9 ms·

> You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably

by dkarl 4y ago

> You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun. > Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts. I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. When somebody makes a living (or thinks they're making a living, or hopes to make a living) pumping out bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics they know nothing about, it's the spiritual equivalent of them doing backbreaking work breathing in toxic dust and fumes. We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. Even if they choose it over meaningful work like teaching, nursing, or working in a restaurant. Even if they choose it for shallow, greedy reasons. Even if they choose it because they prefer lying and cheating over honest work. No matter why they're doing it and whose fault it is, they're still human beings being wasted and ruined for no good reason.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
p0pcult 4y ago
It is very nice of you to be so concerned about these folks' inner lives and psychological well being! Are you going to pay their rent, and feed them too?
- svachalek 4y ago
  Honestly I don't sympathize with either of these sentiments. If the only work people can find is by making the world a miserable place, perhaps we have too many people.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    1. If "bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics [the author] knows nothing about" makes your world a miserable place, you are part of the globally privileged. Unplug and get some fresh air, ffs. 2. Lots of people like that stuff. Who are you, and who are OP to decide what content gets produced and consumed? The morality police? 3. The irony of complaining about that stuff on a site dedicated to the industry that platforms that kind of stuff is just astounding. Perhaps the real problem is not the content, but the medium that allows its mass dissemination? 4. The material misery that would be created by shifting entire industries out of work (if even for a "few" years to who-knows-how-long) would be measurably greater than the micro-miseries of the kinds of things OP seems to complain about.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
thenerdhead 4y ago
Most of the people you describe have little to no moral compass. Most of the time they are above the accepted morals of society (a very Nietzsche perspective). These are the marketers of the world who encourage you to "pollute the web" and the media manipulators whose secrets are to "con the conmen". The reality is, they make more money than any of us and sleep just fine every night because they know that nobody seeks honesty or reality anymore. The more unbelievable of headlines and articles, the more it warps our compass. No sane person doing this will push reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.
- dejj 4y ago
  > they know that nobody seeks honesty or reality anymore It’s only true for them. Not for us.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    What's the difference between not seeking, and not knowing how to seek? From a moral perspective, a lot. From an amoral pragmatic perspective, not a lot – unless you think it'll somehow benefit you to give people the ability to effectively seek such things? Hah.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Us is them. At least I say this in a general sense that a healthy portion of posters here are in marketing, or they are looking for some way to make a living in any way possible. Trying to making this a us vs them is pretty much meaningless as it's completely ineffective in solving the problem.
    - toofy 4y ago
      > Trying to making this a us vs them is pretty much meaningless as it’s completely ineffective in solving the problem. i don’t mean this as confrontational as it’s going to come across, but this is nonsense. it isn’t ineffective at all. would you mind expanding on what you mean?
    - PeterisP 4y ago
kurthr 4y ago
Unfortunately, the price will go down pushing the supply/demand curve out, and we'll get ever more garbage. Some of it will be dangerous or addictive to susceptible portions of society, mostly just boring and stupid to the rest of us. Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  To play devil's advocate: If AI is producing content that would be morally objectionable because it harms someone, but nobody was harmed in the making of it, are we still right to find it morally objectionable?
  - adenozine 4y ago
    In terms of enjoyment, yes. In terms of overall harm reduction, no. It's still a bad thing for humanity at large but it may have a knock-on effect of pacifying people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money for new content to be produced. If we can placate those people, at least the money dries up for those other sources and maybe they would move on to doing something other than harming children. Tricky spot, to be sure.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      How do you know if an AI porn character is 17 or 18?
      - NoToP 4y ago
        How do you know when a porn character is 17 or 18?
        4y ago
visarga 4y ago
In fact that's exactly what I want LLM to be doing - read the whole internet and write articles on all topics, answer all imaginable questions, make a 1000x larger wikipedia, a huge knowledge base. Take special care to resolve contradictions. Then we could be using this GPT-wiki to validate when models are saying factually wrong things. If we make it available online, it will be the final reference.
- nradov 4y ago
  How do we know which sources contain factually right things? What happens when the facts change? It used to be a "fact" that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and that stomach ulcers were caused by stress...
  - visarga 4y ago
    The model can describe the distribution of answers and their confidences. So there will not be one right answer for everything.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Nonsense. There is no reliable way to model confidence on such issues.
      - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
        That's why repeatable experiments are so important to science. Anybody can independently verify a testable claim.
      - idiotsecant 4y ago
        You shouldn't be so confident without knowing how these things work, there is a absolutely a simple and built-in way to model this... LMMs for example are simply calculating the next word or phrase sequence that is most likely given previous results and modeling information. So they can definitely tell you the combined liklihood that the answer is 'Peru is a cat' vs 'Peru is a country' and provide you the exact statistical likelihood of each.
Coryodaniel 4y ago
> I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. I don’t know. People already pump out a ton of bullshit from content farms then litter their web pages with ads and last-click attribution. End user value isn’t what drives a lot of “information” businesses. See any recipes site or “news” that’s regurgitating what someone “newsworthy” tweeted. It will be interesting to see how search engines adjust. Maybe someone will make the GetHuman (https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/) equivalent of search.
- trinsic2 4y ago
  I was just thinking about that today before reading this article. It took me like 45 mins one day to find a health site that wasnt trying to sell a product. Most of these for-profit sites conflate there content to jive with the products they are selling, which can prevent someone from finding information that actual does some good.
danvoell 4y ago
"I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that" - Hadn't thought of it like this. Good point. Perhaps it will be akin to email getting better spam filters. And perhaps there is a better way than a 3,000 word article about how long to boil rice.
meowface 4y ago
On one hand I completely agree, but on the other hand, from their perspective it may be "well I paid $500 for this turnkey point-and-click app and now it makes money for me in the background while I sit on my couch making music all day". This new streamlining makes it more soulless in general but less soulless for the individual people responsible for it because they're doing and seeing less of the actual bullshit themselves and deferring it all to the automation pipeline. They may (and, frankly, should) still feel something about what they're putting out into the world, but they can more easily blind themselves to it and just tell themselves almost everyone's doing something dumb to make a living and they're not even the ones actually "doing it" themselves.
sharemywin 4y ago
I think you get what you pay for. Free information isn't free.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. No they're not. They're exploitatively torturing other people, while deploying machines to mine the coal. They deserve any bad thing that happens to them, because they have the education and resources to do better but choose not to. I don't care that they're human. If they have agency and resources and leverage those in such willfully zero-sum fashion as you describe, they've chosen to gamble on profiting from the suffering of others. Empathy and kindness are good things, but empathy for willfully abusive people is maladaptive.
cbsudux 4y ago
Profound

by dkarl 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

p0pcult 4y ago

It is very nice of you to be so concerned about these folks' inner lives and psychological well being! Are you going to pay their rent, and feed them too?

svachalek 4y ago
Honestly I don't sympathize with either of these sentiments. If the only work people can find is by making the world a miserable place, perhaps we have too many people.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  1. If "bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics [the author] knows nothing about" makes your world a miserable place, you are part of the globally privileged. Unplug and get some fresh air, ffs. 2. Lots of people like that stuff. Who are you, and who are OP to decide what content gets produced and consumed? The morality police? 3. The irony of complaining about that stuff on a site dedicated to the industry that platforms that kind of stuff is just astounding. Perhaps the real problem is not the content, but the medium that allows its mass dissemination? 4. The material misery that would be created by shifting entire industries out of work (if even for a "few" years to who-knows-how-long) would be measurably greater than the micro-miseries of the kinds of things OP seems to complain about.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

thenerdhead 4y ago

Most of the people you describe have little to no moral compass. Most of the time they are above the accepted morals of society (a very Nietzsche perspective). These are the marketers of the world who encourage you to "pollute the web" and the media manipulators whose secrets are to "con the conmen". The reality is, they make more money than any of us and sleep just fine every night because they know that nobody seeks honesty or reality anymore. The more unbelievable of headlines and articles, the more it warps our compass. No sane person doing this will push reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.

dejj 4y ago
> they know that nobody seeks honesty or reality anymore It’s only true for them. Not for us.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  What's the difference between not seeking, and not knowing how to seek? From a moral perspective, a lot. From an amoral pragmatic perspective, not a lot – unless you think it'll somehow benefit you to give people the ability to effectively seek such things? Hah.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Us is them. At least I say this in a general sense that a healthy portion of posters here are in marketing, or they are looking for some way to make a living in any way possible. Trying to making this a us vs them is pretty much meaningless as it's completely ineffective in solving the problem.
  - toofy 4y ago
    > Trying to making this a us vs them is pretty much meaningless as it’s completely ineffective in solving the problem. i don’t mean this as confrontational as it’s going to come across, but this is nonsense. it isn’t ineffective at all. would you mind expanding on what you mean?
  - PeterisP 4y ago

kurthr 4y ago

Unfortunately, the price will go down pushing the supply/demand curve out, and we'll get ever more garbage. Some of it will be dangerous or addictive to susceptible portions of society, mostly just boring and stupid to the rest of us. Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.

idiotsecant 4y ago
To play devil's advocate: If AI is producing content that would be morally objectionable because it harms someone, but nobody was harmed in the making of it, are we still right to find it morally objectionable?
- adenozine 4y ago
  In terms of enjoyment, yes. In terms of overall harm reduction, no. It's still a bad thing for humanity at large but it may have a knock-on effect of pacifying people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money for new content to be produced. If we can placate those people, at least the money dries up for those other sources and maybe they would move on to doing something other than harming children. Tricky spot, to be sure.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    How do you know if an AI porn character is 17 or 18?
    - NoToP 4y ago
      How do you know when a porn character is 17 or 18?
      - 4y ago

visarga 4y ago

In fact that's exactly what I want LLM to be doing - read the whole internet and write articles on all topics, answer all imaginable questions, make a 1000x larger wikipedia, a huge knowledge base. Take special care to resolve contradictions. Then we could be using this GPT-wiki to validate when models are saying factually wrong things. If we make it available online, it will be the final reference.

nradov 4y ago
How do we know which sources contain factually right things? What happens when the facts change? It used to be a "fact" that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and that stomach ulcers were caused by stress...
- visarga 4y ago
  The model can describe the distribution of answers and their confidences. So there will not be one right answer for everything.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Nonsense. There is no reliable way to model confidence on such issues.
    - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
      That's why repeatable experiments are so important to science. Anybody can independently verify a testable claim.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      You shouldn't be so confident without knowing how these things work, there is a absolutely a simple and built-in way to model this... LMMs for example are simply calculating the next word or phrase sequence that is most likely given previous results and modeling information. So they can definitely tell you the combined liklihood that the answer is 'Peru is a cat' vs 'Peru is a country' and provide you the exact statistical likelihood of each.

Coryodaniel 4y ago

> I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. I don’t know. People already pump out a ton of bullshit from content farms then litter their web pages with ads and last-click attribution. End user value isn’t what drives a lot of “information” businesses. See any recipes site or “news” that’s regurgitating what someone “newsworthy” tweeted. It will be interesting to see how search engines adjust. Maybe someone will make the GetHuman (https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/) equivalent of search.

trinsic2 4y ago
I was just thinking about that today before reading this article. It took me like 45 mins one day to find a health site that wasnt trying to sell a product. Most of these for-profit sites conflate there content to jive with the products they are selling, which can prevent someone from finding information that actual does some good.

danvoell 4y ago

"I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that" - Hadn't thought of it like this. Good point. Perhaps it will be akin to email getting better spam filters. And perhaps there is a better way than a 3,000 word article about how long to boil rice.

meowface 4y ago

On one hand I completely agree, but on the other hand, from their perspective it may be "well I paid $500 for this turnkey point-and-click app and now it makes money for me in the background while I sit on my couch making music all day". This new streamlining makes it more soulless in general but less soulless for the individual people responsible for it because they're doing and seeing less of the actual bullshit themselves and deferring it all to the automation pipeline. They may (and, frankly, should) still feel something about what they're putting out into the world, but they can more easily blind themselves to it and just tell themselves almost everyone's doing something dumb to make a living and they're not even the ones actually "doing it" themselves.

sharemywin 4y ago

I think you get what you pay for. Free information isn't free.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 4y ago

We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. No they're not. They're exploitatively torturing other people, while deploying machines to mine the coal. They deserve any bad thing that happens to them, because they have the education and resources to do better but choose not to. I don't care that they're human. If they have agency and resources and leverage those in such willfully zero-sum fashion as you describe, they've chosen to gamble on profiting from the suffering of others. Empathy and kindness are good things, but empathy for willfully abusive people is maladaptive.

cbsudux 4y ago

Profound