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Although 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 In

Although 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 ago
Totally agreed, SEO spammers wrecked the public web years ago and Google did everything they could to enable it for more ad revenue.
- Culonavirus 3y ago
  SEO 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 ago
    No, 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.
    - calibas 3y ago
      You can't really separate SEO and the Google algorithms. SEO is a product of the Google's ranking algorithms. The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.
      - ska 3y ago
        > Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms. Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user. Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat. More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.
tonymet 3y ago
Yes but the content from the web flows into social media, news, “books” (now e-books) in an intangible cyclone of fabricated information. If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  The sewage has already been flowing for years. Now we're just going to have more of it. Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.
  - tonymet 3y ago
    You see how that’s worse, don’t you?
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      It was a growing trend even before ChatGPT was released. The trend accelerated, but it's not new.
      - tonymet 3y ago
        that's not good. it's actually worse if it's not new. and I agree it's not new.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
      The thing that you initially said was, as I interpreted, that there’s a very large difference between no sewage and a little, since a low concentration is still dangerous. The response to you pointed out that we already have sewage in the supply, implying it may not make a huge difference to add more. I feel like you’re goalpost moving.
Aurornis 3y ago
> Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. I feel the same way. I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me. I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.
- bombela 3y ago
  I failed a remote technical interview by writing a bad abstraction and mudding myself with it. After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology. The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    I think you might have missed a big-old .303 bullet there. If a company isn't able to recognise the value of going back and correcting your mistakes, even with the help of LLMs, it doesn't sound like a very nice working environment.
  - jmjanzen 3y ago
    Wow I am not looking forward to that in my future interviews. At least showing atomic little micro commits should probably give potential employers a view into your thought process? Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then. I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.
Shorel 3y ago
I agree that low quality content has always existed. But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now. Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume. Good insight about Apps.
ryanisnan 3y ago
With respect, I think you're missing a key variable, which is volume. Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap. Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Plus, at worst, human writers simply regurgitate/summarize info from other articles. It's more work to intentionally write something false. AI writing has no idea what is real or fake and doesn't care.
FlyingSnake 3y ago
[flagged]
- tokai 3y ago
  Ridiculous calling someone racist over stating the reality that India has huge seo writing industry.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  A huge amount of SEO spam comes out of India. If you look at places like BlackHatWorld, the biggest "SEO firms" are from India. It's the reality unfortunately.
willmadden 3y ago
>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. I completely agree!
stcredzero 3y ago
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. One wonders: How good could the next generation of AIs after LLMs become at curating the web? What if every poster was automatically evaluated by AIs on 1, 2, and 5 year time horizons for predictive capability, bias, and factual accuracy?
kossTKR 3y ago
Okay so this is pretty bleak isn't it, for the entrepreneurs, grassroots, startups, or just free enterprise in the most basic form? I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore. Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?

luma 3y ago

Totally agreed, SEO spammers wrecked the public web years ago and Google did everything they could to enable it for more ad revenue.

Culonavirus 3y ago
SEO 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 ago
  No, 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.
  - calibas 3y ago
    You can't really separate SEO and the Google algorithms. SEO is a product of the Google's ranking algorithms. The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.
    - ska 3y ago
      > Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms. Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user. Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat. More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.

tonymet 3y ago

Yes but the content from the web flows into social media, news, “books” (now e-books) in an intangible cyclone of fabricated information. If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.

nerdponx 3y ago
The sewage has already been flowing for years. Now we're just going to have more of it. Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.
- tonymet 3y ago
  You see how that’s worse, don’t you?
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    It was a growing trend even before ChatGPT was released. The trend accelerated, but it's not new.
    - tonymet 3y ago
      that's not good. it's actually worse if it's not new. and I agree it's not new.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    The thing that you initially said was, as I interpreted, that there’s a very large difference between no sewage and a little, since a low concentration is still dangerous. The response to you pointed out that we already have sewage in the supply, implying it may not make a huge difference to add more. I feel like you’re goalpost moving.

Aurornis 3y ago

> Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. I feel the same way. I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me. I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.

bombela 3y ago
I failed a remote technical interview by writing a bad abstraction and mudding myself with it. After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology. The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I think you might have missed a big-old .303 bullet there. If a company isn't able to recognise the value of going back and correcting your mistakes, even with the help of LLMs, it doesn't sound like a very nice working environment.
- jmjanzen 3y ago
  Wow I am not looking forward to that in my future interviews. At least showing atomic little micro commits should probably give potential employers a view into your thought process? Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then. I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.

Shorel 3y ago

I agree that low quality content has always existed. But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now. Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume. Good insight about Apps.

ryanisnan 3y ago

With respect, I think you're missing a key variable, which is volume. Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap. Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.

rchaud 3y ago
Plus, at worst, human writers simply regurgitate/summarize info from other articles. It's more work to intentionally write something false. AI writing has no idea what is real or fake and doesn't care.

FlyingSnake 3y ago

[flagged]

tokai 3y ago
Ridiculous calling someone racist over stating the reality that India has huge seo writing industry.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
A huge amount of SEO spam comes out of India. If you look at places like BlackHatWorld, the biggest "SEO firms" are from India. It's the reality unfortunately.

willmadden 3y ago

>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. I completely agree!

stcredzero 3y ago

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. One wonders: How good could the next generation of AIs after LLMs become at curating the web? What if every poster was automatically evaluated by AIs on 1, 2, and 5 year time horizons for predictive capability, bias, and factual accuracy?

kossTKR 3y ago

Okay so this is pretty bleak isn't it, for the entrepreneurs, grassroots, startups, or just free enterprise in the most basic form? I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore. Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?