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Analyses like this are bizarre to me. There is an implicit assumption here that human generated content is often high quality and worth consuming or using. My

Analyses like this are bizarre to me. There is an implicit assumption here that human generated content is often high quality and worth consuming or using. My experience, as an adult who grew up with the internet, is that close to 100% of the content online is garbage not worth consuming. It's already incredibly difficult to find high quality human output. This isn't even a new fact about the internet. If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Even most textbooks, which are high-effort projects consuming years of human labor, are low quality and not worth reading. And yet, despite nearly all content being garbage, I have spent my entire life with more high-quality content queued up to read than I could possibly get through. I'm able to do this because like many of you, I rely completely on curation, trust, and reputation to decide what to read and consume. For example, this site's front page is a filter that keeps most of the worst content away. I trust publications like Nature and communities like Wikipedia to sort and curate content worth consuming, whatever the original source. I'm not at all worried about automated content generation. There's already too much garbage and too much gold for any one person to consume. Filtering and curating isn't a new problem, so I don't think anything big will change. If anything, advances in AI will make it much easier to build highly personalized content search and curation products, making the typical user's online experience better.

anon23anon 4y ago
I love your book example. I was at my library leafing through books about a subject I know fairly well - none of them were worth my time. The situation is even more dire on popular subjects w/ a low barrier of entry e.g. exercise and nutrion - not that those actually have a low barrier to entry but everyone seems to think they're expert and the populace generally accepts nutrition advice w/ little to no real evidence.
- danuker 4y ago
  I can recommend NutritionFacts.org. Unless the bots get published in academic journals often enough to steer scientific consensus, that site is worth your time.
kortilla 4y ago
I agree with you from the content consumer perspective. However, it’s going to make the curation part quite a bit harder. There is a lot of “garbage smell” that you learn when sifting through content as a curator. However unfair it is, there are a lot of cues in language sloppiness, poor structure, etc that content curators use as a first pass filter. People that have something meaningful to say usually put some effort into it and it shows in the form of good structure, visual aids, etc. AI generated content will be immune to that because it’s amazing at matching the pattern of high value content. Life for curators is about to get a lot worse.
- qzw 4y ago
  I think the ideas is to use AI for curation and discovery, but we’ll have to see whether AI can successfully distinguish truly high quality content from those that only appear high quality. I find it hard to imagine how that would work without an actual understanding of the content, but I’m open to being surprised.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >but we’ll have to see whether AI can successfully distinguish truly high quality content from those that only appear high quality Heh, a new version of the Chinese Room problem.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- majormajor 4y ago
  > AI generated content will be immune to that because it’s amazing at matching the pattern of high value content. Life for curators is about to get a lot worse. I think you'll see that pattern change more quickly. Nothing makes perception of something go from "high quality" to "low quality" like mass production and cheap ubiquity.
  - danuker 4y ago
Shorel 4y ago
> There is an implicit assumption here that human generated content is often high quality and worth consuming or using. Human generated content can be high quality, and can be worth consuming. It can also be crap. Probabilistically speaking, human generated content has a wide distribution, quality varies a lot, and it is capable of greatness, by a few outliers. These generative models have the same average quality as human content. Just the spread is very thin, almost everything is about the same high school level, without the very bad content, and without great content. My prediction is: the median of the human generated content will change, just because the new normal (as in normal distribution) is putting pressure on humans to do so. Or we will all become addicts to social interaction with and AI, in the style of the film "Her". It will be like porn consumption, but for our ears. Artificial and available without effort.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
> This isn't even a new fact about the internet. If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Even most textbooks, which are high-effort projects consuming years of human labor, are low quality and not worth reading. I doubt this is true. If you pick up a random bit of written prose from 1900, I’m guessing that it’s closer to the best written prose of 1900 than a random bit of the 2020 is to the best of 2020. It’s like your point about textbooks. Yes, the average textbook is crap compared to the best textbook, but it’s still a textbook, which is infinitely more useful than the hundred billion or so spam emails sent every day.
KirillPanov 4y ago
> If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Yes, but a physical book exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice part of a tree, some ink, and some electricity to make the book exist. A tiny cost, but still larger than the cost of putting stuff on the web. As a result, the randomly-chosen book is significantly more likely to be a good use of time than the randomly-chosen web page. Like 0.05% chance vs 0.01% chance. Prose text on the web exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice some amount of some human's time writing it. The GPT stuff removes even that signal.

anon23anon 4y ago

I love your book example. I was at my library leafing through books about a subject I know fairly well - none of them were worth my time. The situation is even more dire on popular subjects w/ a low barrier of entry e.g. exercise and nutrion - not that those actually have a low barrier to entry but everyone seems to think they're expert and the populace generally accepts nutrition advice w/ little to no real evidence.

danuker 4y ago
I can recommend NutritionFacts.org. Unless the bots get published in academic journals often enough to steer scientific consensus, that site is worth your time.

kortilla 4y ago

I agree with you from the content consumer perspective. However, it’s going to make the curation part quite a bit harder. There is a lot of “garbage smell” that you learn when sifting through content as a curator. However unfair it is, there are a lot of cues in language sloppiness, poor structure, etc that content curators use as a first pass filter. People that have something meaningful to say usually put some effort into it and it shows in the form of good structure, visual aids, etc. AI generated content will be immune to that because it’s amazing at matching the pattern of high value content. Life for curators is about to get a lot worse.

qzw 4y ago
I think the ideas is to use AI for curation and discovery, but we’ll have to see whether AI can successfully distinguish truly high quality content from those that only appear high quality. I find it hard to imagine how that would work without an actual understanding of the content, but I’m open to being surprised.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >but we’ll have to see whether AI can successfully distinguish truly high quality content from those that only appear high quality Heh, a new version of the Chinese Room problem.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
majormajor 4y ago
> AI generated content will be immune to that because it’s amazing at matching the pattern of high value content. Life for curators is about to get a lot worse. I think you'll see that pattern change more quickly. Nothing makes perception of something go from "high quality" to "low quality" like mass production and cheap ubiquity.
- danuker 4y ago

Shorel 4y ago

> There is an implicit assumption here that human generated content is often high quality and worth consuming or using. Human generated content can be high quality, and can be worth consuming. It can also be crap. Probabilistically speaking, human generated content has a wide distribution, quality varies a lot, and it is capable of greatness, by a few outliers. These generative models have the same average quality as human content. Just the spread is very thin, almost everything is about the same high school level, without the very bad content, and without great content. My prediction is: the median of the human generated content will change, just because the new normal (as in normal distribution) is putting pressure on humans to do so. Or we will all become addicts to social interaction with and AI, in the style of the film "Her". It will be like porn consumption, but for our ears. Artificial and available without effort.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

> This isn't even a new fact about the internet. If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Even most textbooks, which are high-effort projects consuming years of human labor, are low quality and not worth reading. I doubt this is true. If you pick up a random bit of written prose from 1900, I’m guessing that it’s closer to the best written prose of 1900 than a random bit of the 2020 is to the best of 2020. It’s like your point about textbooks. Yes, the average textbook is crap compared to the best textbook, but it’s still a textbook, which is infinitely more useful than the hundred billion or so spam emails sent every day.

KirillPanov 4y ago

> If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Yes, but a physical book exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice part of a tree, some ink, and some electricity to make the book exist. A tiny cost, but still larger than the cost of putting stuff on the web. As a result, the randomly-chosen book is significantly more likely to be a good use of time than the randomly-chosen web page. Like 0.05% chance vs 0.01% chance. Prose text on the web exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice some amount of some human's time writing it. The GPT stuff removes even that signal.