5 ms·

It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything

It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything that can be monetized. Widespread, good-enough, AI-generated, SEO’d “articles” will push it over the edge.

alsodumb 4y ago
At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.
- juve1996 4y ago
  All these advances and yet we're still going to ruin them all with ads. What a bright future
  - lm28469 4y ago
    That's internet since ~2010, the brightest minds of the world are all busy finding ways to show you ads and/or collect data about you to show you "better" ads.
- lm28469 4y ago
  chatgpt isn't a search engine, ask it questions about a topic you know about and you'll quickly figure out it's very good at shaping BS into something believable
- testplzignore 4y ago
  ChatGPT prompt: Devise an economic policy that would lead to the elimination of the advertising industry. Include a list of wealthy persons and companies who would benefit from it so that I may solicit bribes... err, "political donations" from them to support my 2024 presidential campaign.
visarga 4y ago
I don't think so. The internet is already full of shit sites, you can automate spam very easily in any quantity. But chatGPT would actually write useful texts, most of them more useful than the average blog post. Over a few years they might be just as good as the best human articles. Normal people could write a draft version and have chatGPT reword it, that would control the contents of the article. But I expect spammers would just clone other articles, they don't have the time. One thing AI could do is to scale up validation. Search every topic and note the answers - do they concur? do they disagree? what is the distribution. Maybe there is no answer? This would be a reference for AI to stop hallucinating and making factoid mistakes. The model should know when it doesn't know, or when it is stepping on a landmine by forgetting to mention something. In the end I think the internet is going to be full of spam, AI generated or not. And we will need to use more AI to extract the signal from the noise. This time it should be local AI under user control.
- staticman2 4y ago
  "But chatGPT would actually write useful texts, most of them more useful than the average blog post. Over a few years they might be just as good as the best human articles." If web sites start being written by A.I. and ChatGPT starts getting trained on A.I. output, it's going to start spewing garbage results. It's only useful if trained on human input, A.I. have no model of the world and no A.I. can function if trained by A.I. written texts.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I think that only holds true if : 1) there’s no editorial influence on the chatgpt content - I.e., sanity checking. 2) humans decide they don’t like writing any more, which given how many humans like to write seems unlikely 3) the chatgpt echo chamber doesn’t reinforce non-garbage and resonates in some way that diverges to garbage There’s also a weird assumption that humans don’t write a bunch of garbage as is.
    - staticman2 4y ago
      I don't understand the claim that editorial influence will fix things when the above claim is Google can't distinguish between legit content and SEO garbage. Does google not have smart people working for them who can use editorial influence? As to point 2 , the argument is that, like with google search results the dataset will be corrupted and get worse, not that it won't contain some human written prose, so that's irrelevant when you say humans will still write things. Claim 3 seems to be an argument that we can solve the problem of machine learning being based on bad bots by throwing more bots at it, which seems to be a very Rube Goldberg proposal which I'm not sure will work. Finally is the claim many humans are dumb, so the more chat bots that impersonate humans, the better I guess?
agent281 4y ago
TBH, I'm wondering if we need to start using yahoo style curated content directories again. Content aggregators like reddit, hacker news and lobsters already help filter out a lot of noise, but they focus on recent articles. It would be nice to have a searchable/browsable source for interesting content. It wouldn't contain the full internet, but at least it would have better relevancy.
- napolux 4y ago
  That's a good idea for a side project, thx!
  - agent281 4y ago
    Cheers! When I was thinking about this originally I thought you could build it as a social network. Rather than curate the internet for yourself, you could work with others to aggregate different curated views. By following only some people and having the ability to unfollow them, you would be able to keep away from spammers. Furthermore, you might be able to fork other people's curations so that people who "sell out" and include spammers can be cut out of the loop. Wasn't sure if this was too crazy though.
- telotortium 4y ago
  I use Google restricted to these sites, or, in HN's case, just the HN Algolia.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  For anything that isn't current events, that's basically Wikipedia for me.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I wonder if Wikipedia is also going to be destroyed by ChatGPT-like technologies. It is not hard to imagine a bot that writes its own "primary sources" (even comes up with good domain names to host them on), edits entries linking them, comments defending them etc until the torrent of bullshit is so thick that honest human editors are overwhelmed by the machines serving dull corporate and government propaganda interests. Like, imagine if there are 500 bot edits for every human hour spent curating/reviewing/adjudicating. Then scale it to 5,000,000 edits per hour.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Dunno, may just be the opposite that happens in the long term. The cheaper it becomes to produce content spam the further the traffic becomes diluted and the smaller each individual spammers' profit margins become. The very same discovery issues that plague human-created content is also in the end harmful to spam content. Google is overall a pretty bad benchmark IMO. There's a lot of quality content that they seem to struggle to find. Not that it doesn't exist, you just won't find it for a host of complex reasons.
CyanBird 4y ago
Then don't use Google, use a paid search engine like Kagi or others With Google you are the product
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  I do use Kagi. Most people haven’t heard of it though.

alsodumb 4y ago

At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.

juve1996 4y ago
All these advances and yet we're still going to ruin them all with ads. What a bright future
- lm28469 4y ago
  That's internet since ~2010, the brightest minds of the world are all busy finding ways to show you ads and/or collect data about you to show you "better" ads.
lm28469 4y ago
chatgpt isn't a search engine, ask it questions about a topic you know about and you'll quickly figure out it's very good at shaping BS into something believable
testplzignore 4y ago
ChatGPT prompt: Devise an economic policy that would lead to the elimination of the advertising industry. Include a list of wealthy persons and companies who would benefit from it so that I may solicit bribes... err, "political donations" from them to support my 2024 presidential campaign.

visarga 4y ago

I don't think so. The internet is already full of shit sites, you can automate spam very easily in any quantity. But chatGPT would actually write useful texts, most of them more useful than the average blog post. Over a few years they might be just as good as the best human articles. Normal people could write a draft version and have chatGPT reword it, that would control the contents of the article. But I expect spammers would just clone other articles, they don't have the time. One thing AI could do is to scale up validation. Search every topic and note the answers - do they concur? do they disagree? what is the distribution. Maybe there is no answer? This would be a reference for AI to stop hallucinating and making factoid mistakes. The model should know when it doesn't know, or when it is stepping on a landmine by forgetting to mention something. In the end I think the internet is going to be full of spam, AI generated or not. And we will need to use more AI to extract the signal from the noise. This time it should be local AI under user control.

staticman2 4y ago
"But chatGPT would actually write useful texts, most of them more useful than the average blog post. Over a few years they might be just as good as the best human articles." If web sites start being written by A.I. and ChatGPT starts getting trained on A.I. output, it's going to start spewing garbage results. It's only useful if trained on human input, A.I. have no model of the world and no A.I. can function if trained by A.I. written texts.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I think that only holds true if : 1) there’s no editorial influence on the chatgpt content - I.e., sanity checking. 2) humans decide they don’t like writing any more, which given how many humans like to write seems unlikely 3) the chatgpt echo chamber doesn’t reinforce non-garbage and resonates in some way that diverges to garbage There’s also a weird assumption that humans don’t write a bunch of garbage as is.
  - staticman2 4y ago
    I don't understand the claim that editorial influence will fix things when the above claim is Google can't distinguish between legit content and SEO garbage. Does google not have smart people working for them who can use editorial influence? As to point 2 , the argument is that, like with google search results the dataset will be corrupted and get worse, not that it won't contain some human written prose, so that's irrelevant when you say humans will still write things. Claim 3 seems to be an argument that we can solve the problem of machine learning being based on bad bots by throwing more bots at it, which seems to be a very Rube Goldberg proposal which I'm not sure will work. Finally is the claim many humans are dumb, so the more chat bots that impersonate humans, the better I guess?

agent281 4y ago

TBH, I'm wondering if we need to start using yahoo style curated content directories again. Content aggregators like reddit, hacker news and lobsters already help filter out a lot of noise, but they focus on recent articles. It would be nice to have a searchable/browsable source for interesting content. It wouldn't contain the full internet, but at least it would have better relevancy.

napolux 4y ago
That's a good idea for a side project, thx!
- agent281 4y ago
  Cheers! When I was thinking about this originally I thought you could build it as a social network. Rather than curate the internet for yourself, you could work with others to aggregate different curated views. By following only some people and having the ability to unfollow them, you would be able to keep away from spammers. Furthermore, you might be able to fork other people's curations so that people who "sell out" and include spammers can be cut out of the loop. Wasn't sure if this was too crazy though.
telotortium 4y ago
I use Google restricted to these sites, or, in HN's case, just the HN Algolia.
moron4hire 4y ago
For anything that isn't current events, that's basically Wikipedia for me.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I wonder if Wikipedia is also going to be destroyed by ChatGPT-like technologies. It is not hard to imagine a bot that writes its own "primary sources" (even comes up with good domain names to host them on), edits entries linking them, comments defending them etc until the torrent of bullshit is so thick that honest human editors are overwhelmed by the machines serving dull corporate and government propaganda interests. Like, imagine if there are 500 bot edits for every human hour spent curating/reviewing/adjudicating. Then scale it to 5,000,000 edits per hour.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Dunno, may just be the opposite that happens in the long term. The cheaper it becomes to produce content spam the further the traffic becomes diluted and the smaller each individual spammers' profit margins become. The very same discovery issues that plague human-created content is also in the end harmful to spam content. Google is overall a pretty bad benchmark IMO. There's a lot of quality content that they seem to struggle to find. Not that it doesn't exist, you just won't find it for a host of complex reasons.

CyanBird 4y ago

Then don't use Google, use a paid search engine like Kagi or others With Google you are the product

NotYourLawyer 4y ago
I do use Kagi. Most people haven’t heard of it though.