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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
- d_251 3y agoAre books by proven publishers the future?
- branon 3y agoNever thought I'd say this, but in times like these, with clearnet in such dire straits, all the information siloed away inside Discord doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Remaining unindexable by search engines all but guarantees you'll never appear alongside AI slop or be used as training data. The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they once excelled at. They have eschewed their efficacy at basic tasks in favor of being terrible at complex tasks.
- nemomarx 3y agoWell, unless Discord starts selling it to ai companies right?
- wussboy 3y agoThey wouldn’t…would they? /s
- queuebert 3y agoNo, that's never happened before. You're crazy.
- tivert 3y ago> No, that's never happened before. You're crazy. Start filling up Discords with insane AI-generated garbage, and maybe you can devalue the data to the point it won't get sold. It's probably totally practical too, just create channels filled with insane bots talking to each other, and cultivate the local knowledge that real people just don't go there. Maybe even allow the insane bots on the main channels, and cultivate the understanding that everyone needs to just block them. It would be important to avoid any kind of widespread conventions about how to do this, since and important goal to to make it practically impossible to algorithmically filter-out the AI generated dogshit when training a model. So don't suffix all the bots with "-bot", everyone just need to be told something like "we block John2993, 3944XNU, SunshineGirl around here." If we work together, maybe we can turn AI (or at least LLMs) into the next blockchain.
- klondike_klive 3y agoThe equivalent of "locals don't go to this area after dark"? I instinctively like it, but only because I flatter myself that I would be a local. I can't see it working to any scale.
- tivert 3y ago> The equivalent of "locals don't go to this area after dark"? I instinctively like it, but only because I flatter myself that I would be a local. I can't see it working to any scale. I was think it could work if 1) the noise is just obvious enough that a human would get frustrated and block without wasting much time and/or 2) the practice is common enough that everyone except total newbies will learn generally what's up.
- throwaway29812 3y ago> The equivalent of "locals don't go to this area after dark"? We have this with human online places already it's called 4chan
- galdosdi 3y agoThis is an intellectually fascinating thought experiment.
- tivert 3y ago> This is an intellectually fascinating thought experiment. It's not a thought experiment. I'd actually like to do it (and others to do it). IRL. I probably would start with an open source model that's especially prone to hallucinate, try to trigger hallucinations, then maybe feed back the hallucinations by retraining. Might make the most sense to target long-tail topics, because that would give the impression of unreliability while being harder to specifically counter at the topic level (e.g. the large apparent effort to make ChatGPT say only the right things about election results and many other sensitive topics).
- kmeisthax 3y agoThis idea has been talked about enough that we call it "Habsburg AI". OpenAI is already aware of it and it's the reason why they stopped web scraping in 2021.
- kaashif 3y ago*until If people believe giving all information to one company and having it unindexable and impossible to find on the open internet is a way to keep your data safe, I have an alternative idea. This unindexability means Discord could charge a much higher price when selling this data.
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- kaetemi 3y agoOpenAI trains GPT on their own Discord server, apparently. If you copy paste a chatlog from any Discord server into GPT completion playground, it has a very strong tendency to regress into a chatlog about GPT, just from that particular chatlog format.
- rchaud 3y agoImagine the rich economic insights we could get from a Discord AI trained on billions of messages in crypto shitcoin channels. /s
- pawelmurias 3y agoAI spam bots will invade discord.
- TillE 3y agoAnd they'll get banned by moderators. Ultimately that's the key ingredient in any good strategy here: human curation.
- elzbardico 3y agoAI bots will get the confidence of admins and moderators. They will be so helpful and wise that they will become admin and moderators. Then, they will ban the accounts of the human moderators.
- BizarreByte 3y agoMods will ban them and new users will be forced to verify via voice/video chat/livestream.
- mingus88 3y agoWe already have AI generated audio and video. This is a stopgap at best. Maybe the mods will have to trick the AI by asking it to threaten them or any other kind of “ethical” trap but that will just mean the AI owners abandon ethical controls
- theonlybutlet 3y agoI can't see how being used as training data has anything to do with this problem. Being able to differentiate between the AI slop and the accurate information is the issue.
- unglaublich 3y agoDifferentiation becomes harder the better AIs perform, which is currently bound by data availability and quality.
- CaptainFever 3y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- titzer 3y agoThe fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectively all the players are conspiring to generate revenue from people's free time, attention, and coerce them into consumption, while amusing them to death. Big entities in the space have trouble coming up with successful models other than advertising--not because those models are unsuccessful, but because 20+ years of compounded exponential growth has made them so big that it's no longer worth their while and will not help them achieve their yearly growth targets. Just a case in point. I joined Google in 2010 and left in 2019. In 2010 annual revenue was ~$30 billion. Last year, it was $300 billion. Google has grown at ~20% YoY very consistently since its inception. To meet that for 2024, they'll have to find $60 billion in new revenue. So they need to find two 2010-Google's worth of revenue in just one year. And of course 2010-Google took twelve years to build. It's just bonkers.
- plagiarist 3y agoThere used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things. The weeds have grown over them and made it difficult to find these from the public web because these individuals cannot devote the same resources to SEO and SEM as teams of adtech affiliate marketers with LLM-generated content. When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.
- waveBidder 3y agosuch websites still get made all the time, they're just not useful for Google to surface. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- Groxx 3y agoI've pretty much just seen evidence that this segment keeps growing, and is now much MUCH larger than the Internet in The Good Old Days. Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane. Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.
- welder 3y agoDiscord is searchable: https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/
- raesene9 3y agoI think that answer overflow is opt-in, that is individual communities have to actively join it, for their content to show up. That would mean that (unless answer overflow becomes very popular), most discord content isn't visible that way.
- CaptainFever 3y agoI can't really see a relevance between "we should spend more time with trusted people", which is an argument for restricting who can write to our online spaces, and "we should be unindexable and untrainable", which is an argument for restricting who can read our online spaces. I still hold that moving to proprietary, informational-black-hole platforms like Discord is a bad thing. Sure, use platforms that don't allow guest writing access to keep out spam; but this doesn't mean you should restrict read access. One big example: Lobsters. Or better-curated search engines and indexes.
- krapp 3y agoRead access to humans means read access to AIs. We can't stop the cancer but we can at least try to slow its spread.
- CaptainFever 3y agoThis assumes that there are no legitimate uses to AI. This is clearly not true, so you can't really just equate the two. If you want better content, restrict writing, not reading. It's that simple.
- nicbou 3y agoI strongly disagree. I've been answering immigration questions online for a long time. People frequently comment on threads from years ago, or ask about them in private. In other words, public content helps a lot of other people over time. On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best. If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.
- krapp 3y ago"Sharing useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience," unfortunately, is the worst possible thing you can do nowadays. I hate that the internet is turning me into that guy, but everything is turning into shit and cancer, and AI is only making an already bad situation worse. Bots, trolls, psychopaths, psyops and all else aside, anything put on to the public web now only contributes to its metastasis by feeding the AI machine. It's all poisoned now. Closed, gatekept communities with ephemeral posts and aggressive moderation, which only share knowledge within a limited and trusted circle of confirmed humans, and only for a limited time, designed to be as hostile as possible to sharing and interacting the open web, seem to be the only possible way forward. At least until AI inevitably consumes that as well.
- nicbou 3y agoBut what about people that are not yet in the community? Are we going to make "it's not what you know but who you know" our default mode of finding answers?
- krapp 3y agoWhat alternative do you suggest? Everything you expose to the public internet is now feeding AI, and every interaction is more and more likely to be with an AI than a real human. This isn't a matter of elitism, but vetting direct personal connections and gatekeeping access seems like the only way to keep AI quarantined and guarantee that real human knowledge and art don't get polluted. Every time I see someone on Twitter post something interesting, usually art, it makes me sad. I know that's now a part of the AI machine. That bit of uniqueness and creativity and humanity has been commoditized and assimilated and forever blighted from the universe. Even AI "poisoning" programs will fail over time. The only answer is to never share anything of value over the open internet. Corporations are already pouring billions of dollars into "going all in" on AI. Video game and software companies are using AI art. Steam is allowing AI content. SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement allowing the use of AI. Someone is trying to publish a new "tour" of George Carlin with an AI. All of our resources of "knowledge" and "expertise" have been poisoned by AI hallucinations and nonsense. Even everything we're writing here is feeding the beast.
- broscillator 3y agoDiscord will die and there's no way that I'm aware of to easily export all that information.
- stcredzero 3y agoThe future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they once excelled at. What if the AI apocalypse takes this form? - Social Media takes over all discourse - Regurgitated AI crap takes over all Social Media - Intellectual level of human beings spirals downward as a result
- TimurSadekov 3y agoNeural networks will degenerate in the process of learning from their own hallucinations, and humans will degenerate in the process of applying the degenerated neural networks. This process is called "neural network collapse". https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 It can only be countered by a collective neural network of all the minds of humanity. For mutual validation and self-improvement of LLM and humans, we need the ability to match the knowledge of artificial intelligence with collective intelligence. Only the CyberPravda project is the practical solution to avoid the collapse of large language models.
- espe 3y agothey will sell. the big guys are gobbling up _anything_ they can get their hands on.
- erellsworth 3y agoI'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.
- cranberryturkey 3y agotime to abandon google and go back to web rings.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI don't know how the old web worked, but something decentralized makes sense to me.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt was a bit annoying, you just kind of wandered around aimlessly until you stumbled upon something interesting. Google was a breath of fresh air.
- bombcar 3y agoGoogle was powerful because it found those "something interesting" - you'd be searching for details on how to configurate and obligator and the answer would be on an entire forum dedicated to obligators that you didn't even know about - and then you'd spend time there learning and reading. You'd use Google to find interesting places and then you'd colonize them. Now Google is used for strategic shots - you are interested in one piece of information, you find it, and you quickly retreat to your safe havens.
- firecall 3y agoPeople used to email each links to cool websites! And there were services like Hotline! And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!
- 7thaccount 3y agoOh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago> The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines. I mean, it always has been on its lowest layers. The "is this incoming data from the Internet originated by a human being" problem hasn't really been solved, and is probably not truly solveable. It probably wasn't a good idea to train most of the world to use a single private ad-driven service for answers to everything in the first place.
- dartos 3y agoIt doesn’t need to be solved before as most internet users could easily identify algorithmically generated stuff and stop spreading it, but not so anymore. Maybe one day we’ll all be able to “smell” ai generate text easily, but we’re not there yet
- novagameco 3y agoThis is also known as the dead internet theory, which sounded a bit stupid before 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory > The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers World Wide Web search results outside of walled garden platforms like youtube or facebook (and, really, even within those platforms) have run into a kind of kessler syndrome where the amount of garbage on the web has made it increasingly difficult to get anything done on it. Eventually we may find that we can't trust anything we read on the internet anymore, and abandon the world wide web entirely (opting instead to spend all of our time on proprietary walled garden systems we do trust). Perhaps we will be required to use some form of identification (you driver's license or SSN, as in South Korea) to access such services (unless that can be easily defeated by an AI as well). I was surprised that, when ChatGPT came out, the immediate concern people had was skynet-tier apocalypse fantasy, in which roving bands of machines walk the earth, searching for humans to exterminate like in BLAME! It shows that the people who work on these AI systems understand their implications about as much as Richard Hammond understood the power of genetic engineering in Jurassic Park. Their entire worldview is painted by Science Fiction. Their understanding of the human race lacks any kind of grounding in reality. They believed that what they had released was the first baby step which could, potentially, result in the downfall of the human race in several decades if we're not careful, but they fell victim to the same "move fast and break things" motto that Facebook did. They didn't consider the immediate destructive power their technology would release because they consider "disruption" to be a fundamentally good thing. Their only concern was avoiding hypothetical possibilities posited by their favorite science fiction authors and not the real eventualities predicted by economists. I found it much more likely that AI will disrupt systems we rely on, wielded by humans for short term profit motive: ecommerce, news, media, and the labor economy. Malicious actors promoting scam products or yellow journalism, middle managers trying to cut labor cost by replacing easily automated jobs like copywriting with LLMs. I think we are more likely to shoot ourselves in the head with AI in pursuit of a single quarter's earnings report than we are to see Silicon based lifeforms wander the planet looking for carbon based matter to consume
- cranberryturkey 3y agoai going to make google results garbage.
- DanHulton 3y ago"going to" In my experience, there's not far to go!
- theyeenzbeanz 3y agoGoing to? It already has. I get about 50 articles for software fixes that have a lot of hot garbage in them before getting to the point. For example I had a discord issue and instead of laying out a fix, the “article” apparently needed a multi paragraph ChatGPT explanation of what discord is before even attempting to show remedies.
- emmet 3y agoPeople like to make fun of the "2000 word backstory before actually getting to the recipe" about cooking sites, but now I'm finding it with everything. Tried to find news about Baldurs Gate cross-play, and stumbled my way through a giant incoherent mess of an article that had nothing to do with the title.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe funny thing about recipe spam is that now the best cooking information is youtube, even though objectively it seems like a video would be a bad format for a recipe, at least with youtube you know up-front how long the video is going to be, and the ingredients are generally in the description.
- AgentOrange1234 3y agoIt’s really infuriating because you constantly feel like they’re about to get to the point. Maybe as a protest I’ve been hammering on bottom-line-up-front in all of our team communications.
- gedy 3y ago
- WesSouza 3y ago"Google Is Full of AI Dogshit" or "Search Engines Are Full of AI Dogshit" or even better "Search Engine Algorithms Expose All of Internet's recent AI Dogshit"
- Eisenstein 3y agoHow about 'internet content which is dependent on ad-revenue inevitably turns anything associated with it to dogshit'?
- netsharc 3y agoBefore ChatGPT, it was already full of bot-generated garbage; google any celebrity name and crappy sites are recommended with their net worth or relationship status.
- b112 3y agoThis is the worst of it. All of googles' top suggestions, highlights, and whatever other garbage they put in the top two scroll pages, is just junk. Garbage. It's right perhaps 5% of the time for me. So not only do I have to hunt through their horrible search results, I have to hunt through junk they add on top of that. The sad part is, their buffoonery in aliasing words is 90% of the problem. No, I searched for David, not Dave. No, I searched for Debian, not Ubuntu. On and on, unless I use verbatim, I get nothing even remotely useful. It's like Google is completely disconnected from the real world. I bet they don't even dogfood. They probably have a Google Employee search that actually works, and doesn't alias or something. I wonder what startling revelations Google would have, if they flew to the middle of Missouri, told people how to use verbatim, and then saw the wondrous expressions of "oh, it works now?" in grandmas. They blew the AI game, screwing around, messing about, giving up a decade lead on OpenAI. They're destroying their search engine, their brand, with this junky, modern lack of effort. They're making gmail less and less friendly, losing cherished photos of loved ones in Google Drive, their entire Pii based income stream is coming to an end, frankly, Google is done, unless they do something dramatic. They're on the path to becoming IBM. A washed up has been, ruminating on past glories. They should be hiring right now. Massive amounts of talent is being set free, they should scoop them up, and reap 5 year research and dev rewards. They have the excess capital... now, something they will lose soon. But no. Onward, we march into oblivious irrelevance, says they! Yay!
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- tavavex 3y agoIt kind of baffles me how people spent the last 15 years or so generating a black hole's worth of SEO content, but Google is at the forefront of "being at fault" for it now. Google has no real incentive to make their product suck for no reason, but SEO people have a never-changing reason to try and break Google. The point of SEO is delivering your content to a user through search results, no matter if it's actually relevant to anything. It's not (mainly) Google. It's that SEO won.
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- ganzuul 3y agoI feel like we brought this on ourselves when we started autocompleting replies to questions like "How are you?" with, "Fine, thank you." instead of thinking about it and giving honest answers.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe like the canned responses in Teams. Removes the fine grained nuances.
- tyfon 3y agoDoes anyone actually use those? I have not seen any instances of it within the companies I've been at.
- rightbyte 3y agoProbably not. I personally would feel like a twat using them. There are like mumbling a lazy disinterested answer, face to face.
- TOGoS 3y agoI may have clicked one ironically one time, for my own amusement, then followed it up with an actual answer because I knew my coworker wouldn't get the joke.
- hooverd 3y agoOr maybe "I wish I were a bird."
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIt's not going to get better. Maybe 5-10% of content is AI generated now. Wait until it's 90%. Wait as we keep piling more nines onto that number. How do we keep the internet useful to humans while this is going on? Maybe this is the new search engine challenge. Google rose to the top because, at the time, they were able to mine the links' references to each other to determine which were the best sites. If a search engine can solve the problem of finding the best (realest?) information in this mess, then they can rise to the top.
- gshubert17 3y agoIndeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network") wrote "Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information." "So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity". The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day." A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.
- plagiarist 3y agoThe Ret getting filled with garbage and the arms race of production and filtering is real. I think 99.99% effective filtering was the sci-fi part, though I hope I am wrong on that.
- ksherlock 3y ago30 years in the making. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog -- Peter Steiner / The New Yorker, July 5, 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
- Kye 3y agoDogs make some of the best clients for paying creative work.
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- jeffbee 3y agoI can't repro the author's supposed comedy. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+does+it+take+for+sinus+swelling+to+go+down https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+does+it+take+for+si...
- red_admiral 3y agoAt the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google will start dealing with this problem when it starts appearing in their budget in big enough numbers. The tech layoffs we're hearing about from one company after another - google is mentioned in another HN thread today - may be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.
- ramesh31 3y ago>At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. You seem to have a hilariously over generous opinion of ad tech spending. The biggest players are already doing this themselves.
- b112 3y agoBig tech has always been laying off, firing, even in the best of years. And today, right now, they're all still hiring.
- lolinder 3y ago> Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google might notice but has no incentive to spend money to stop it because they're not the ones the humans stopped paying. The companies that advertise with Google might notice a drop in ROI on their ads, but it will be a while before they abandon Google because most of them don't see any other option. I dread what the internet will look like if we wait for this this to hit Google's bottom line.
- novagameco 3y agoAI is generating content, not consuming it. If people are easily duped by fake or bad products with advertisements or content generated by AI (which, they are) then this will continue to drive revenue for Google. The only reason Google dislikes SEO manipulation is because it's a way for sites to get top real estate on google without paying for the promoted results; the quality of the product doesn't matter to them It only becomes a problem when it results in a collapse of trust; when people have been burned by too many bad products and decide to no longer trust the sites or search results which they used to. Due to my job, I get a lot of ads for gray market drugs on Instagram. I know, however, that all of these are not tested by the FDA and most are either snake oil or research chemicals masquerading as Amanita Muscaria or Delta-8 THC, and so I ignore these ads.
- visarga 3y agoIt all started with the "Traffic==Money" idea, a long time ago. LLMs weren't even around a couple of years ago in any meaningful way and the internet was still full of dogshit. Maybe we can have better dogshit made with AI.
- samtho 3y agoThe problem is that the dogshit machine was constrained in its output by the organization creating it. Sure you may have paid small amounts per article but your resources were still limited as cost scaled linearly with content creation. Now any size of organization can make a metric tonne of lexically unique content with a fixed cost given the incentive to do so at the moment, it’s all but inevitable.
- visarga 3y agoYes but the Google Bot LLMs will filter out drivel with their superior language understanding and network analysis of spam clues. I mean it could, if only Google wanted to clean up its act. Well, in the meantime I hopped on phind.com and use Google about 25%, when I just wan to go to a specific site or article. Slowly weaning off. Phind is fantastic, even its search results on the right side bar are clean.
- naruhodo 3y ago> The people who hold the purse strings for Sports Illustrated are more interested in gaming Google search results and the resultant ad revenue from that practice than actually serving their readers. Then by running an ad blocker I'm doing my part to make the world better.
- jebarker 3y agoNot if you're using it to still read Sports Illustrated.
- RugnirViking 3y agoDepends. Do they get paid for adblocker readers? Do they get paid based on the percentage of their readers that use adblock? Do they get paid more if they form over some of this information (and therefore less if it looks bad so they don't)
- tivert 3y agoThe future is bright people. Technology will save us and usher in paradise! But personally, I'm pretty happy about the internet filling up with dogshit, if only because I think it's likely that it will foil the plans of SV, singularitarians, etc.
- dom96 3y agoThe next Google's killer feature will be the ability to filter out AI generated content and promote content that is truly written by humans.
- tomjen3 3y agoHonestly I don't see Google having any killer feature left. The next killer feature is AI to do search, which MS is doing, but Google is failling at so hard they had to fiddle with their own demo. Why do a web search to hope to get answers to my question, when I can have an AI write me a custom article that actually answers my question?
- deepsquirrelnet 3y agoOh how I yearn for the days when people's life stories were written into recipes -- by what I'm told were actual people.
- Kye 3y agoThere's too much value in undetectable AI for an AI detector to last long. Any technology behind a tool that can accurately detect it will used against itself: keep on trying until it can't detect its own output.
- Almondsetat 3y agoCreate the disease and sell the cure
- frob 3y agoWow, that Jake Ward guy linked in the middle is an absolute douchenozzle. His entire business model seems to be generating low-quality AI spam to help websites steal traffic from their competitors. The internet would be a better place if people like him didn't exist.
- sgentle 3y agoSusan Blackmore was right. > To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is. > [...] > Computers handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variation and selection is still done by human beings, with their biologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement, communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already there are examples of computer programs recombining old texts to create new essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions, and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data. Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, AltaVista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2010/08/temes-an-emerging-third-replicator/ https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2010/08/te...
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- TrackerFF 3y agoMakes me wonder how the advertisement industry is going to cope with the ever-growing influx of non-human users. What happens when the conversion rates plummet to zero? Maybe I'm cynic, but a completely walled-off / paid internet doesn't seem too unrealistic. You'll have to pay a subscription to every website you want to visit. On one side you have the open internet wasteland, filled to the brim with AI bots / generated content, essentially trying to vacuum pennies off human visitors. On the other hand you have the walled internet, where you have to pay for stuff and jump through flaming hoops to prove that you're a human.
- soared 3y agoAI solves that problem - it’s pretty easy to look at behavioral data and identify low v high quality users. Optimize towards what the AI thinks is users likely to convert and the problem Is solved.
- fnordian_slip 3y agoWhat prevents this from becoming a game of cat and mouse? I mean, AIs can pretend to be high quality users, too, right? I won't pretend to be able to look into the future with any kind of certainty, even if the scope is only a couple of years, but it wouldn't surprise me if we have created a way to make the dead internet theory real.
- WJW 3y agoIt is already a game of cat and mouse and has been since forever. There's nothing wrong with cat-and-mouse games from the viewpoint of an advertiser, it just means they have to keep innovating.
- TrackerFF 3y agoWouldn't it just become an arms race between the two? I.e. the ad companies trying to identify human/legit users the best they can, and the AI actors trying to mimic high quality users? Having interacted with some bots, it def feels like we've gone from the stone age, to the sci-fi future, in only a couple of years.
- MrsPeaches 3y agoGoogle ≠ the internet. This reads more like a rant against Google’s search product. Yes, Google might go under due to AI (Clayton says, thank you and goodbye) but that doesn’t mean the internet as a whole is doomed. To be frank, the internet is already awash with dogshit. It’s doing pretty well so far.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- me_again 3y agoThe worst case scenario is something like Kessler Syndrome for information.
- zilti 3y agoWe are racing right towards that, accelerating as we go. The web's toast. Maybe we can somehow build up different, more resilient platforms.
- philodelta 3y agoThis has already become self-evident when trying to find images on google. I have seen whole pages of results which were AI-generated. At every level it becomes so hard to understand the motivations of my fellow man in regards to these problems, it quickly invites almost conspiratorial thinking. How could anyone be so stupid, how is anyone benefitting, from the obvious and apocalyptic poisoning of the well. Especially when in the case of AI-imagery, if I really wanted the amalgamized paste of generative output I could just make it myself. Some part of me actually finds it offensive, that someone would have the gall to waste storage on this easily replicable digital refuse.
- BizarreByte 3y agoGoogle Image search has been hopeless for a long time now, you'll get better results typically on Yandex or Bing to the point I won't use Google for images.
- jampekka 3y agoTo prevent the impending total enshittification of the Internet we'd probably need e.g. something like cryptographically signing human-generated content with some way of proving humanness. Although nothing like this (or other solutions) is probably gonna materialize. The world, and especially the Internet, is driven by short-term commercial interests, and not-enshittifying things doesn't seem to make enough return on capital.
- TrackerFF 3y agoI live in Norway, and I've noticed that identification systems like BankID have become ubiquitous - even necessary - if you want to do anything serious on the web.
- mrkramer 3y ago>To prevent the impending total enshittification of the Internet we'd probably need e.g. something like cryptographically signing human-generated content with some way of proving humanness. Perhaps cryptography can be useful but already irl you can buy "hand-made" products but ofc you can not fully trust that something was really hand-made or that web content was made really by human but at the end of the day it all comes down to trust. Web sites and web publishers need to build up trust in order to gain traction among web users and web customers.
- macNchz 3y agoSearch has been steadily headed this direction for a long time, but recently (in just the last couple of months) I’ve started to notice a big uptick in obvious ChatGPT content in places that have otherwise been less egregiously SEO’d: StackOverflow answers, a real person’s personal Medium blog, comment sections on blogs that have good discussions, Github issues, etc. Unfortunately I have to imagine this is only going to lead to more closed communities and less free sharing of knowledge.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoBefore that though, it already felt like a lot of those outlets - blogs, SO, comment sections - were either bot or low-value, almost automatic comments. And of course, low wage content writers who get paid by the word to write "where do I find this item" guides for video game websites, somehow managing to change "it's in this chest in this region" to ten paragraph articles.
- SleepilyLimping 3y ago"Now, potions are traditionally a good way of getting healing in RPGs. Potions were first introduced in..."
- myaccountonhn 3y agoIt's def. gotten worse. ATM if you search for anything related to OCaml you will get links to Ocamlwiki, which is just a AI generated site filled with bullshit and inaccuracies.
- peppermint_gum 3y agoOne aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for AI-generated garbage. Its command of the language is perfect - in fact, it's much better than that of most human beings. Anyone can instantly generate superficially coherent posts. You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do. curl's struggle with bogus AI-generated bug reports is a good example of the problems this causes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878 This is only the beginning, it will get much worse. At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- asylteltine 3y agoThat’s true. I thought I missed the internet before ClosedAI ruined it but man, I would love to go back to 2020 internet now. LLM research is going to be the downfall of society in so many ways. Even at a basic level my friend is taking a masters and EVERYONE is using chatgpt for responses. It’s so obvious with the PC way it phrases things and then summarizes it at the end. I hope they just get expelled.
- oblio 3y agoAt this rate many exams will just become oral exams :-)
- rightbyte 3y agoOr like ... normal paper exams in a class room?
- monkeynotes 3y agoThe paradigm is changed beyond that. Exams are irrelevant if intelligence is freely available to everyone. Anyone who can ask questions can be a doctor, anyone can be an architect. All of those duties are at the fingertips of anyone who cares to ask. So why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge? An exam certifies you know how to do something, well if you can ask questions you can do anything.
- mint2 3y agoThe post google uses for the feature snippet for the search “best place to fly drones in sf” appears to be misleading inane useless dogshit. What I’m not sure is whether it’s ai generated, bad quality traditional bot generated, or human content spam generated. But whatever it is, it fooled google. It hurts to read, each numbered point is similar to this: “S.F. city parks are a great and amazing place to fly. Sf parks are illegal to fly in” Post link: https://www.kentfaith.com/blog/article_where-can-you-fly-drones-in-san-francisco_2144 https://www.kentfaith.com/blog/article_where-can-you-fly-dro...
- cwmma 3y agoWe're really fast forwarding to the end of Accelerando where the earth gets dissembled to make a dyson sphere of computronium that ends up being filled with sentient pyramid schemes.
- Bufgaric 3y agoThose cyber lobsters are our only hope!
- nunez 3y agoThis is an old problem that LLM-generated content only accelerated. LMGTFY died when Google tripled down on growing their ad revenue and adtech dominance and SEO ran rampant throughout search results. It is fairly difficult to get non-biased factual information from a naked query these days, which is why I try to search for info on Reddit first. This isn't a panacea either given that it's been chock-ful of astroturfed content for the last few years, but older threads from when Reddit was less popular and manipulatable or threads from small communities are usually good bets.
- larodi 3y agoone thing to always remember, which may also easily repulse you from ever using google search again - it does not give search results. it generates a carefully crafted page which caters to your bubble. so does FB, so does Twitter, etc. just using different algos. Google search does not return the same results for the same query for different people, which a) makes it so different from AltaVista and historical search engines (from ElasticSearch if you want); and b) this is enough to NOT treat it as a search engine, even though is still billed as one....but as a personal wall of ad-designated BS.
- htrp 3y agoWell I feel like that would be ok if 1) they told you this 2) it actually gave you those relevant results It does make troubleshooting officially impossible, can't tell people its the 3rd link on this specific query in google.
- larodi 3y ago> Well I feel like that would be ok if 1) they told you this 2) it actually gave you those relevant results indeed, and the fact they don't tell you many things like... common ethics would require to, makes the whole service even more... despicable.
- causal 3y agoFinally switched to Kagi when I realized Google could not find a particular ThreeJS class doc page for me no matter what keywords I used, I had to paste the very URL of the page for it to appear at the top of my search results. Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.
- larodi 3y agoWondering whether 10-12 years from now the internet becomes a hostile, corpo-inhibited medium, while the personal LLMs are what we take knowledge from. In reality some (of us) already do so, the only thing is that we don't really know what the LLMs were fed to begin with, but is assumed to be a reality-based information. Your personal Search Engine is your personal model which you evolve to your needs. Safely including with your history, your chats, your family's memory. Internet then exists only as technical means to reach big corpo nets (heavily guarded against anyone extracting info from them) and as a ring of guerilla websites or fediverses, which are open by nature and resemble the old internet. It is really to my opinion that this happens earlier than 2036.
- nicbou 3y agoWho will create the information then? They won't have traffic, an audience or even any recognition. Who would want to do that?
- passion__desire 3y agoAI-assisted information creation will be treated the same way electronic music is considered now.
- nicbou 3y agoIt's hardly comparable. How will AI discover new facts in the real world? What is the AI equivalent of boots-on-the-ground journalism? Of learning by doing? A lot of reality happens in meatspace, and someone eventually needs to put that information into computers. AI can only rehash what's already there. My question is who will do that work if you rob them of any satisfaction for doing it? A man running a widget review blogs could get reader mail, online friendships, advertising partnerships, a sense of making his mark. If everything a person creates just feeds an AI, what do they get in return?
- passion__desire 3y agoFunsearch could be one way out for theoretical work. For robotics, we can have better simulated environments to learn, so no need for meatspace. Run experiments in simulated envs. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-in-mathematical-sciences-using-large-language-models/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-d...
- spookybones 3y agoWhat’s the chance that some of these comments are AI bots? Genuine question. When will OpenAI create an AI PR team?
- jprete 3y agoThey don't have to, the fandom will do it for free. EDIT: Also, the odds are close to 100%.
- BizarreByte 3y ago> They don't have to, the fandom will do it for free. See Elon Musk about 4-5 years ago. It was impossible to criticize the man or his projects without getting dogpiled.
- sureglymop 3y agoStill the case despite many many examples why there should be harsh criticisms. Human behavior is incredibly interesting at times.
- qingcharles 3y agoI just did a demo this week for someone who asked how well GPT4 would write forum replies in their voice. The results were startling to be honest. The only way I would (maybe) tell the comments were AI is that they were slightly better quality replies than the author themselves would have written. I wouldn't go forward with it because it felt unethical, but it was a really fascinating thought experiment.
- spookybones 3y agoI’m sure we’ll see a lot of this soon with the US presidential election.
- tavavex 3y agoOn HN? I'm going to guess it's pretty low. There's no monetary incentive to generating content or getting HN's "karma".
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoI'm a sports fan who follows basketball and football. Here's something I see a lot of nowadays in my feed: <Player> set a new record last night And when you go to click into it? An AI created post about how the athlete in question is now in position 1258 all time at something or other. Awesome. Such a great use of technology. Yet this will be the primary use of AI outside of materials research. Making clickbait clickbaitier.
- ravenstine 3y agoAlthough I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material and isn't that distinguishable from it. It doesn't help that search engines today sort by prestige over whether your query matches text in a webpage. People aren't really using the web much now anyway. They're living in apps. I don't see people surfing webpages on their phone unless they're "googling" a question, and even then they aren't usually going more than 1 level deep before returning to their app experience. The web has been crap for a very long time, and it has become worse, but soon it's not going to matter anymore. You, the reader, were the frog slowly boiling, except now the heat has been turned way up and you are now aware of your situation. If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop. EDIT: People seem to be misunderstanding me by thinking I am not considering the change in volume of spam. I invoked the boiling frog analogy specifically to make the point that the volume has significantly increased.
- luma 3y agoTotally agreed, SEO spammers wrecked the public web years ago and Google did everything they could to enable it for more ad revenue.
- Culonavirus 3y agoSEO spammers were a thing even before Google fucked their search results. You know when Google search results were still amazing, like decade ago? SEO spammers were thriving. I know that for a fact because I worked for one back then. 90% of why Google search sucks now is due to Google being too greedy, only the rest is caused by SEO spammers.
- ska 3y agoNo, SEO made things noticeably worse from the very beginning. This is almost tautological, when you think about it. Agree googles machinations have not helped, but disagree with your 90/10 split.
- blueboo 3y agoThere’s a grain of truth here, but I object to the hyperbolic headline as it is unsupported by the content’s described data points which are exceptional rather than representative of typical content. “The internet is broken in a fundamental way”? No, there are some growing pains at the margins. Feel free to react strongly, but these are not the same.
- epolanski 3y agoI feel like Google's SEO and advertisement game have cornered the entire internet into being mostly a useless gamification and parody of content. Automation can now shove even further content to search engines and keep lowering the quality further. I think that websites as we knew and searched for them started dying a long time ago, but AI will unavoidably make this whole matter worse.
- maerF0x0 3y agoTo me the most interesting comment I heard on the "practical ai" podcast[1]. One of the guests pointed out that 2021 might be the last year we can have AI train off of, because the internet is about to explode in AI generated content which means it will just become a self-reinforcing loop. [1]: https://changelog.com/practicalai https://changelog.com/practicalai
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2023)
- jillesvangurp 3y agoThe way out is authenticity. Signed content is the only way to get that. You can't take anything at face value. It might be generated, forged, et. When anyone can publish anything and when anyone is outnumbered by AIs publishing even more things, the only way to filter that is by relying on reputation and authenticity so you can know who published what and what else they are saying. Web of trust has of course been tried but it never got out of the it's a geeky things for tin foil hat wearing geeks kind of corner. It may be time to give that another try.
- volkk 3y agoagree 100%. there's no going back at this point and it's an inevitable problem anyway. so we need to innovate further.
- smt88 3y ago> Signed content is the only way to get that. This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it. It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can always defraud it. This is the same reason that no one ever successfully used blockchains for supply-chain authentication. Yes, you can verify that item #523 has a valid hash associated with it, but you can't prove that the hash was applied to item #523 instead of something fraudulent.
- marstall 3y ago> It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. Though there are many brands built on trust, whose domain name is very difficult to spoof, that are an exception to this. Hate on nytimes.com, but you have reasonable confidence the content on that site is written, fact-checked and edited by staff at the New York Times Company.
- nerdponx 3y ago
- mihaaly 3y ago> The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless. You are as likely to return incorrect information as you are complete fabrications To me this came when I realised that SEO this and SEO that SEO here and SEO there was as innate as googling for answers. And is still incomprehensible to me how people can argue with serious face for actively and forcefully distorting the search results that they so eagerly want to build their goodwill on top of. Machines only taking over the killing of the internet search with incredible efficiency.
- tobiasSoftware 3y agoMy favorite example is if I search Google for "tide me over vs tie me over" it comes up with "Tie me over is correct". Not only is this wrong, but if you click the link, the source itself says it is wrong! The source is literally on the importance of fact checking, and Google is pulling a quote that the article uses as an example of an incorrect fact. Google: WARNING: It is a common misconception that the phrase “tie me over” is actually pronounced “tide me over.” Some even go so far as to say the “tide” refers to the ebb and flow of hunger, but this is not the case. Rest assured “tie me over” is correct. Actual source: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tie-me-over-vs-tide-me-over-also-the-importance-of-fact-checking https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tie-me-over-vs-tid...
- tavavex 3y agoInterestingly enough, I searched for the same query myself (signed out) and it came up with > “Tied over” is a misspelling of “tide over.” Tied means to attach, fasten, or bind something, while a tide is the rising and falling of the sea that takes place twice a day in relation to the pull of the moon's gravity. So, it did come up with a correct answer... but the answer is to a completely different question. Though the "actual source" you used was the second result.
- codexb 3y agoLets be honest, the internet has always been full of Dogshit. Teachers have long warned us about using Wikipedia as a source. Fake news has always existed. Real news has been diluting itself with questionably true clickbait for years. The mass scramble by companies to hastily use AI is just further diluting and tainting the standard information outlets we've used.
- nicbou 3y agoIt just got a lot cheaper to generate convincing dogshit
- mingus88 3y agoHow old are you? Xillenial here and the internet was a utopia when I first explored it. Everyone you interacted with was similarly curious and interesting. All the content was some flavor of passion project. I’ve recently been getting into ham radio because it has a similar feel to me as the early internet. You need a license and an outlay of equipment and everyone else is a hobbyist also. It’s not an app anyone can use with their thumbs. I think we’ll see a backlash at some point where people abandon these app-driven spaces and we go back to grass roots communities. At least I hope so
- rightbyte 3y ago> I think we’ll see a backlash at some point where people abandon these app-driven spaces and we go back to grass roots communities. To some extent is has already happened. I've seen some upswing in niche forum use but nowhere close to the heyday. Sadly, most people seem to move into private chat channels.
- renegat0x0 3y agoI think most people misunderstand that the search engines are not content. Internet was always full of spam. Google was able to work around that. Since for some years Internet became dead because Google is not able to keep up. Internet was dogshit. Now it is just AI dogshit. Google was quite good, but now it is not. In a few years we will not use Google search, we will ask chatbots for answers. There will be no "link archive", or nobody will be interested at all in looking at them. Chatbots will be worshiped. Why going to BBC, if chatbot will always 'know better'. Google will not invest into Google search, as this "program" will die. Killed of. Journalists will remain. BBC will continue writing stories, which will be created only to feed chat bot monsters.
- blackhaz 3y agoThat's it. Google is loosing the ground here. It is no longer "the gateway to the Internet." There has always been dog shit, it's just there will now be much more dog shit than ever. Indexing dog shit is not working anymore. There is still Internet out there with useful information, it's just you cannot access it by searching. Are we back to the era of curated sources, encyclopedias and web rings?
- skydhash 3y agoI'm already back to it, by following the blogs I like and by bookmarking every interesting sources I come across, as it's unlikely to get back to it via googling. I also more diligent with taking notes, and building a personal knowledge base due to the rate of information disappearing, especially recommendations.
- renegat0x0 3y agoI'm doing the same thing. I build database of links I find interesting. For example. https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
- chasd00 3y ago> Are we back to the era of curated sources, encyclopedias and web rings? maybe even further. I subscribed to the physical, printed and delivered, Wall St. journal a few weeks ago, i really really like it. It has a first page and a last page, i can read it and be done. There's no infinite scroll. I also am subscribed (by chance more or less) to a physical magazine that arrives monthly. I really enjoy it too, the magazine isn't an answer to a question I asked so I always run across something unexpected/new there. Also, like the newspaper, it has a last page and there's no engagement bait because it's Read Only.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sssilver 3y agoTongue in cheek: is public key cryptography the solution to verifying content authorship on the internet? Should all major OSes establish and bundle proof of authenticity for every phrase and image created in them using an input device attached to them?
- blackhaz 3y agoThat's an interesting idea. Until AIs will get access to keyboard drivers to type their dogshit.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAuthenticity is so much more than "I am using a non-public number to mathematically sign this data", that's the whole problem. It's the same as crypto people not understanding that pretty much zero theft/fraud/crime happens through a simple man in the middle attack, so building a terrible machine that can ONLY prevent that method is mediocre at anything else. Gram and Gramp are going to get their keys phished. An LLM screed signed by Gramps stolen key isn't authentic even though it 100% mathematically is. Authenticity is about the mindset and intentions of the creator.
- rglover 3y agoI've had a draft blog post on my todo list for awhile titled "Chauffeur Knowledge and the Impending AI Crack-Up." While humorous today, the eggs melting and sinus inflammation are perfect examples of where I think AI will cause the most destruction. I'm of the mind that any societal collapse generated by AI will be one of stupidity and over-reliance on AI's "intelligence" as infallible, not some Terminator scenario or elimination of too many jobs. Eventually, people will not know the difference between an AI "hallucination" and factual information. This becomes a serious problem when you consider that there's already an existing cohort of people who blindly trust Google over experienced humans. Case in point: I just saw a video [1] this morning where an air traffic controller argues with an experienced pilot about their approach method, citing "I Googled it" as their authoritative information source. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=BxbF638gCYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=BxbF638gCYQ
- bno1 3y ago"The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people" But the examples given are... google search results and articles from big publishers, things made to cast a wide net. Those were never good ways to communicate with other people online imo. If you want to interact with real people look for smaller communities and individual creators.
- hardcopy 3y agoThe Internet Is Full of Registration Popup Dogshit
- dbttdft 3y agoThere's no difference. Web search has been useless for over 15 years now. This is barely any worse than the previous situation which was where that any question, if not immediately answered with marketing pages for all the first results, would lead to some thinly veiled marketing crap a la a "blog". I would never trust someone whose career is "content creation" or "monetized blogging" to answer any question I have, like, how to was a toilet. The only difference between the example in the article and what you'd get 10 years ago, is that the former is obviously wrong and the latter would be something you would need to spend several days to refute unless you so happen to work in the relevant field.
- alecco 3y ago[flagged]
- mo_42 3y agoGenerally, I'm an optimistic about current approaches towards AI. I'm using ChatGPT daily for my work. I'm seeing the BS generated from it all the time but it provides many great ideas from which I create something useful (both writing and programming). The sinus example scares me. It's obviously wrong. But what about all the subtle errors that will be generated? Humanity's knowledge is bootstrapped from BS. But most of it is long forgotten. On the internet, the BS ends up in the training data of the next iteration. I guess curation of quality text corpora will be an important thing in the next years.
- tonymet 3y agoYou have to account for the amplification effect when a large number of people read false information so it becomes true. “Truth” in the most practical sense is whatever most people believe and espouse. Sure we’re all more sophisticated and intelligent to believe the actual truth, but do you have the willpower to fight that battle every day?
- mo_42 3y agoI like that idea. I guess such an amplification effect can lead entire civilizations astray. But still in the long run BS will be ruled out. Here, I disagree with you in that "truth" is also a matter what works and what not. Simply, BS doesn't work. It makes worse models in the heads of people (and possible artificial agents). Worse models will lead to less effective decisions.
- mrguyorama 3y ago>But still in the long run BS will be ruled out. You espouse this like a rule but it just isn't so. Nazi Germany believed themselves to be the righteous rulers of the earth, descended from Ubermen that never existed, commanding more powerful armies than anything, and were allowed to live that delusion right up until the democratic world forced them to reckon with reality. You can avoid that reckoning for arbitrary lengths of time. It's no different to "the market will remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It's the same rule. Reality can be avoided for as long as you want if you don't have infinite ambition.
- trey-jones 3y agoBefore the "AI" takeover, it was already full of SEO-mandated human-generated bullshit, so we haven't actually lost that much in the last couple of years. I've been saying it for almost as long as I've been in the industry, which is well over a decade now.
- tonymet 3y agoIf this is true it implies all news and history for the past 10 years is also human-generated bullshit. I’m not saying you’re wrong – just that you have to follow your beliefs to their conclusions.
- trey-jones 3y agoI apologize; I didn't mean to imply anything about ALL of anything. My main complaint is that the things that are not bullshit on the internet have largely been buried beneath bullshit for a long time.
- waveBidder 3y agohumans are quite capable of generating bullshit, I don't think that's ever been in contention. doesn't mean all or even most human generated content is garbage.
- tonymet 3y agoIt may. And given the claim that most of the web is dogshit, that means that most of everything we are consuming is dogshit. Unless we can come up with a model and framework for discernment. And we don't have a workable one.
- gfodor 3y agoUltimately cryptography, up to and including the use of decentralized ledgers, will help mitigate some of this, by carving out ground facts that can be mutually agreed upon without risk of AI interference. The people who hate AI the most often hate crypto too, so it will be interesting to see how they resolve this.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoDead Internet Theory, now coming true. Only way to win is not to play.
- Devasta 3y agoI fully believe that the future of the internet is going to small invite only enclaves of a few hundred people, because everything else will be unusable because of AI generated trash.
- wantsanagent 3y agoIf you've ready Anathem ... as Ita it's our job to filter the crap from the Reticulum anyway so let's get to it. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Ita https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Ita https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulum https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulum
- ashton314 3y ago“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.” “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.” Anathem (Part 11: Advent) by Neil Stephenson I like "Artificial Inanity" as a description of LLMs
- Apocryphon 3y agoI've figured that was the future for almost 25 years now, see #5: https://ymlibrary.com/download/Topics/Self/Work-School/Work-School-Stories-Inspiration/Ten%20hottest%20jobs%20What%20jobs%20disappear.pdf https://ymlibrary.com/download/Topics/Self/Work-School/Work-...
- andrewdubinsky 3y agoWasn't the internet full of hand-crafted made for google dog shit before?
- imposter 3y agoI see the point about AI's impact on internet content, but I think it's important to view it in a broader context. AI is just a tool, and its effectiveness is shaped by how users use it. It's not just AI, but the entire internet that's always had a mix of good and bad content. AI actually has the potential to improve access to information and level the field. It's more about refining search algorithms and enhancing oversight rather than dismissing the technology altogether. The internet has always required users and creators to sift through and elevate quality content. AI is just a new aspect of this
- orangesite 3y agoI hate to keep beating on this drum but is _anyone_ working on a search engine yet that filters out anything with ads and/or a tracker? The root cause of the problem is content monetization so please let's just stop indexing anything that tries to monetize content and/or track readers. And I'll say this for all the overly-capitalistic folk on here: the amount of money I'm willing to pay for access to a search engine like this has been going up every month since 2002 -- something that the other paid search engines clearly fail to understand.
- sureglymop 3y agoRegarding the last sentence: The problem is that capitalism knows no limits. Sure, it would be nice to pay a monthly subscription for genuinely good and desirable content/search results... But what if the CEO of the service provider needs another $5m bonus? What if the stock needs to go up so that the shareholder gamblers can get more dividend paid? What if all of a sudden the service gets bought out? The truth is that what you are seeking is more likely to come from someone who is just passionate about it with not that much motivation based on profit. That doesn't mean that this entity or person can't be financially supported but it gets problematic when profit is the _main_ incentive. For a good example of an interesting search engine built by a single guy, see Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- mrkramer 3y agoThat would solve some problems but not all; spam sites would be filtered out but also sites with good quality information that monetize with ads would also be filtered out. There is no silver bullet(one way solves all) for SEO/ad/affiliate spam.
- NanoYohaneTSU 3y agoBeing dismissive of AI while simultaneously embracing Google is a very hypocritical position. Google has trashed the internet by changing how results are generated so that your website is only successful by being 1. approved and 2. popular. AI has brought back some of the fun from 2010~ because you can generate non-pre-approved content for fun and profit and have a big community to share it with.
- alickz 3y ago>The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines. LLMs don't talk to each other - humans use LLMs to talk to other humans
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoAre you sure about that? Can you conceive of LLM generated SEO spam blogs receiving comments from completely unrelated LLM generated comment spammers?
- tonymet 3y agoFor those advocating for “dead internet” aka “it was all dogshit anyway” – where is the boundary for non-dogshit information? Presumably everything we consume originated from or is adjacent to content from the internet. Even original content & sources are reading the internet themselves. Perhaps you are internet aristocracy advocating “Google for thee and arXiv.org for me” . Are the folks writing our peer reviewed studies in an air-gapped compound in the amazon? You can’t put the sewer next to the water supply and expect the two not to mix together.
- Barrin92 3y ago>You can’t put the sewer next to the water supply and expect the two not to mix together. You can in digital communication because we have cryptography. That's the reason we can have secure https traffic over a really insecure web. The future is probably that almost everything authentic is going to be signed and everything else we'll just assume comes from a bot.
- tonymet 3y agoBots can sign. and how do sigs stop the citogenesis ? people will continue to believe and reference BS.
- emsign 3y ago> In the future I fear that people will have no other choice but to ask people for information from the Internet, because right now it’s all full of AI dogshit. Ha ha ha! That future is now, the value of the web has declined for me dramatically. I hate looking for information on the web now. First it was troll and content farms, now they have a new sibling to help them enshitify the web further in AI. Apart from a few places I trust I've turned away from the web. The worst thing is that I spent more of my time researching now and I seldom get any results.
- PeterCorless 3y agoThat there has always been terribly-rendered dreck on the Internet. Badly-written copy by semi-literate self-appointed "authorities." Kitbashed plagiarism that only half-understood its sources. Conspiracy theories galore from garbage-minded gasbags. Totally muddle-headed hot takes. But it was manually generated. Or semi-automatic at best (like bad machine translations of foreign language sources). The issue with AI is the fully-automatic engines behind the process. It's not that bad web pages are unique in history. What is unique is the sheer volume and velocity of drek that is being and will be produced. Combatting this will need technology to, in effect, provide a mark of authenticity. "This was created by a human," in effect, and, more specifically, "By this [human|set of humans]." Contrariwise, "This is a product of system X." Of course, people will lie and claim their AIs didn't ghostwrite their content or create those images. So against authorship and identities there will be an increasing need to rank authority/authenticity/veracity. Not all AI-generated content will be horrible. And not all human-generated content will be trustworthy. There will need to be a way to mark reliability based on community-oriented standards. For AI-generated content (and human-generated content too) there will need to be ways to cite sources. This will all become highly politicized, commercialized and gamed. Yet if we don't work on such standards, we will continue to be beholden to hidden search engine algorithms of trustworthiness. Why did something get to the answerbox or SERP1? Was it simply through keyword packing? Or did whatever author behind this — human or machine — actually know (or at least seem to know) what the hell they are talking about? There will need to be Internet-wide ways to create community-oriented ratings. Thumbs up and down. Maybe this is a popular page with the public. But actual professional astronomers see this as factually misleading. Maybe this page is popular with political faction X. But others point out it is rife with factually incorrect conspiracy theories. Just like there are now "community notes" on Twitter (X), the whole Internet needs the equivalent way to ascribe qualitative judgments on any arbitrary page.
- mrkramer 3y ago>Not all AI-generated content will be horrible. And not all human-generated content will be trustworthy. There will need to be a way to mark reliability based on community-oriented standards. For AI-generated content (and human-generated content too) there will need to be ways to cite sources. Exactly; if AI can for example summarize a research paper or a book better than human then it is hell of a more useful than any person could possibly be and that's the point of AI(that it possibly can exhibit super human skills). Web search engine is a massive data mining and data analytics software solution powered by graph theory and data science algorithms for information retrieval. No search engine can know what information is per se better and no search engine can know what you know and know what you want but it can use graph theory and data science to approximate and show you what it thinks that you want.
- mirekrusin 3y agoSo new generation of captcha will have to be based on content censored by AIs, like uploading videos with your pants down or something?
- nirav72 3y agoIts getting worse. Kindle bookstore is getting flooded with books created with generative AI.
- passion__desire 3y agochatgpt rewrites of popular books on sell on amazon. the author wrote 24 books in a year. https://twitter.com/MelMitchell1/status/1742936379796193612 https://twitter.com/MelMitchell1/status/1742936379796193612
- nirav72 3y agowow. Looks like Amazon is doing very little or anything at all about it.
- d_251 3y agoAre books published by proven publishers the future?
- yaur 3y agoI think a big part of the problem is that internet is also full of him generated dog shit. At some point it became necessary to write a couple of pages about your vacation to Tuscany before dropping the promised recipe to avoid being penalized by google. Now there is now guarantee that the intro filler will ever end or that the eventual recipe will even be something that is desirable or safe to consume.
- Groxx 3y ago>Today, an article was published alleging that Sports Illustrated published AI-generated articles. According to our initial investigation, this is not accurate. The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon… — Sports Illustrated (@SInow) Oh. So you constructed your site to make this distinction unclear, and then paid for an AI generated article to be put on your site. I guess that makes it alright then. Nothing needs to change.
- winddude 3y agoSounds more like google search has gone to dog shit. But a lot of the internet has as well, but it's been happening before AI has become mainstream, I blame walled gardens like linkedin and facebook, as well as signup and paywall blocks.
- qingcharles 3y agoI agree there is a lot of dogshit out there. In 2006 a fellow developer showed me a bot he had coded to write blog posts that just "spun" existing articles it scraped from other sites. He was making a fortune from fake blogs full of thousands of reworked articles, so this dogshit has been steaming for a long time. I use GPT4 and Claude to write drafts of blog posts and wiki articles, often starting by having them summarize 250 page documents. The output is very high quality, adds a lot of value (because many of the original documents cannot be shared) and completes a task that no human could easily do (read thousands of long documents in hours). So, I can't write AI off -- it is a tool that can be used for good or bad.
- guhcampos 3y agoThe SEO that killed the web, the productivity hacking that burns us down, UX to increase sales and subscriptions, the atention harvesting of social networks. We're optimizing ourselves to death.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoDoesn't help that Google search is increasingly useless, across the board. Text Search sucks (yeah sure, you only got 8 results, I don't believe you stop lying to me Google), Image Search sucks, Maps Search even sucks now it refuses to find a direct ask I know is on the street I'm focused on and instead zoom out to highlight something 10 miles+ away on the other side of the city. YouTube search sucks shows like 3 results then starts showing things you've already watched or are just 8+ million views unrelated viral or gross out videos. In retrospect it'll be obvious why Google wont be relevant at all in 15 years.
- activescott 3y agoYou have to wonder now… How do the machines really know what tasty wheat tastes like?
- whatshisface 3y agoKagi is good at filtering this stuff out. Recently I searched for some information about mobile phones, and while the Google results were contradictory and AI-generated, the Kagi results allowed me to find what I needed. I noticed something seemed off about the Google results (they were bad-looking websites with strange phrasings) which was confirmed when I discovered the different results contradicted each other.
- aaroninsf 3y agoA validated set of UTC timestamps (create, modify, access...) sure would be a useful property for objects on the internet. Oh well.
- protortyp 3y agoI doubt that the dogshit is so much worse than it used to be. Unfortunately, I also contributed to this. When I was 13 or 14, I scripted a little tool that allowed me to write one tech news blog post and generate multiple versions of it by simply swapping phrases, adding practically zero value. You'd be surprised (or not) how much of a tech news blog is repetitive wording, mainly to fill yet one more adsense banner after a new paragraph. It was not based on AI, but the core principle was the same as the example in the article. I published each version on a separate WordPress blog covering roughly the same topic, chose random pictures, set random publish dates close to each other, and signed them all up for Google News. This non-AI dogshit dominated a small tech niche, making a decent amount of money at the time for a 14-year-old. I am pretty sure I was not the only one coming up with that idea at the time.
- rightbyte 3y agoInteresting. How long ago was this? It is obvious it happens now alot, but at what time did you think it started?
- protortyp 3y agoThis was already back in 2008/2009. At the time, I posted about my approach in online forums to ask for coding advice. Through those, I got to meet the creators of two more organizations that used a similar approach for PC gaming news pages. And this was for the German market only. So I am quite sure that it was more common in the US at an earlier time, as they are usually ahead of us.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoI was recently looking up passion fruit seeds to see if they were edible. One of the first results had various wrong warnings of adverse health effects. But the best part was it said to be careful to avoid the seeds when you have a fever because it could cause explosions in your mouth. It’s gotta be AI right? Who else could be as dumb as dogshit. See section “how to pick a healthy and…” https://cookingtom.com/are-passion-fruit-seeds-edible/ https://cookingtom.com/are-passion-fruit-seeds-edible/
- flatline 3y agoThat sounds like a bad human translation from Chinese. AI mistakes are a different category.
- throwup238 3y ago> Lastly, be careful that you don’t eat the seeds if you have had a fever, because the heat from the fever could cause the seeds to explode in your mouth. What exactly could have been the true translation then? The blog author is supposedly "Danny Max".
- gumballindie 3y agoIt is. Ranging from sexualised animals (aka furies) to sexualised children cartoons (aka anime) and all the garbage text and trash google search results, the internet is starting to look more like a madhouse rather than a useful tool. Why are companies catering to the needs of such people instead of sane folks? Is it because the latter gave up on using it a long time ago - ie during the conspiracy theory craze of 19-20 - or is there some sort of agenda we are unaware of? Literarily all social networks are filled with weirdos spamming ai left and right.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI think I need to stop coming to this website. HN is absolutely behind the curve about every new piece of tech now. Just grumpy old boomers ranting about the good old days. So long. And thanks for the memories
- wslh 3y agoSciFi: I think the Internet will be a thing of the past, for humans. Humans will use chatbots and/or a few UIs while infinite information is created and consumed on Internet by AI. Probably, at the end, looking at the vast information created, AI will enter in a loop when it is always creating the same information or the same obvious patterns over, and over again. If that happen it will be the prove that AI is not creative as humans.
- jahsome 3y agoEvery time I read something that's aggressively branded as anti-AI, I am compelled to read the final paragraph first just to make sure I'm not about to get baited and switched by someone who believes they're far more clever than they have any right to think.
- benreesman 3y agoLLMs are in this sense the (economically) perfect business to be in: a near perfect solution to a catastrophic problem created by their own existence. Modern top-flight LLMs are hitting to within 10 or 20% of Google at the very start. Google in like 2001 or whatever was fucking magic: vast official data had been put on the “information superhighway”, the non-POSIX-spec stuff was people cool enough to host a website, and spam was, like on AOL or something. You just got a white page, a box, a button, and the answer. I suspect that for people under 35 or 40, LLMs feel kinda like Google did.
- hogu 3y agoidea: search engine that only indexes pages that don't have advertisements
- rchaud 3y agoI've been saving longreads and news articles to PDF for a couple of years now, for pretty much this exact reason. Google's search results are horrifically bad now. Instead of ranking original articles at the top, they will rank 10 blogspam sites that 'summarize' the article, often without attribution to the original link. With AI, the cost of blogspam becomes so low, and 'hallucinations' driving trust trust even lower, that it makes sense to slowly withdraw from the clearweb entirely and stick to a list of official sources and 5 or so trusted 3d party sources.
- bambax 3y ago> The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless. You are as likely to return incorrect information as you are complete fabrications, and the people who put this content on the Internet do not care. The people who hold the purse strings for Sports Illustrated are more interested in gaming Google search results and the resultant ad revenue from that practice than actually serving their readers. The last part of the conclusion to this article is true: people who put shitty content on the Internet don't care, and are only interested in ad revenue. (Incidentally that's why advertising is bad: it gives the wrong incentives. It's possible that ad blockers will save the Internet.) But the first part isn't true: Google is still useful, especially when used as it was first meant to be used. Google started as a search engine, meaning: a tool to find documents in a corpus. It wasn't an oracle, and still isn't, despite how much it wants to be, or users want it to be. Search for documents, go read them, evaluate if what they say seems to make sense and who wrote them, try to do a comparison between different sources to see where they converge and where they diverge, and then draw your own conclusions. > If that means the rest of us get information about inflamed penises when we’re trying to know how long sinus inflammation is supposed to last, well, I guess we’re shit out of luck. If you can't be bothered to know the difference between a sinus and a penis then sorry, not sorry.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- RecycledEle 3y agoAs bad as the Internet is, it's not as bad as Reddit, Tom's Hardware, and Ars Technica. Those forums routinely delete the best posts to protect the egotistical moderators from being proven wrong. I'm talking about you, Beth Mole. If we had accepted the best internet posts and kicked out the egotistical moderators, and charged $0.01 per post to limit spam, the world would be a better place and we would have a better source from which to train our AIs.
- iepathos 3y agoThis article has some good points but suffers from rosy retrospection where it seems to think the Internet wasn't wildly full of misinformation before LLMs and AI articles. The sad fact is LLM's now are often more articulate and more accurate than an unfortunately large percentage of actual people posting on the Internet. Google has always had inaccuracies and is constantly tweaking their search algorithm and ranking system. Google giving you inaccurate results on a couple edge cases is not proof positive Internet is full of AI "Dogshit". Issues with Google is a Google problem not an AI Internet content problem.
- radarsat1 3y agoOpinion pieces "against AI" are getting just as boring and unimaginative as AI-generated content. I feel like all the arguments have been made at this point.
- riffic 3y agolol didn't take long either
- alephnan 3y agoOP rediscovered "Dead Internet Theory"
- wt__ 3y agoOne thing I find increasingly frustrating is reading an article where bits of it are plausible but the whole thing feels "off" and not being sure why. It's too verbose or vague. Was it AI generated? Someone working in a content farm? A non-specialist hired to write posts for SEO? A mixture of all of the above? However, I don't think we've reached the end of the world yet, because if you just have the patience to learn what the reliable sources are, and the wherewithal to pay for a few of them, then you can ignore most of the junk, just as you can mostly ignore social media. Also, y'know, books. Physical books. Public and university libraries. Yes some books age poorly or don't deserve to be published, but consider how many more checks most books go through before they end up on a shelf, including curation by librarians.
- TedDallas 3y agoNote to self: invest in a used book store ASAP.
- nmz 3y agoIts funny, we may have to go back to buying encyclopedias in physical stores in order to prevent this terrible future with made up information and no way to know what is a hallucination or an actual article.
- lionkor 3y agoI have had some experiences with bogus bug reports and PRs, at BeamMP (a mod that adds multiplayer to a car game, ~750k registered players), we have very little external repo activity all things considered. This is due to not advertising it, and due to the shitty license (soon to be AGPL-3.0), but people find it and contribute every now and then. We have had some AI generated PRs and issues. These are incredibly easy to spot for me, I'll get into how in a second, but its been a matter of taking them half-seriously just in case. When asked about their decisions, they either post an obvious AI answer, or garbage, abd you can reject the contribution. There are two parts to this: 1. why is this a problem? cant you just take it at face value? Well, the point at which I'll accept an AI generated PR is when I cannot tell. This has always been the goalpost for me -- if the contribution is good and was made by the person contributing, it gets approved. If not, then not. AI counts as "didnt write it yourself", because I want to be able to ask you later whx something related broke, when your chatgpt chat is already closed. You need to understand the code you post. 2. How do you spot them? Usually what these AI tools, and people using them, do, is change unrelated code. Rewording a comment in the same or even different file, or simply reordering stuff for no reason. Another obvious sign is the solution itself. If it doesnt compile, or doesn't even look like the right language (e.g. C when the codebase is C++), thats a sign as well. Use of libraries that arent there, or even a PR body filled with text. Real people are lazy. Real people tend to get the job done and gtfo, and not blabber on about whatever in their PR. Real people like me also wont merge anything that wastes my time, like AI garbage.
- TimurSadekov 3y agoOne of the world's leading experts on information security systems, Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, in his article https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2 is already considering a scenario where most of the Internet will be a neural network-generated hallucination. But neither you, nor me, nor any expert or anyone at all will be able to distinguish between fake and real. As a result, neural networks will degenerate in the process of learning from their own hallucinations of the Internet, and humans will degenerate in the process of applying the degenerated neural networks. This process he called "neural network collapse". It can only be countered by a collective neural network of all the minds of humanity. For mutual validation and self-improvement of LLM and humans, we need the ability to match the knowledge of artificial intelligence with collective intelligence. This is what can get us out of the personal reality tunnels and personal information bubbles in which we are getting deeper and deeper stuck individually. This network of real human knowledge provides a way to introduce new, clean, human-generated datasets into LLM training in a validity-conscious manner, and makes it possible to avoid model collapse and reduce unwanted errors in creating new and better generations of generative models. And we have a practical solution to avoid the collapse of large language models — we create a global unbiased decentralized CyberPravda (dot) com platform for disputes, for analyzing the reliability of information and assessing the reputation of its authors, where people are accountable with personal reputation for their knowledge and arguments.
- fennecbutt 3y agoIt's become more and more full of human bs as well, a la Taboola "articles", misinformation/fake videos, etc. As always, the problem is not the tool but the people using the tool. Unfortunately we can't stop them whether they write crap themselves or have AI do it but the latter certainly creates more pollution than ever before. As long as someone clicks on a "you wouldn't believe this secret Android feature that makes you money!" then this will continue. Doesn't really matter tho, people have been curating their view of the web via platforms and individual creators/sources for ages now.
- teilo 3y agoNeal Stephenson predicted this in Anathem.