7 ms·

Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI

133 points by ctoth 3y ago

tim333 3y ago
>... internet, murdered by generative AI People keep posting these internet ruined by junk articles but my personal experience of it gets better and better over the years. I think the paradox is because there is more of everything over time, quality content and junk. You can be selective and look at the quality stuff - it's not actually that hard.
Instagram5454 3y ago
[dead]
the_shivers 3y ago
I feel like this is exaggerating a bit. Spam exists, but the internet is still very usable. It could certainly become worse in the future, but I find it pretty easy to sift through content these days to get what I need. Also, I don't think the problem is necessarily AI for some of these complaints. Twitter replies are awful because you can pay for increased visibility. On a platform like Reddit where its popularity that determines visibility, the issue virtually disappears. Same issue for SEO spam websites, it's a function of Google's algorithm which incentives brainless keyword spam rather than it being an AI issue. Both of these issues predate generative AI. The braindead children's youtube videos, for what it's worth, also predate AI. I feel like these are just growing pains from a revolutionary new technology. Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks.
- rusty_venture 3y ago
  > Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks. I think the author's point is that generative AI is a completely different animal than the printing press. The printing press could be used to spread both factual information and misinformation alike, and for various reasons factual information seems to have predominated, and high quality information is at least readily available, even if it's not the majority of printed work. Then there's the Internet, which can similarly be used to publish both information and misinformation. Perhaps due to the lower bar for entry and the speed of dissemination, the balance of information to misinformation and high-quality to low-quality content doesn't favor information or high-quality content as strongly as it does in the world of printed text, but at least the Internet always has the potential to spread factual information and high-quality content. Then there's generative AI. Unlike the two communication technologies referenced above, AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. It is by design a statistical inference technique that generates content remixed from its training data. Without substantial human rework and rewriting, AI will always produce such low-quality drek as "it's hard to learn volleyball without a ball". And it's increasing promoted as a way to reduce human effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it without supervising it's output, especially if they are trying to mass-produce content to make money. So now we have a new situation in which the majority of content produced going forwards is likely to be extremely low quality and perhaps contain substantial misinformation as well, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The author seems to posit that exposure to this type of content will negatively affect people's ability to learn to produce good, original content of their own, as they are not exposed to even passably good writing from a young age, so they cannot learn to emulate it.
  - dartos 3y ago
    People are still very much exploring AI for the first time. We technically inclined people are ahead of the curve. One people get a “feel” for what AI content looks like, they’ll be able to filter it out like the do all existing spam.
    - rusty_venture 3y ago
      As the author points out, young children have no context for good vs. bad text. And when we are young is when we learn our language skills.
      - dartos 3y ago
        I think the similar “flavor” AI text has will, to them, feel like primary school textbook text to us. It’s just there for information. Non AI text that doesn’t have that AI flavor will stand out.
    - jjjjj55555 3y ago
      If I filter out the AI spam and then the SEO spam, I'm not left with much anything. HN is one of the few online spaces where I feel like I can actually read the thoughts of actual human beings. Also, like the other person commented, there's another generation coming up for whom AI generated content will be the norm.
  - squigz 3y ago
    > AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. Stopped reading after this. This is like saying Photoshop can only produce low-quality content.
    - rusty_venture 3y ago
      Photoshop can't produce anything on its own; unlike AI, it needs a human to control each step of the process. AI generates statistically-likely text to follow a human prompt with no further intervention required by the human. And this lack of intervention means there is no human QC to ensure the statistically likely text meets any criteria for stylistic, semantic or logical correctness.
- jjjjj55555 3y ago
  The problems he described have less to do with the technology and more to do with the fact that people just have way too much time on their hands. We consume garbage content because we don't have anything better that we want to do. Why else would someone read crap articles from SI written from a fake person? Using the examples of both adults and toddlers to make his point is apt. At least the toddler has no choice.
leobg 3y ago
Or by Sam Altman’s ego. (The author doesn’t say that. But he points out that pre-Altman OpenAI was afraid that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release, while now they let anyone use GPT-4 to spam the hell out of YouTube kids.)
ctoth 3y ago
I thought this was interesting, Erik is a great thinker and writer, but I felt as though the bad stuff he doesn't like here, specifically the weird videos for kids, might equally be blamed on photoshop, YouTube, or any other technology in the chain. Alternatively, it can be blamed on specific people and their specific actions. Like, blame the person that makes the weird videos, not the technology that can both make weird/alien scripts for kids videos and also write my React components and describe what's outside my doorbell camera. It's some serious baby with the bathwater action. General-purpose technologies are general-purpose. The behavior he's upset about is currently human behavior. I don't know of anyone who has wired up GPT and asked it to make money and it has decided to start making YouTube videos.
- Phanyxx 3y ago
  I'm reminded of Balk's Law (Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.)
- EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  The old "guns don't kill people, people kill people," argument... completely ignoring people use guns to kill people. We have a school shooting something like once every two days in the US, but can't put children before gun ownership. I don't know how we survive this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  At a certain point you have to acknowledge that if a technology enables harmful action on a scale previously unimaginable you have to start being very, very careful. Machinists and gun makers are well aware how easy it is to make a machine gun or other illegal firearm, but they don't because that knowledge is locked behind experience, norms and expensive machines. This is why it was potentially a big deal when people started printing guns, not because it wasn't possible before to make dangerous or illegal firearms, but now it was an order of magnitude easier. We have always had conmen, but running a good con was hard and you were limited to one at a time. Now with voice cloning and LLMs it is an order of magnitude easier, and infinitely more replicable. I'm not sure the world is ready for the golden era of grifting, but I'm also not sure how you could ever stop it.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I think the AI generated content looks superior to unboxing videos. The problem is that generative AI is competing with clickbait and it turns out it does the job cheaper.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Can we please have "critic AI" that will filter out bad generative AI content? Because basically, that's the only solution.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
xrd 3y ago
I've been experimenting with making a Firefox plugin to hobble YouTube. I don't want to outright ban it (easily done using /etc/hosts) because there is good stuff on YouTube. I talked to a guy at a conference who seemed really offended I might hack into my kids computers by modifying their YouTube viewing. But YouTube is hacking their brains right now and it drives me crazy. No one seems to be concerned about that. I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads. There is no way to inject myself into their YouTube experience on iOS devices. It's just them and Google, with no insight or control by me, their parent. I hate it. And I pay for YouTube ad-free. Why can't I have a dashboard to prevent my kids from seeing Ninja kids where they just shill junk from Walmart?
- j45 3y ago
  I'd love to learn how Youtube Kids was not helpful? https://www.youtubekids.com/ https://www.youtubekids.com/
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads. Take the pads away, daddy. That's what being a daddy is about, preventing harm when you see it occurring right in front of your eyes. Nobody's gonna do it apart from you.
  - xrd 3y ago
    It's a fight between me, my wife and YouTube, sadly. But, your advice is 100% correct.
    - 15457345234 3y ago
      I mean that's a tough one, because the algorithm can be very subtle sometimes and trying to explain your reasoning as to why you think a certain trend in the content you're being suggested is an insidious form of behaviour modification is genuinely hard to do without sounding like a schizo who's spent too much time with Alex Jones. Sometimes it seems to 'give up' and get frustrated - I literally was suggested some weird religious 'being gay is a sin' video followed by a literal vaginal speculum video once. Can't really misread that message.
rchaud 3y ago
This is a spin on the old debate of "guns kill people vs. people kill people". Both can be right, which is why effective regulation is necessary. No such limits seem to apply to ChatGPT style word vomit generators, so the open web may literally turn into a no-man's land(fill). The way to combat this is to zero in on small communities instead of large ones that attract spammers. - Trusted blogrolls, webrings, OPML feeds - Discourse-style messageboards over bot-ridden Discords. - Smart filters on search engines that filter out blogspam sites (e.g. block if they contain social media "share" buttons). - Return of apps like StumbleUpon for human curated websites instead of Pinterest-style sites that obfuscate original content and tries to add a "BUY ITEMS IN THIS IMAGE" overlay to every post.
- squigz 3y ago
  > Discourse-style messageboards over bot-ridden Discords. I'm a bit confused about this comparison. Is there something about Discourse that makes it immune to bots, where Discord is not? (There's a bit of humor in that Discourse has social media "Share" buttons, which are apparently evil)
- pacmanincarnate 3y ago
  [dead]
- toss1 3y ago
  Yup. This is going to fuel the return of the original Yahoo!-style human-curated internet search engine. Aside from Google already being polluted to uselessness beyond redemption, the firehose of AI trash just makes it impossible, unless they are both motivated and able to get Gemini to discern between real content and trash (both unlikely). Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .
jkoudys 3y ago
Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around. Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground. Teddy bear, teddy bear, push your shoe. Teddy bear, teddy bear, off to school. So tasty and healthy.
KTibow 3y ago
2040: children have become small LLMs, trained on synthetic data
hypefi 3y ago
Do you think there is a place for great art, content, generated by AI, artist using AI to generate and produce even greater art than what they normally produce ?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

133 points by ctoth 3y ago

>... internet, murdered by generative AI People keep posting these internet ruined by junk articles but my personal experience of it gets better and better over the years. I think the paradox is because there is more of everything over time, quality content and junk. You can be selective and look at the quality stuff - it's not actually that hard.

Instagram5454 3y ago

[dead]

the_shivers 3y ago

I feel like this is exaggerating a bit. Spam exists, but the internet is still very usable. It could certainly become worse in the future, but I find it pretty easy to sift through content these days to get what I need. Also, I don't think the problem is necessarily AI for some of these complaints. Twitter replies are awful because you can pay for increased visibility. On a platform like Reddit where its popularity that determines visibility, the issue virtually disappears. Same issue for SEO spam websites, it's a function of Google's algorithm which incentives brainless keyword spam rather than it being an AI issue. Both of these issues predate generative AI. The braindead children's youtube videos, for what it's worth, also predate AI. I feel like these are just growing pains from a revolutionary new technology. Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks.

rusty_venture 3y ago
> Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks. I think the author's point is that generative AI is a completely different animal than the printing press. The printing press could be used to spread both factual information and misinformation alike, and for various reasons factual information seems to have predominated, and high quality information is at least readily available, even if it's not the majority of printed work. Then there's the Internet, which can similarly be used to publish both information and misinformation. Perhaps due to the lower bar for entry and the speed of dissemination, the balance of information to misinformation and high-quality to low-quality content doesn't favor information or high-quality content as strongly as it does in the world of printed text, but at least the Internet always has the potential to spread factual information and high-quality content. Then there's generative AI. Unlike the two communication technologies referenced above, AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. It is by design a statistical inference technique that generates content remixed from its training data. Without substantial human rework and rewriting, AI will always produce such low-quality drek as "it's hard to learn volleyball without a ball". And it's increasing promoted as a way to reduce human effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it without supervising it's output, especially if they are trying to mass-produce content to make money. So now we have a new situation in which the majority of content produced going forwards is likely to be extremely low quality and perhaps contain substantial misinformation as well, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The author seems to posit that exposure to this type of content will negatively affect people's ability to learn to produce good, original content of their own, as they are not exposed to even passably good writing from a young age, so they cannot learn to emulate it.
- dartos 3y ago
  People are still very much exploring AI for the first time. We technically inclined people are ahead of the curve. One people get a “feel” for what AI content looks like, they’ll be able to filter it out like the do all existing spam.
  - rusty_venture 3y ago
    As the author points out, young children have no context for good vs. bad text. And when we are young is when we learn our language skills.
    - dartos 3y ago
      I think the similar “flavor” AI text has will, to them, feel like primary school textbook text to us. It’s just there for information. Non AI text that doesn’t have that AI flavor will stand out.
  - jjjjj55555 3y ago
    If I filter out the AI spam and then the SEO spam, I'm not left with much anything. HN is one of the few online spaces where I feel like I can actually read the thoughts of actual human beings. Also, like the other person commented, there's another generation coming up for whom AI generated content will be the norm.
- squigz 3y ago
  > AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. Stopped reading after this. This is like saying Photoshop can only produce low-quality content.
  - rusty_venture 3y ago
    Photoshop can't produce anything on its own; unlike AI, it needs a human to control each step of the process. AI generates statistically-likely text to follow a human prompt with no further intervention required by the human. And this lack of intervention means there is no human QC to ensure the statistically likely text meets any criteria for stylistic, semantic or logical correctness.
jjjjj55555 3y ago
The problems he described have less to do with the technology and more to do with the fact that people just have way too much time on their hands. We consume garbage content because we don't have anything better that we want to do. Why else would someone read crap articles from SI written from a fake person? Using the examples of both adults and toddlers to make his point is apt. At least the toddler has no choice.

leobg 3y ago

Or by Sam Altman’s ego. (The author doesn’t say that. But he points out that pre-Altman OpenAI was afraid that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release, while now they let anyone use GPT-4 to spam the hell out of YouTube kids.)

ctoth 3y ago

I thought this was interesting, Erik is a great thinker and writer, but I felt as though the bad stuff he doesn't like here, specifically the weird videos for kids, might equally be blamed on photoshop, YouTube, or any other technology in the chain. Alternatively, it can be blamed on specific people and their specific actions. Like, blame the person that makes the weird videos, not the technology that can both make weird/alien scripts for kids videos and also write my React components and describe what's outside my doorbell camera. It's some serious baby with the bathwater action. General-purpose technologies are general-purpose. The behavior he's upset about is currently human behavior. I don't know of anyone who has wired up GPT and asked it to make money and it has decided to start making YouTube videos.

Phanyxx 3y ago
I'm reminded of Balk's Law (Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.)
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
The old "guns don't kill people, people kill people," argument... completely ignoring people use guns to kill people. We have a school shooting something like once every two days in the US, but can't put children before gun ownership. I don't know how we survive this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dghlsakjg 3y ago
At a certain point you have to acknowledge that if a technology enables harmful action on a scale previously unimaginable you have to start being very, very careful. Machinists and gun makers are well aware how easy it is to make a machine gun or other illegal firearm, but they don't because that knowledge is locked behind experience, norms and expensive machines. This is why it was potentially a big deal when people started printing guns, not because it wasn't possible before to make dangerous or illegal firearms, but now it was an order of magnitude easier. We have always had conmen, but running a good con was hard and you were limited to one at a time. Now with voice cloning and LLMs it is an order of magnitude easier, and infinitely more replicable. I'm not sure the world is ready for the golden era of grifting, but I'm also not sure how you could ever stop it.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I think the AI generated content looks superior to unboxing videos. The problem is that generative AI is competing with clickbait and it turns out it does the job cheaper.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

Can we please have "critic AI" that will filter out bad generative AI content? Because basically, that's the only solution.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

xrd 3y ago

I've been experimenting with making a Firefox plugin to hobble YouTube. I don't want to outright ban it (easily done using /etc/hosts) because there is good stuff on YouTube. I talked to a guy at a conference who seemed really offended I might hack into my kids computers by modifying their YouTube viewing. But YouTube is hacking their brains right now and it drives me crazy. No one seems to be concerned about that. I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads. There is no way to inject myself into their YouTube experience on iOS devices. It's just them and Google, with no insight or control by me, their parent. I hate it. And I pay for YouTube ad-free. Why can't I have a dashboard to prevent my kids from seeing Ninja kids where they just shill junk from Walmart?

j45 3y ago
I'd love to learn how Youtube Kids was not helpful? https://www.youtubekids.com/ https://www.youtubekids.com/
15457345234 3y ago
> I'm trying to get my kids to use their Ubuntu Linux machines instead of the fucking iPads. Take the pads away, daddy. That's what being a daddy is about, preventing harm when you see it occurring right in front of your eyes. Nobody's gonna do it apart from you.
- xrd 3y ago
  It's a fight between me, my wife and YouTube, sadly. But, your advice is 100% correct.
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    I mean that's a tough one, because the algorithm can be very subtle sometimes and trying to explain your reasoning as to why you think a certain trend in the content you're being suggested is an insidious form of behaviour modification is genuinely hard to do without sounding like a schizo who's spent too much time with Alex Jones. Sometimes it seems to 'give up' and get frustrated - I literally was suggested some weird religious 'being gay is a sin' video followed by a literal vaginal speculum video once. Can't really misread that message.

rchaud 3y ago

This is a spin on the old debate of "guns kill people vs. people kill people". Both can be right, which is why effective regulation is necessary. No such limits seem to apply to ChatGPT style word vomit generators, so the open web may literally turn into a no-man's land(fill). The way to combat this is to zero in on small communities instead of large ones that attract spammers. - Trusted blogrolls, webrings, OPML feeds - Discourse-style messageboards over bot-ridden Discords. - Smart filters on search engines that filter out blogspam sites (e.g. block if they contain social media "share" buttons). - Return of apps like StumbleUpon for human curated websites instead of Pinterest-style sites that obfuscate original content and tries to add a "BUY ITEMS IN THIS IMAGE" overlay to every post.

squigz 3y ago
> Discourse-style messageboards over bot-ridden Discords. I'm a bit confused about this comparison. Is there something about Discourse that makes it immune to bots, where Discord is not? (There's a bit of humor in that Discourse has social media "Share" buttons, which are apparently evil)
pacmanincarnate 3y ago
[dead]
toss1 3y ago
Yup. This is going to fuel the return of the original Yahoo!-style human-curated internet search engine. Aside from Google already being polluted to uselessness beyond redemption, the firehose of AI trash just makes it impossible, unless they are both motivated and able to get Gemini to discern between real content and trash (both unlikely). Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .

jkoudys 3y ago

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around. Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground. Teddy bear, teddy bear, push your shoe. Teddy bear, teddy bear, off to school. So tasty and healthy.

KTibow 3y ago

2040: children have become small LLMs, trained on synthetic data

hypefi 3y ago

Do you think there is a place for great art, content, generated by AI, artist using AI to generate and produce even greater art than what they normally produce ?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]