5 ms·

I actually think (hope?) that AI in general will get rather good at picking out SEO spam pages in their current state (think generic cooking recipe sites) and b

I actually think (hope?) that AI in general will get rather good at picking out SEO spam pages in their current state (think generic cooking recipe sites) and be able to downgrade them in search rankings. Now whether the major search engines will actually do that is another story.

im3w1l 3y ago
I'm pretty sure it's actually gonna do the exact opposite thing. Like if you look into what AI is doing to student essays and homework, it's so good that even trained humans cannot tell human and ai generated content apart. It's not a stretch to imagine AI generated SEO spam pages will be indistinguishable from human created personal websites.
alwa 3y ago
I’m curious what incentive will remain for people to render facts about the world into AI-consumable form. It seems to me that the same incentives that motivate this supposedly-$68bn industry are the ones that motivate people to write what we think of as high-quality content: some degree of financial compensation, some degree of prestige or social capital, some degree of influence over consumer or voter behavior. If anything, what we’re stripping out is direct compensation and authorial prestige, leaving only crass commercial/political incentive. Why would I want to share what I know about the world, from my position of hard-earned expertise and original research, if it’s just to anonymously make AIs sound smarter? And why would I be more motivated to do this than, say, entities with products or agendas to push, who hope to motivate AIs to influence consumer behavior or political beliefs—same as it ever was? I’m reminded of the eternal example of Wikipedia turf wars, where true subject matter experts try a few times to correct stubborn self-appointed editors then eventually give up and return to the more important things they have to do. I can only hope smart people are thinking about ways to equip the AI-based approaches with something of the same techniques we train into would-be scholars: consider the source, check your references, cite your work, ground everything in the real world.
- xnx 3y ago
  > Why would I want to share what I know about the world, from my position of hard-earned expertise and original research, if it’s just to anonymously make AIs sound smarter? This is a huge and important question, but it's worth considering how radically different things could be as LLMs become even more capable and popular. As one possibility: LLMs decimate the number of people needed in many professions (SEO, education, etc. etc.). LLMs become a subscription service. (Perhaps ranging from $50 to $200/month per household, which is not at all unreasonable considering the value they provide and what cable TV currently costs). Governments, companies, institutions pay millions of content creators, quality raters, researchers directly for their contributions and how impactful to the LLM their input is. Things could go any number of ways, but I feel it's a pretty safe bet there will be a lot of change.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I feel like this is already happening to me. Outside of GitHub, I've stopped posting useful information nuggets I discover. Why waste my time screaming into an empty void on zombie forums, Reddit, Discord and such?

im3w1l 3y ago

I'm pretty sure it's actually gonna do the exact opposite thing. Like if you look into what AI is doing to student essays and homework, it's so good that even trained humans cannot tell human and ai generated content apart. It's not a stretch to imagine AI generated SEO spam pages will be indistinguishable from human created personal websites.

alwa 3y ago

I’m curious what incentive will remain for people to render facts about the world into AI-consumable form. It seems to me that the same incentives that motivate this supposedly-$68bn industry are the ones that motivate people to write what we think of as high-quality content: some degree of financial compensation, some degree of prestige or social capital, some degree of influence over consumer or voter behavior. If anything, what we’re stripping out is direct compensation and authorial prestige, leaving only crass commercial/political incentive. Why would I want to share what I know about the world, from my position of hard-earned expertise and original research, if it’s just to anonymously make AIs sound smarter? And why would I be more motivated to do this than, say, entities with products or agendas to push, who hope to motivate AIs to influence consumer behavior or political beliefs—same as it ever was? I’m reminded of the eternal example of Wikipedia turf wars, where true subject matter experts try a few times to correct stubborn self-appointed editors then eventually give up and return to the more important things they have to do. I can only hope smart people are thinking about ways to equip the AI-based approaches with something of the same techniques we train into would-be scholars: consider the source, check your references, cite your work, ground everything in the real world.

xnx 3y ago
> Why would I want to share what I know about the world, from my position of hard-earned expertise and original research, if it’s just to anonymously make AIs sound smarter? This is a huge and important question, but it's worth considering how radically different things could be as LLMs become even more capable and popular. As one possibility: LLMs decimate the number of people needed in many professions (SEO, education, etc. etc.). LLMs become a subscription service. (Perhaps ranging from $50 to $200/month per household, which is not at all unreasonable considering the value they provide and what cable TV currently costs). Governments, companies, institutions pay millions of content creators, quality raters, researchers directly for their contributions and how impactful to the LLM their input is. Things could go any number of ways, but I feel it's a pretty safe bet there will be a lot of change.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
I feel like this is already happening to me. Outside of GitHub, I've stopped posting useful information nuggets I discover. Why waste my time screaming into an empty void on zombie forums, Reddit, Discord and such?