9 ms·

G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

105 points by Analemma_ 3y ago

damnesian 3y ago
Well, of course. We use Ai as a toy, just like the very first movie directors. to shock, sensationalize, and otherwise grab eyeballs and elicit a strong response. we're the dumbest apes, how could we do anything different than throw poo when presented with a novel situation?
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Ironic that you're downvoted by the Certified Experts that love telling people we're nothing more than "stochastic parrots".
_8j50 3y ago
My suspicion is there will be a lot of new jobs that revolve around verifying random internet content or school work and such, not to tell if it is LLM generated but to simply validate the facts claimed in the post,essay,video,etc... I don't see why this can't be an economy either, a reputation scoring and content validity notarizing economy. Business idea! Lol.
- bamfly 3y ago
  I think a new rise of trusted publishers is more likely than professional information-vetting services/jobs becoming widespread. It's sort-of the same thing, I guess, but with the due diligence up front rather than trying to sort out what's good from the vast sea of information pollution after the fact. Most really good material is already better found in books (even if ebooks) from real publishers than by trawling the Web, anyway. Even before the LLM apocalypse, the Web has always been rather disappointing at the whole "all the world's knowledge" thing. Great for trivia, great for a few aspects or presentations of a few topics, kinda shit for the rest. AI garbage wrecking the Web doesn't seem like a complete change of the current state of things, but a shift in where exactly the "Web is good for this / Web is not good for this" line falls.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    You could be right. With certificate authorities for example they are used to establish trust. How do you know what site is trustworthy? How do you know which resume isn't ML crafted? How do you prove your pic/video isn't fake? What fact checking sites do now but at scale and commercial is what I had in mind.
version_five 3y ago
Remember when websites would have a long list of keywords in the background color and tiny font at the bottom? I keep seeing these "AI will destroy X" articles, I've never seen one that wasn't ultimately referring to a minor incremental extension of something already prevalent. Keywords gave way to link farms gave way to shitty outsourced "content" and now LLMs will be part of SEO. It's not really different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt, and seo scammers will find some new thing. It's all such a minor part of the internet anyway.
- instagib 3y ago
  I still do the tiny font keyword list for my resume. I have occasionally left out certain keywords but then hear back from recruiters that if I had keyword x or y then I would be perfect for the job. Back to a 5 page resume.
  - zonkerdonker 3y ago
    I've heard from recruiters that some software will export submitted resumes in plain text in a standard format for review, I wonder if the tiny white font tags show up as well
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > It's not really different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page of a search are crap.
  - vuln 3y ago
    > Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page of a search is crap. That’s by design. They load the results with crap so you click on the ads instead of the result. Ads generate revenue for Alphabet, search _results_ less so. Simple as.
- munificent 3y ago
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
boesboes 3y ago
It's the natural evolution of content marketing & SEO. I work at an IT company where we have ~15 ppl building and managing a few SaaS apps for the travel industry, and we have 50-60 ppl doing marketing as a service for our customers. They write page after page of content that barely get read. It all just exists to make the google bot happy. And that works. They bring in more customers & revenue apparently. (honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all wasted and the added revenue is due to the better website and backoffice, but what do i know.) So it seems only natural to have AI generate that content for the Google bot and stop wasting all this effort. Obviously I can't prove nobody reads this content, but seriously.. A landing page about hot-tubs and how cool it is to have one in your holiday home? Doubt that anyone actually reads that.. EDIT: I guess my point is also: it's already flooded with crap, just look at al the blog spam for things like 'how to start nginx'
- sshine 3y ago
  1. Good old days, humans talk to humans. 2. Someone invents a bot, humans talk to bots. 3. Someone invents another bot, bots talk to bots. This is the story of SEO, banner ads, stock trading, consumer pricing. There are probably many other cases. The tech help spam: initially an attempt for a bot to talk to a human, but with LLMs crawling search results and aggregating answers, your answer to "how to start nginx" becomes the output of bot-bot interaction: an average of several generated answers (some initially and occasionally by humans).
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Those 60 people can have a new job: fact checking the lies that the new ais produce
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    Why would they? Google sees more content so you now have more nodes connected to you, so you appear higher. Whether it's true or false doesn't matter to Google.
    - 3y ago
jrm4 3y ago
I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing. I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we should all be working on ways to confound and confuse and generally screw up the companies who are sucking up all the personal info. This kind of runs parallel to that. Google search has been pretty bad for some time now, might be worth "burning this thing down to save it."
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The problem generally speaking is that any successor search engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling. I don’t know that making the web less usable in general is worth it.
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a lot better.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      Are they doing nothing, or is the current state of the spam arms race resulting in running just to stay in the same place? And would anyone be better once they became the primary target?
      - BizarroLand 3y ago
        They are standing in the middle of it and picking everyone's digital pockets while claiming that they can't possibly help in the fight because it's too hard to pick a side. In an alternate universe they would be a Nazi Switzerland. Google makes money off of SEO spam. They get ad revenue from sellers and then give some pocket change to the scammers from the sellers. All of the money goes through their hands first. They're evil, they've sold whatever soul they might have had to the god of "money at any cost", and the current shitshow of their terrible search results is what you get when a soulless wreck is left to shamble the earth until its heart stops beating.
juujian 3y ago
> You’re going to see more AI-written articles whether you like it or not I won't, cause I have largely stopped using Google.
- philipov 3y ago
  What are you using instead?
- jlund-molfese 3y ago
  Bing and its consumers (I use Kagi) will have the same problems unless they do something radical, like promote content verifiably created by humans above unverified content. And first they'd have to figure out what that even means, and the impact on non-professional writers. Blogspam will get worse before it gets better.
claytongulick 3y ago
Honestly, it's getting hard for me to imagine how Google can get much worse anyway. So AI generated content will now take up the single non-sponsored link space to replace the ad-stuffed SEO-gamed clickbait article? Huh.
yabones 3y ago
Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.
- ijustwanttovote 3y ago
  > Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content. Very well said.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's brilliant. Doubly so because data is starting to take on toxic waste properties as well.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  Great description. The history truly rhymes.
- vopi 3y ago
  Great quote.
BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
A few days ago I was searching for some information about a CSS problem I was having. I saw a promising result on a reputable looking webpage. As soon as I started unpacking the example code a little modal window popped up saying this was AI powered and touted it as some revolutionary assistant. First things first, using AI to generate CSS advice is probably the most false positive laden use-case I can imagine. Especially because mistakes in CSS aren’t always readily apparent. But more importantly, there’s really nothing stopping folks from omitting the fact that the content on the page was AI generated. It’s the new hotness right now, so I can understand why they say so, but I can’t help but think they’ll start hiding this fact.
- Kiro 3y ago
  AI for CSS sounds like a much better thing than the stuff mentioned here. I find Copilot and ChatGPT really good at writing robust CSS.
bun_at_work 3y ago
Hopefully this serves as an incentive to Google to improve their search results. I find GPT-4 works so much better for finding answers (even in cases when it's wrong) than searching Google, especially for trivial ones. Add plugin features like code interpreter and the usefulness is not even close for most of the cases I use it. It's always worth verifying the answers, but that's also true for google results, and with GPT I don't have to dig through mountains of trash advertising sites to get to something useful. Really, I'd just like to see Google as useful as it once was.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Probably it won't, at least not at first. Google's customers are advertisers. GPT thus far is a subscription-based service, it's not competing for Google's customers. So what if Google has a few less users? Since Google Ads is auction-based, it means a few less impressions will be available, and the cost of impressions will go up. Advertisers will pay a bit more for less but Google's sort of the only game in town so it won't make a huge difference. Now if Bing achieves 30% market share on the back of its great GPT integration or something, maybe that gets Google off its ass. I think LLMs might be the beginning of the end for Google but they're so entrenched it'll take 20 years.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
If AI can write articles that fool Google, Google can use AI to detect it. Heck, maybe there will be an AI model that specifically recognizes AI content and can be used to filter it out. A lot of electricity spent for nothing, but it's not like the human species hasn't been its own worst enemy since it appeared.
- bradjohnson 3y ago
  SEO optimized turds have been floating to the top of google results for years and google hasn't done anything to effectively combat it. Why would this be something that google would do something about?
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  There are many things LLMs might be able to do, today or in the future, but the single task they are unambiguously capable of doing is generating text that is statistically indistinguishable from their training corpus. The endgame given the technology which presently exists is that spam generation methods will be more robust and effective than spam filtering methods, and I am not convinced that fundamentally better filtering methods are inevitable.
- danaris 3y ago
  I believe efforts of this nature will fall afoul of a very similar effect to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[0]: the amount of effort required to detect AI-written content is (at least) an order of magnitude greater than that required to generate them in the first place. And as LLMs get further fine-tuned to generate more and more human-like text, it will get even harder. Even now, I wouldn't give an "AI Text Detector", even one built with all of Google's resources, more than about a 60% chance of correctly telling AI-generated text from human-generated. The big problem is false positives—human-written text that gets incorrectly flagged as being written by AI. There's going to be so many false positives in any scheme like this, it'll barely be worth it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
  - AceJohnny2 3y ago
squarefoot 3y ago
That was pretty much a given, and in the meantime they already filled YouTube with crappy collage videos with clickbaity titles+captions and voiced by AI. Any plans to build a blacklist (+ browser extension?) that along ads and malware sites will also allow to nuke that rubbish from search results?
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  I prefer subscribing to good, valuable sources rather than having a filter for recommendations.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Once again, Neal Stephenson nailed it. The miasma is here.
kat_rebelo 3y ago
i have always augmented my more traditional music projects with avant-garde and experimental stuff. particularly focusing on found sounds, noise, and free improvisation. i record everything, but i treat it more as a journal of "free writing" than actual music output. the recordings are often formless, noisy, and chaotic and frequently contain experiments in polyrhythms or free time. over the years i've amassed an enormous amount of audio data that i treat more as an intellectual curiosity for myself than music i would show to other people. however, with all of the debates around attribution and ownership for human creators in the age of AI art, combined with the apparently legally and ethically dubious means by which these megacorps obtain their training data, i have began to think about what are some avenues that the general public could try to protest the actions of these megacorps by discretely poisoning the well of their training data. with the gigabytes and gigabytes of data i have generated of mostly incoherent audio, i have considered releasing this music for the first time by innocuously labeling it as a music audio dataset with the intention of trying to make it appear extremely attractive to megacorps scouring the internet for free data. my individual contribution probably couldn't amount to much, but if a concentrated mass of people did this in their respective fields, perhaps this could be a way of at least obstructing these corporations from freely capitalizing on the hard work of real artists.
- anileated 3y ago
  The sad reality is that one way or another free and open exchange of information is going to trend down, as people realize anything they publish will get repacked and stripped of attribution to be sold by some commercial AI they will switch to e2ee closed groups, and more active opposition will be poisoning datasets which would introduce more noise and contribute to the trend. But I agree with the sentiment—if the blatant disregard for IP is not curbed, this sort of thing would have to be done…
namelosw 3y ago
It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game and nobody can say for sure. As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about YouTube algorithms: 1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad videos, or thousands even. 2. Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised people would leave and it would hurt your stats. 3. Generating large amounts of videos may be profitable because it's like collecting peanuts with automation, but that would never reach the mainstream audience like Mr. Beast. This is because the algorithm promotes videos that are frequently clicked and fully watched. Generated or not, the content must be good enough to be watched through, in order to please the algorithm. You see, there are a lot of bootleg versions of Stackoverflow, but many of them are terrible. Some of them get ranked because they're still helpful (to the 80% majority of programmers, probably not for the HN elites). We can imagine there would certainly LLM generated versions of those, but very likely with better quality. Generated or not, it's still an arms race to generate more helpful and higher quality content to get traffic. Also, HN people have been complaining about how the quality of Google degrade over time. It might be Google's fault, but I believe there's another important factor that hurts search engines as a whole - There are too many walled gardens nowadays: Instagram, Discord, and now Twitter, etc. Value information is hiding behind those, which would certainly make search engines less helpful over time. For example, when I play not very popular video games I wish there are wikis or guides for that. In the old days, I know I can find most of the information in several forums and check the top posts. Now I need to go through Discord and scroll through casual chats and wonder if I missed something. With LLMs, people would likely be draining that information from walled gardens and compiling them into helpful insights. Again, there are a lot of dynamics, and it's hard to tell how things would turn out. Maybe it would kill Google and possibly the old Web, maybe it would make the Web great again.
- acomjean 3y ago
  I think it makes it worse. There is only so much it can index. I was searching a municipal website that had a bunch of pdfs. Instead of downloading them I'll I figured I'd sure the "site:__" to look through them. It didn't work. It seemed to index only 3 of those files. sigh. One of the appeals of using "chat bot" is you get an answer without all the ad crap the web delivers. I think thats the appeal of stackoverflow and Redit.. Using AI to make the web worse is something...
deleted 3y ago
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COGlory 3y ago
Remember when Google kept saying AI was dangerous and that's why they couldn't release it? Dangerous to their business model, on multiple fronts.
rchaud 3y ago
As someone who avoided the Twitter firehose like the plague, I've noticed the slow, then rapid decline of traditional 'websites' over the past decade as they succumbed to SEO keyword optimization and driving traffic from social networks. . Due to the incentives of the players involved, there is no solution that would lead to a neater, less blogspam-infested internet. The concept of a 'website' as Tim Berners Lee and the early netizens understood it, is commpletely outdated. The second we were able to add an Adsense script or Paypal button or Amazon affiliate link, the fundamental motivation for building websites changed. The artisanal personal websites of yore aren't coming back. People who used to build those have long since moved into less crowded, less commercialized territories where their work might actually be seen. If you don't want to get angry when looking up a recipe online, buy a recipe book. Everything good on the internet is already paywalled anyway.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  You're on this site talking to generally smart people who are not paying for the privilege of using this site complaining that everything good on the internet is already paywalled. If you don't know how to find what you're looking for, just ask. Paywalls aren't a real thing that have to be obeyed, nor is there ever only one spigot for any digital fountain.
  - unforeseen9991 3y ago
    I have yet to find a paywall that has stopped me from reaching the content within a click or two of one of my browser extensions.
schnable 3y ago
That doesn't sound very much like a plan. What an exhausting style of rhetoric.
mr-wendel 3y ago
How new is this problem really? For example, consider the example of Demand Media (e.g. https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/ https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fal...). They invested quite a lot in cheap content generation and for a while it served them quite well. I struggle to imagine a scenario where lowering the cost of polluting would have made this strategy more viable.
nickfromseattle 3y ago
My understanding of the algorithm is that Google uses UX metrics to stack rank content. I believe this because I focus on creating the most relevant & most valuable page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and skip all of the backlinks and technical BS stuff. This strategy of avoiding backlinks and technical BS & focus 100% on content quality has worked really well for me. If you think about it, Google has all of the data to do this: - Android - Chrome - Google Analytics All of the big platforms use UX metrics to influence reach - LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, even YouTube uses UX metrics to influence reach, why not Google search? It seems like people using AI see some limited amount of success, for some limited amount of time before losing their rankings. If I was Google, I would let people think their AI content is working for a little bit, then de-index their website to demotivate + scare webmasters away from using AI.
dang 3y ago
Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-plan-is-to-flood-google-search-with-ai-garbage-it-is-not-a-secret-plan https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-plan-is-to-f..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I think that nuance is key. An AI-generated story with factual errors is obviously bad but I wouldn't mind if reporters were able to feed facts they've found, data dump style, to an AI that could generate a narrative that is then reviewed.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  The kind of straight news story that this works for is the kind of story where writing it is the fastest part already. Getting the actual facts to put in the story normally took far longer when I was working in a newsroom. Longer, harder to write stories, like deeply researched news, or long features are not something that AI can do (yet).
exogeny 3y ago
Jim Spanfeller is a herb.
hexo 3y ago
What is G/O, pleaase?
- greenyoda 3y ago
  That question is answered in the first sentence of the article: > "In early July, managers at G/O media, the digital publisher that owns sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel, published four stories that had been almost entirely generated by AI engines." More about them on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media
reportgunner 3y ago
The drivel is so bad even writers can't stand to write it anymore.
SirMaster 3y ago
Then I'll stop reading their stories. I just don't have any interest in reading a story written by a LLM.

105 points by Analemma_ 3y ago

Well, of course. We use Ai as a toy, just like the very first movie directors. to shock, sensationalize, and otherwise grab eyeballs and elicit a strong response. we're the dumbest apes, how could we do anything different than throw poo when presented with a novel situation?

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Ironic that you're downvoted by the Certified Experts that love telling people we're nothing more than "stochastic parrots".

_8j50 3y ago

My suspicion is there will be a lot of new jobs that revolve around verifying random internet content or school work and such, not to tell if it is LLM generated but to simply validate the facts claimed in the post,essay,video,etc... I don't see why this can't be an economy either, a reputation scoring and content validity notarizing economy. Business idea! Lol.

bamfly 3y ago
I think a new rise of trusted publishers is more likely than professional information-vetting services/jobs becoming widespread. It's sort-of the same thing, I guess, but with the due diligence up front rather than trying to sort out what's good from the vast sea of information pollution after the fact. Most really good material is already better found in books (even if ebooks) from real publishers than by trawling the Web, anyway. Even before the LLM apocalypse, the Web has always been rather disappointing at the whole "all the world's knowledge" thing. Great for trivia, great for a few aspects or presentations of a few topics, kinda shit for the rest. AI garbage wrecking the Web doesn't seem like a complete change of the current state of things, but a shift in where exactly the "Web is good for this / Web is not good for this" line falls.
- _8j50 3y ago
  You could be right. With certificate authorities for example they are used to establish trust. How do you know what site is trustworthy? How do you know which resume isn't ML crafted? How do you prove your pic/video isn't fake? What fact checking sites do now but at scale and commercial is what I had in mind.

version_five 3y ago

Remember when websites would have a long list of keywords in the background color and tiny font at the bottom? I keep seeing these "AI will destroy X" articles, I've never seen one that wasn't ultimately referring to a minor incremental extension of something already prevalent. Keywords gave way to link farms gave way to shitty outsourced "content" and now LLMs will be part of SEO. It's not really different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt, and seo scammers will find some new thing. It's all such a minor part of the internet anyway.

instagib 3y ago
I still do the tiny font keyword list for my resume. I have occasionally left out certain keywords but then hear back from recruiters that if I had keyword x or y then I would be perfect for the job. Back to a 5 page resume.
- zonkerdonker 3y ago
  I've heard from recruiters that some software will export submitted resumes in plain text in a standard format for review, I wonder if the tiny white font tags show up as well
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> It's not really different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page of a search are crap.
- vuln 3y ago
  > Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page of a search is crap. That’s by design. They load the results with crap so you click on the ads instead of the result. Ads generate revenue for Alphabet, search _results_ less so. Simple as.
munificent 3y ago

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

boesboes 3y ago

It's the natural evolution of content marketing & SEO. I work at an IT company where we have ~15 ppl building and managing a few SaaS apps for the travel industry, and we have 50-60 ppl doing marketing as a service for our customers. They write page after page of content that barely get read. It all just exists to make the google bot happy. And that works. They bring in more customers & revenue apparently. (honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all wasted and the added revenue is due to the better website and backoffice, but what do i know.) So it seems only natural to have AI generate that content for the Google bot and stop wasting all this effort. Obviously I can't prove nobody reads this content, but seriously.. A landing page about hot-tubs and how cool it is to have one in your holiday home? Doubt that anyone actually reads that.. EDIT: I guess my point is also: it's already flooded with crap, just look at al the blog spam for things like 'how to start nginx'

sshine 3y ago
1. Good old days, humans talk to humans. 2. Someone invents a bot, humans talk to bots. 3. Someone invents another bot, bots talk to bots. This is the story of SEO, banner ads, stock trading, consumer pricing. There are probably many other cases. The tech help spam: initially an attempt for a bot to talk to a human, but with LLMs crawling search results and aggregating answers, your answer to "how to start nginx" becomes the output of bot-bot interaction: an average of several generated answers (some initially and occasionally by humans).
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Those 60 people can have a new job: fact checking the lies that the new ais produce
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Why would they? Google sees more content so you now have more nodes connected to you, so you appear higher. Whether it's true or false doesn't matter to Google.
  - 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing. I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we should all be working on ways to confound and confuse and generally screw up the companies who are sucking up all the personal info. This kind of runs parallel to that. Google search has been pretty bad for some time now, might be worth "burning this thing down to save it."

bobthepanda 3y ago
The problem generally speaking is that any successor search engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling. I don’t know that making the web less usable in general is worth it.
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
  I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a lot better.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Are they doing nothing, or is the current state of the spam arms race resulting in running just to stay in the same place? And would anyone be better once they became the primary target?
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      They are standing in the middle of it and picking everyone's digital pockets while claiming that they can't possibly help in the fight because it's too hard to pick a side. In an alternate universe they would be a Nazi Switzerland. Google makes money off of SEO spam. They get ad revenue from sellers and then give some pocket change to the scammers from the sellers. All of the money goes through their hands first. They're evil, they've sold whatever soul they might have had to the god of "money at any cost", and the current shitshow of their terrible search results is what you get when a soulless wreck is left to shamble the earth until its heart stops beating.

juujian 3y ago

> You’re going to see more AI-written articles whether you like it or not I won't, cause I have largely stopped using Google.

philipov 3y ago
What are you using instead?
jlund-molfese 3y ago
Bing and its consumers (I use Kagi) will have the same problems unless they do something radical, like promote content verifiably created by humans above unverified content. And first they'd have to figure out what that even means, and the impact on non-professional writers. Blogspam will get worse before it gets better.

claytongulick 3y ago

Honestly, it's getting hard for me to imagine how Google can get much worse anyway. So AI generated content will now take up the single non-sponsored link space to replace the ad-stuffed SEO-gamed clickbait article? Huh.

yabones 3y ago

Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.

ijustwanttovote 3y ago
> Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content. Very well said.
jacquesm 3y ago
That's brilliant. Doubly so because data is starting to take on toxic waste properties as well.
gloryjulio 3y ago
Great description. The history truly rhymes.
vopi 3y ago
Great quote.

BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago

A few days ago I was searching for some information about a CSS problem I was having. I saw a promising result on a reputable looking webpage. As soon as I started unpacking the example code a little modal window popped up saying this was AI powered and touted it as some revolutionary assistant. First things first, using AI to generate CSS advice is probably the most false positive laden use-case I can imagine. Especially because mistakes in CSS aren’t always readily apparent. But more importantly, there’s really nothing stopping folks from omitting the fact that the content on the page was AI generated. It’s the new hotness right now, so I can understand why they say so, but I can’t help but think they’ll start hiding this fact.

Kiro 3y ago
AI for CSS sounds like a much better thing than the stuff mentioned here. I find Copilot and ChatGPT really good at writing robust CSS.

bun_at_work 3y ago

Hopefully this serves as an incentive to Google to improve their search results. I find GPT-4 works so much better for finding answers (even in cases when it's wrong) than searching Google, especially for trivial ones. Add plugin features like code interpreter and the usefulness is not even close for most of the cases I use it. It's always worth verifying the answers, but that's also true for google results, and with GPT I don't have to dig through mountains of trash advertising sites to get to something useful. Really, I'd just like to see Google as useful as it once was.

safety1st 3y ago
Probably it won't, at least not at first. Google's customers are advertisers. GPT thus far is a subscription-based service, it's not competing for Google's customers. So what if Google has a few less users? Since Google Ads is auction-based, it means a few less impressions will be available, and the cost of impressions will go up. Advertisers will pay a bit more for less but Google's sort of the only game in town so it won't make a huge difference. Now if Bing achieves 30% market share on the back of its great GPT integration or something, maybe that gets Google off its ass. I think LLMs might be the beginning of the end for Google but they're so entrenched it'll take 20 years.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

If AI can write articles that fool Google, Google can use AI to detect it. Heck, maybe there will be an AI model that specifically recognizes AI content and can be used to filter it out. A lot of electricity spent for nothing, but it's not like the human species hasn't been its own worst enemy since it appeared.

bradjohnson 3y ago
SEO optimized turds have been floating to the top of google results for years and google hasn't done anything to effectively combat it. Why would this be something that google would do something about?
RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
There are many things LLMs might be able to do, today or in the future, but the single task they are unambiguously capable of doing is generating text that is statistically indistinguishable from their training corpus. The endgame given the technology which presently exists is that spam generation methods will be more robust and effective than spam filtering methods, and I am not convinced that fundamentally better filtering methods are inevitable.
danaris 3y ago
I believe efforts of this nature will fall afoul of a very similar effect to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[0]: the amount of effort required to detect AI-written content is (at least) an order of magnitude greater than that required to generate them in the first place. And as LLMs get further fine-tuned to generate more and more human-like text, it will get even harder. Even now, I wouldn't give an "AI Text Detector", even one built with all of Google's resources, more than about a 60% chance of correctly telling AI-generated text from human-generated. The big problem is false positives—human-written text that gets incorrectly flagged as being written by AI. There's going to be so many false positives in any scheme like this, it'll barely be worth it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- AceJohnny2 3y ago

squarefoot 3y ago

That was pretty much a given, and in the meantime they already filled YouTube with crappy collage videos with clickbaity titles+captions and voiced by AI. Any plans to build a blacklist (+ browser extension?) that along ads and malware sites will also allow to nuke that rubbish from search results?

renegat0x0 3y ago
I prefer subscribing to good, valuable sources rather than having a filter for recommendations.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

Once again, Neal Stephenson nailed it. The miasma is here.

kat_rebelo 3y ago

i have always augmented my more traditional music projects with avant-garde and experimental stuff. particularly focusing on found sounds, noise, and free improvisation. i record everything, but i treat it more as a journal of "free writing" than actual music output. the recordings are often formless, noisy, and chaotic and frequently contain experiments in polyrhythms or free time. over the years i've amassed an enormous amount of audio data that i treat more as an intellectual curiosity for myself than music i would show to other people. however, with all of the debates around attribution and ownership for human creators in the age of AI art, combined with the apparently legally and ethically dubious means by which these megacorps obtain their training data, i have began to think about what are some avenues that the general public could try to protest the actions of these megacorps by discretely poisoning the well of their training data. with the gigabytes and gigabytes of data i have generated of mostly incoherent audio, i have considered releasing this music for the first time by innocuously labeling it as a music audio dataset with the intention of trying to make it appear extremely attractive to megacorps scouring the internet for free data. my individual contribution probably couldn't amount to much, but if a concentrated mass of people did this in their respective fields, perhaps this could be a way of at least obstructing these corporations from freely capitalizing on the hard work of real artists.

anileated 3y ago
The sad reality is that one way or another free and open exchange of information is going to trend down, as people realize anything they publish will get repacked and stripped of attribution to be sold by some commercial AI they will switch to e2ee closed groups, and more active opposition will be poisoning datasets which would introduce more noise and contribute to the trend. But I agree with the sentiment—if the blatant disregard for IP is not curbed, this sort of thing would have to be done…

namelosw 3y ago

It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game and nobody can say for sure. As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about YouTube algorithms: 1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad videos, or thousands even. 2. Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised people would leave and it would hurt your stats. 3. Generating large amounts of videos may be profitable because it's like collecting peanuts with automation, but that would never reach the mainstream audience like Mr. Beast. This is because the algorithm promotes videos that are frequently clicked and fully watched. Generated or not, the content must be good enough to be watched through, in order to please the algorithm. You see, there are a lot of bootleg versions of Stackoverflow, but many of them are terrible. Some of them get ranked because they're still helpful (to the 80% majority of programmers, probably not for the HN elites). We can imagine there would certainly LLM generated versions of those, but very likely with better quality. Generated or not, it's still an arms race to generate more helpful and higher quality content to get traffic. Also, HN people have been complaining about how the quality of Google degrade over time. It might be Google's fault, but I believe there's another important factor that hurts search engines as a whole - There are too many walled gardens nowadays: Instagram, Discord, and now Twitter, etc. Value information is hiding behind those, which would certainly make search engines less helpful over time. For example, when I play not very popular video games I wish there are wikis or guides for that. In the old days, I know I can find most of the information in several forums and check the top posts. Now I need to go through Discord and scroll through casual chats and wonder if I missed something. With LLMs, people would likely be draining that information from walled gardens and compiling them into helpful insights. Again, there are a lot of dynamics, and it's hard to tell how things would turn out. Maybe it would kill Google and possibly the old Web, maybe it would make the Web great again.

acomjean 3y ago
I think it makes it worse. There is only so much it can index. I was searching a municipal website that had a bunch of pdfs. Instead of downloading them I'll I figured I'd sure the "site:__" to look through them. It didn't work. It seemed to index only 3 of those files. sigh. One of the appeals of using "chat bot" is you get an answer without all the ad crap the web delivers. I think thats the appeal of stackoverflow and Redit.. Using AI to make the web worse is something...

deleted 3y ago

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COGlory 3y ago

Remember when Google kept saying AI was dangerous and that's why they couldn't release it? Dangerous to their business model, on multiple fronts.

rchaud 3y ago

As someone who avoided the Twitter firehose like the plague, I've noticed the slow, then rapid decline of traditional 'websites' over the past decade as they succumbed to SEO keyword optimization and driving traffic from social networks. . Due to the incentives of the players involved, there is no solution that would lead to a neater, less blogspam-infested internet. The concept of a 'website' as Tim Berners Lee and the early netizens understood it, is commpletely outdated. The second we were able to add an Adsense script or Paypal button or Amazon affiliate link, the fundamental motivation for building websites changed. The artisanal personal websites of yore aren't coming back. People who used to build those have long since moved into less crowded, less commercialized territories where their work might actually be seen. If you don't want to get angry when looking up a recipe online, buy a recipe book. Everything good on the internet is already paywalled anyway.

BizarroLand 3y ago
You're on this site talking to generally smart people who are not paying for the privilege of using this site complaining that everything good on the internet is already paywalled. If you don't know how to find what you're looking for, just ask. Paywalls aren't a real thing that have to be obeyed, nor is there ever only one spigot for any digital fountain.
- unforeseen9991 3y ago
  I have yet to find a paywall that has stopped me from reaching the content within a click or two of one of my browser extensions.

schnable 3y ago

That doesn't sound very much like a plan. What an exhausting style of rhetoric.

mr-wendel 3y ago

How new is this problem really? For example, consider the example of Demand Media (e.g. https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/ https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fal...). They invested quite a lot in cheap content generation and for a while it served them quite well. I struggle to imagine a scenario where lowering the cost of polluting would have made this strategy more viable.

nickfromseattle 3y ago

My understanding of the algorithm is that Google uses UX metrics to stack rank content. I believe this because I focus on creating the most relevant & most valuable page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and skip all of the backlinks and technical BS stuff. This strategy of avoiding backlinks and technical BS & focus 100% on content quality has worked really well for me. If you think about it, Google has all of the data to do this: - Android - Chrome - Google Analytics All of the big platforms use UX metrics to influence reach - LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, even YouTube uses UX metrics to influence reach, why not Google search? It seems like people using AI see some limited amount of success, for some limited amount of time before losing their rankings. If I was Google, I would let people think their AI content is working for a little bit, then de-index their website to demotivate + scare webmasters away from using AI.

dang 3y ago

Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-plan-is-to-flood-google-search-with-ai-garbage-it-is-not-a-secret-plan https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-plan-is-to-f..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I think that nuance is key. An AI-generated story with factual errors is obviously bad but I wouldn't mind if reporters were able to feed facts they've found, data dump style, to an AI that could generate a narrative that is then reviewed.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
The kind of straight news story that this works for is the kind of story where writing it is the fastest part already. Getting the actual facts to put in the story normally took far longer when I was working in a newsroom. Longer, harder to write stories, like deeply researched news, or long features are not something that AI can do (yet).

exogeny 3y ago

Jim Spanfeller is a herb.

hexo 3y ago

What is G/O, pleaase?

greenyoda 3y ago
That question is answered in the first sentence of the article: > "In early July, managers at G/O media, the digital publisher that owns sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel, published four stories that had been almost entirely generated by AI engines." More about them on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media

reportgunner 3y ago

The drivel is so bad even writers can't stand to write it anymore.

SirMaster 3y ago

Then I'll stop reading their stories. I just don't have any interest in reading a story written by a LLM.