT-3 to help me write stuff on forum. It writes better than me :/
- DragonL80 5y agoThat's how I know it's not gpt-3, gpt-3 would write better articles. At the very best it's poorly trained Markov chains.
- evilduck 5y agoThe idea that a genuinely Dead Internet might be an improvement over the current internet experience is a fun one, and one I don't entirely disagree with.
- monkeynotes 5y agoSpeaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI. My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a entropic gene pool in nature, but with information.
- jonathankoren 5y agoProbably zero. People are really cheap.
- NavinF 5y ago~0% right now. I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.
- numpad0 5y agoApparently, using a machine translation as a basis and working through correcting it to read or write foreign languages is a growing trend and that’s a form of computer assisted literacy if I were to guess. Bar that, it’s humans outrunning AI in the race to the bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like.
- technofiend 5y ago> Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like. Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says, sometimes it's the only work people can get. [1] https://www.mturk.com/ https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...
- netcan 5y ago>> This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work. It may be becoming borderline. I expect that sentence/paragraph completion is already becoming useful to people who churn out quick content for a living. In any case, the important part isn't whether or not it's bots. The important part is whether or not it's authentic. The precise meaning of authenticity gets squishy, but it exists nonetheless. IMO the sentiments are correct, whatever the details. Part of why google sucks is that the internet is worse, for a bunch of the things we use google to search for. The internet becoming a larger, more profitable industry changed it. Instagramming for influencer perks, SEOing, or selling targeted ads like FB do... it does not lead to the same places that earlier iterations of the WWW produced. Times change.
- RationPhantoms 5y agoIt's a pretty clear indication that the once stalwart effort, within Google, to produce a true search experience is effectively dead.
- PoignardAzur 5y agoNo. Google is just playing the Red Queen's race, and losing.
- vlunkr 5y agoThe other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it's purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.
- ghostly_s 5y agoThere's a whole industry of sites like this for NYT crossword answers, to the point that it's often impossible to get any organic results at all for something that's been clued in the Times, which is frustrating because I don't just want the answer (there's a button in the app that does that already), I want to learn about the thing I’m unfamiliar with. Luckily, most topics that come up have some content on Wikipedia so I go there instead.
- justinhj 5y agolol the same happens with WSJ. It’s very disappointing to try and do a bit of research on a clue and get the answer on a bot site linked to the puzzle you’re doing. Interesting how they do it though.
- ziml77 5y agoUgh yes that’s super annoying! I don’t want the answer spoon-fed to me. The point of searching it is to actually learn a little something which will help me remember in the future
- eproxus 5y agoIt’s like a DDoS attack on your mind (distributed because everyone is doing it). The attention span economy at its finest. Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks for as long as possible. Except it’s turned around. Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any real money in ads anymore or if it’s just a giant circle jerk that slowly destroys society…
- KoftaBob 5y ago
- ghostly_s 5y agoMy friend briefly had a copywriting job writing weed strain descriptions for dispensaries. He was never provided the product he was describing, just told to make it up.
- falcor84 5y agoI assume this is exactly how they come up with the descriptions on most wine bottles
- TheFlyingFish 5y agoSomebody who worked at a winery once told me that the flavors they mention on the bottle are actually what the wine is missing, and they name them in the hope that the power of suggestion give you a more balanced impression.
- registeredcorn 5y agoIt would be interesting to see some sort of study, to see the impact on wine labels on: normal people, vs wine "experts", vs sommeliers. I've seen a few of those wine documentaries about sommeliers, and they certainly made it seem like it was a legitimate ability to identify stuff. I'd be interested to see how close they are in a more neutral, measured environment.
- ghostly_s 5y agoIt's mostly bullshit[1]. Tasters can't even tell reds from whites with a great deal of accuracy. [2] 1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... 2. http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-event-distinguishing-reds-from-whites/ http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-...
- woeriud 5y ago
- mike10921 5y agoLately, half the results I get are pages that I cant view without paying to some service or signing up for a free trial.. Google literally serves up results that are unreachable ..
- TheKarateKid 5y agoCan we also talk about how Google allows top organic results to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook which literally present you with a LOGIN page before you see anything related to your search? Absolute worst UX ever, yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies.
- 1024core 5y ago> yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies. At one time, Google used to ban sites for "cloaking": offering one version of the page to the crawler, and another to the user. But over time they got into trouble from these sites, getting sued left and right. Being accused of putting up a wall, and abusing their monopoly. Eventually, these sites won out and Google dropped this requirement.
- zo1 5y agoSimilar story with Image search. "Blah blah something something copyright something". And voila - now you can't get direct access to images on the search results page.
- annadane 5y agoYeah, thank Getty for that one
- bluehex 5y agoAh so that's why Quora no longer shows you the first result before blurring the page most of the time. It's a shame. I've really enjoyed a lot of the well written responses there but I can't be bothered to create another account.
- denton-scratch 5y agoI would expect an automaton to be able to spell; so perhaps the presence of spelling errors is a mark of an authentic page. Maybe one could force Goo to spit out authentic results by including a strategically-misspelled word in the search terms.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]