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There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by

There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by scraping news articles and blog posts and replacing random words with thesaurus alternatives. The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’ve actually encountered lively discussions of these sorts of cloned articles with nary a mention of the weird writing. With what we’ve seen from AI text and image generators recently, it’s only going to get weirder soon.

thewebcount 4y ago
> The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’m glad it’s not just me! But for me, it’s not just random searches. It also happens with news articles from major outlets. Can they really not afford to pay a single person to just proof read the story and make sure whatever’s auto-generated is at least coherent?
netsharc 4y ago
YouTube is also full of this, with bots narrating the story using text-to-speech, some of them sound passable as humans...
LelouBil 4y ago
Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST! It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question before.
- bpye 4y ago
  There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at least have a link to the original page, but I've only ever opened it by mistake...
  - xvello 4y ago
    There is a community-maintained list of these stackoverflow / github / npm / wikipedia clones, and adblocking rules to hide them from search results: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter These lists are supported as presets in https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

thewebcount 4y ago

> The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’m glad it’s not just me! But for me, it’s not just random searches. It also happens with news articles from major outlets. Can they really not afford to pay a single person to just proof read the story and make sure whatever’s auto-generated is at least coherent?

netsharc 4y ago

YouTube is also full of this, with bots narrating the story using text-to-speech, some of them sound passable as humans...

LelouBil 4y ago

Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST! It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question before.

bpye 4y ago
There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at least have a link to the original page, but I've only ever opened it by mistake...
- xvello 4y ago
  There is a community-maintained list of these stackoverflow / github / npm / wikipedia clones, and adblocking rules to hide them from search results: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter These lists are supported as presets in https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results