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Replace "AI" in your comment with "human journalists" and it still holds largely true though. It's not like AI invented clickbait, though it might have mastere

Replace "AI" in your comment with "human journalists" and it still holds largely true though. It's not like AI invented clickbait, though it might have mastered the art of it. The convincing bullshit problem does not stem from AI, I'd argue it stems from the interaction between ad revenue and SEO and the weird and unexpected incentives created in when mixing those 2. To put it differently, the problem isn't that AI will be great at writing 100 pages of bullshit you'll need to scroll through to get to the actual recipie, the problem is that there was an incentive to write those pages in there first place. Personally I don't care if a human or a robot wrote the bs, in fact I'm glad one fewer human has to waste their time doing just that. Would be great if cutting the bs was a more profitable model though.

friendzis 3y ago
> I'd argue it stems from the interaction between ad revenue and SEO and the weird and unexpected incentives created in when mixing those 2. Personally, I highly dislike this handwaving of SEO. SEO is not some sinister agenda following secret cult trying to disseminate bullshit. SEO is just... following the rules set forth by search engines, which for quite a long time is effectively singlehandedly Google. Those "weird and unexpected incentives" are put forth by Google. If Google for whatever reason started ranking "vegetable growing articles > preparation technique articles > recipes > shops selling vegetables" we would see metaphorical explosion of home gardening in mere few years, only due to the relatively long lifecycles inherent in gardening.
- lupire 3y ago
  The explosion would be in BS articles about gardening, plus ads for whatever the user's profile says they are susceptible to. SEO is gaming Google's heuristics. Google doest generate a perfect ranking according to Google human's values. SEO gaming is much older than Google. Back when "search" was just an alphabetical listing of everyone in a printed book, we had companies calling themselves "A A Aachen" to get to the front of the book.
  - friendzis 3y ago
    > SEO is gaming Google's heuristics. I fail to see immediate disagreement here: I don't see how Google's ranking process/method/algorithm being heuristic changes the observation that to a website in the end it is a set of ranking rules, that can in some ways be gamed. SEO is two part process: discovering those ranking rules and abusing them. Your example with gaming alphabetical listings only reinforces the idea that SEO abuses rules set forth by the ranking engine. However, it does not meaningfully matter whether the incentives inherent in the ranking system form results the way they do intentionally. What matters is the eventual behavior of the ranking system. Mostly because by definition you cannot filter out bad actors entirely, all you can do is 1) place some arbitrarily enforced barriers, which are generally prohibitively costly 2) place incentives minimizing gain of bad actors.
- amarant 3y ago
  It's a classic case of "once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric" To clarify, Google defines the metrics by which pages are ranked in their search results, and since everyone want to be at the top of Google's search results, those metrics immediately become targets for everyone else. It's quite clear to me that the metrics Google have introduced over the year have been meant to improve the quality of the results on their search. It's also clear to me that they have, in actual fact, had the exact opposite effect, namely that recipes are now prepended with a poorly written novella about that one time the author had a emotionally fulfilling dinner with love ones one autumn, in order to increase time spent on the page, since Google at one point quite reasonably thought that pages where visitors stay longer are of higher quality, otherwise why did visitors stay so long?
  - friendzis 3y ago
    In a bit broader sense this situation is created by "enshitification", term coined by Cory Doctorow. Google itself, as a platform, has an incentive to rank higher sites that produce more ad spend. Googles has no incentive to rank "good" (by whatever definition) sites high, that do not spend money on ads themselves or do not contain ad space.
    - amarant 3y ago
      I think they do have at least some incentive to rank good results highly. Why use a search engine if it's no good at finding relevant stuff? And if no one is using the search engine, who's gonna see all those ads? Of course, they do have other incentives too, some of which are directly conflicting with high quality search results, as you point out. I suppose one could argue that their near-monopoly in the search business has allowed them to be somewhat negligent on the quality of search, but now that there are a few competitors at least somewhat worthy of the name, one can hope high quality results will be a higher priority. Anyway, I'm holding out hope someone will one day manage to train a LLM to distinguish between quality content and SEO bullshit, and then put that to use in a search engine. I'm not well versed enough in the current status of LLM's to make a prediction on how hard that will be, but my impression is that we're a fair ways off from any LLM being able to do that well enough to be valuable. I'd really love to be proven wrong on this one, if you're reading this and have some relevant experience, consider yourself challenged! (feel free to rephrase this last bit in your head to whatever motivates you the most)

friendzis 3y ago

> I'd argue it stems from the interaction between ad revenue and SEO and the weird and unexpected incentives created in when mixing those 2. Personally, I highly dislike this handwaving of SEO. SEO is not some sinister agenda following secret cult trying to disseminate bullshit. SEO is just... following the rules set forth by search engines, which for quite a long time is effectively singlehandedly Google. Those "weird and unexpected incentives" are put forth by Google. If Google for whatever reason started ranking "vegetable growing articles > preparation technique articles > recipes > shops selling vegetables" we would see metaphorical explosion of home gardening in mere few years, only due to the relatively long lifecycles inherent in gardening.

lupire 3y ago
The explosion would be in BS articles about gardening, plus ads for whatever the user's profile says they are susceptible to. SEO is gaming Google's heuristics. Google doest generate a perfect ranking according to Google human's values. SEO gaming is much older than Google. Back when "search" was just an alphabetical listing of everyone in a printed book, we had companies calling themselves "A A Aachen" to get to the front of the book.
- friendzis 3y ago
  > SEO is gaming Google's heuristics. I fail to see immediate disagreement here: I don't see how Google's ranking process/method/algorithm being heuristic changes the observation that to a website in the end it is a set of ranking rules, that can in some ways be gamed. SEO is two part process: discovering those ranking rules and abusing them. Your example with gaming alphabetical listings only reinforces the idea that SEO abuses rules set forth by the ranking engine. However, it does not meaningfully matter whether the incentives inherent in the ranking system form results the way they do intentionally. What matters is the eventual behavior of the ranking system. Mostly because by definition you cannot filter out bad actors entirely, all you can do is 1) place some arbitrarily enforced barriers, which are generally prohibitively costly 2) place incentives minimizing gain of bad actors.
amarant 3y ago
It's a classic case of "once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric" To clarify, Google defines the metrics by which pages are ranked in their search results, and since everyone want to be at the top of Google's search results, those metrics immediately become targets for everyone else. It's quite clear to me that the metrics Google have introduced over the year have been meant to improve the quality of the results on their search. It's also clear to me that they have, in actual fact, had the exact opposite effect, namely that recipes are now prepended with a poorly written novella about that one time the author had a emotionally fulfilling dinner with love ones one autumn, in order to increase time spent on the page, since Google at one point quite reasonably thought that pages where visitors stay longer are of higher quality, otherwise why did visitors stay so long?
- friendzis 3y ago
  In a bit broader sense this situation is created by "enshitification", term coined by Cory Doctorow. Google itself, as a platform, has an incentive to rank higher sites that produce more ad spend. Googles has no incentive to rank "good" (by whatever definition) sites high, that do not spend money on ads themselves or do not contain ad space.
  - amarant 3y ago
    I think they do have at least some incentive to rank good results highly. Why use a search engine if it's no good at finding relevant stuff? And if no one is using the search engine, who's gonna see all those ads? Of course, they do have other incentives too, some of which are directly conflicting with high quality search results, as you point out. I suppose one could argue that their near-monopoly in the search business has allowed them to be somewhat negligent on the quality of search, but now that there are a few competitors at least somewhat worthy of the name, one can hope high quality results will be a higher priority. Anyway, I'm holding out hope someone will one day manage to train a LLM to distinguish between quality content and SEO bullshit, and then put that to use in a search engine. I'm not well versed enough in the current status of LLM's to make a prediction on how hard that will be, but my impression is that we're a fair ways off from any LLM being able to do that well enough to be valuable. I'd really love to be proven wrong on this one, if you're reading this and have some relevant experience, consider yourself challenged! (feel free to rephrase this last bit in your head to whatever motivates you the most)