5 ms·

A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.

by cdme 3y ago

golergka 3y ago
LLMs are no more a tool to generate spam than text and image editors or programming languages are.
- croes 3y ago
  And a chainsaw is just tool to cut things like a plastic knife.
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.
    - HughParry 3y ago
      The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.
      - jsheard 3y ago
        While the Google Search people are scrambling to figure out how to sift through genAI slop, another team on the other side of the Google campus is building a platform for publishers to generate that slop. By joining the AI arms race they've put themselves in the awkward position of contributing to the problem that's killing their own core product. https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai/ https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...
        ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
        Yup I saw the Google official YouTube channel comment on a seo channel saying these are good tips and the tips were basically let AI generate a bunch of content for you. Google is out of ideas and they are lost as a company. They will take a long time to die out but die out they will.
    - mega_dean 3y ago
      A recent example of this was "theresawikiforthat", which generated sites like ocamlwiki.com and juliawiki.com that were full of very low-quality information. They are offline now, but the ocamlwiki was consistently toward the top of google search results for a while last year. Here are some threads from the ocaml/julia communities as they started to catch on: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335
      - jay_kyburz 3y ago
        I would like to write a bot for these kinds of websites, but subvert the whole thing, have no ads, no waffle, high quality info. Get to the point as fast as possible.
    - kibibu 3y ago
      I got a few hundred words into a product review the other day before I encountered "as of my knowledge cut off..." Shame on me for not noticing earlier, but I did expect a review site listed on page 1 of google to host actual reviews
  - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    Yes, historically people abuse tools for spam. And also golergka is still completely correct.
  - AbstractH24 3y ago
    You speak of this like its something that is behind us. lol, thats funny.
- phoe-krk 3y ago
  Similarly, the Haber–Bosch process is no more a tool to produce crop fertilizer than feeding corn to a cow is. Seriously though - the ability to industrialize and mass-produce that both LLMs and the industrial ammonia process have given us, for the bad and the good, is the real game-changer here. Treating two tools the same because both can give you the same singular result is an error if they have dramatically different - by several orders of magniture - speeds at which these results are achieved.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Like all automation tools, LLMs are very effective at getting more done. They're not content-neutral (no violence, no sex, etc., which some people complain about very loudly), but for anything not forbidden, gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 can output more for about $4233.60 than a human record holding stenographer can type in a working lifetime. When it doesn't have to be amazing, and I think spam is one of many things in that category, this is absolutely a huge deal compared to a text editor.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    > gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 can output more for about $4233.60 than a human record holding stenographer can type in a working lifetime. “This is the same picture” 1. Build your entire professional ethos on automating things 2. Claim that automation doesn’t make any difference If it’s not named already, I’d coin it “the hacker blindspot”: Scale is simultaneously paramount and irrelevant.
- solumunus 3y ago
  Bombs are no more a tool to kill people than rocks or knives are.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Are you claiming that overwhelming majority of bombs are used to cook and build? Please do share these intriguing cuisine and masonry techniques!
    - bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
      He wasn't claiming that, he was just applying your stupid logic elsewhere.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      I think the majority of explosives are used for fireworks and mining, but I honestly have no idea how to get an accurate count of explosives set off in mining vs. explosives set off in warfare.
      - golergka 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure that majority of explosives by equivalent TNT or by dollar value are used in nuclear warheads for strategic deterrence, and thankfully have never been set off. But it would an interesting challenge to estimate all of these indeed.
        bevekspldnw 3y ago
        I think you’ll appreciate the origins of the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family of engineers.[11] He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1894, Nobel purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill, which he made into a major armaments manufacturer. Nobel also invented ballistite. This invention was a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially the British smokeless powder cordite. As a consequence of his patent claims, Nobel was eventually involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite. Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth coming from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous.[12] There is a popular story about how, in 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled "The Merchant of Death Is Dead", in a French newspaper. It was Alfred's brother Ludvig who had died; the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered. This inspired him to change his will.[13] Historians have been unable to verify this story and some dismiss the story as a myth.[14][15] On 10 December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 63 years old.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Have you ever found this quote? > These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. That paragraph comes from this [1] now-deleted blog post from OpenAI in 2019 when they decided not to release GPT-2 due to "concerns about malicious applications of the technology". It's hard to argue that GPT and friends are not "tools to generate spam" when the researchers themselves argued that point years ago. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190214171619/https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190214171619/https://blog.opena...
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  Yes, they ARE more a tool to generate spam than text, because they can do everything a single text does, but in addition it can also generate text. So strictly more spam.
- samatman 3y ago
  C'mon, be serious. It isn't the only thing they're good at, but they are very good at generating spam. I would even argue that it's what they're best at, because it's the one application where the tendency to confabulate is irrelevant to the use case.
codethatwerks 3y ago
> Seems Predictable Nice pun
glaslong 3y ago
it is good to hear they dogfood their products so heavily

A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.

by cdme 3y ago

A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.

golergka 3y ago

LLMs are no more a tool to generate spam than text and image editors or programming languages are.

croes 3y ago
And a chainsaw is just tool to cut things like a plastic knife.
nirvdrum 3y ago
Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.
- jsheard 3y ago
  Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.
  - HughParry 3y ago
    The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      While the Google Search people are scrambling to figure out how to sift through genAI slop, another team on the other side of the Google campus is building a platform for publishers to generate that slop. By joining the AI arms race they've put themselves in the awkward position of contributing to the problem that's killing their own core product. https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai/ https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...
      - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
        Yup I saw the Google official YouTube channel comment on a seo channel saying these are good tips and the tips were basically let AI generate a bunch of content for you. Google is out of ideas and they are lost as a company. They will take a long time to die out but die out they will.
  - mega_dean 3y ago
    A recent example of this was "theresawikiforthat", which generated sites like ocamlwiki.com and juliawiki.com that were full of very low-quality information. They are offline now, but the ocamlwiki was consistently toward the top of google search results for a while last year. Here are some threads from the ocaml/julia communities as they started to catch on: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      I would like to write a bot for these kinds of websites, but subvert the whole thing, have no ads, no waffle, high quality info. Get to the point as fast as possible.
  - kibibu 3y ago
    I got a few hundred words into a product review the other day before I encountered "as of my knowledge cut off..." Shame on me for not noticing earlier, but I did expect a review site listed on page 1 of google to host actual reviews
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  Yes, historically people abuse tools for spam. And also golergka is still completely correct.
- AbstractH24 3y ago
  You speak of this like its something that is behind us. lol, thats funny.
phoe-krk 3y ago
Similarly, the Haber–Bosch process is no more a tool to produce crop fertilizer than feeding corn to a cow is. Seriously though - the ability to industrialize and mass-produce that both LLMs and the industrial ammonia process have given us, for the bad and the good, is the real game-changer here. Treating two tools the same because both can give you the same singular result is an error if they have dramatically different - by several orders of magniture - speeds at which these results are achieved.
ben_w 3y ago
Like all automation tools, LLMs are very effective at getting more done. They're not content-neutral (no violence, no sex, etc., which some people complain about very loudly), but for anything not forbidden, gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 can output more for about $4233.60 than a human record holding stenographer can type in a working lifetime. When it doesn't have to be amazing, and I think spam is one of many things in that category, this is absolutely a huge deal compared to a text editor.
- klabb3 3y ago
  > gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 can output more for about $4233.60 than a human record holding stenographer can type in a working lifetime. “This is the same picture” 1. Build your entire professional ethos on automating things 2. Claim that automation doesn’t make any difference If it’s not named already, I’d coin it “the hacker blindspot”: Scale is simultaneously paramount and irrelevant.
solumunus 3y ago
Bombs are no more a tool to kill people than rocks or knives are.
- golergka 3y ago
  Are you claiming that overwhelming majority of bombs are used to cook and build? Please do share these intriguing cuisine and masonry techniques!
  - bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
    He wasn't claiming that, he was just applying your stupid logic elsewhere.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    I think the majority of explosives are used for fireworks and mining, but I honestly have no idea how to get an accurate count of explosives set off in mining vs. explosives set off in warfare.
    - golergka 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure that majority of explosives by equivalent TNT or by dollar value are used in nuclear warheads for strategic deterrence, and thankfully have never been set off. But it would an interesting challenge to estimate all of these indeed.
      - bevekspldnw 3y ago
        I think you’ll appreciate the origins of the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden, into a family of engineers.[11] He was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1894, Nobel purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill, which he made into a major armaments manufacturer. Nobel also invented ballistite. This invention was a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially the British smokeless powder cordite. As a consequence of his patent claims, Nobel was eventually involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite. Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth coming from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous.[12] There is a popular story about how, in 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled "The Merchant of Death Is Dead", in a French newspaper. It was Alfred's brother Ludvig who had died; the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered. This inspired him to change his will.[13] Historians have been unable to verify this story and some dismiss the story as a myth.[14][15] On 10 December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 63 years old.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize
probably_wrong 3y ago
Have you ever found this quote? > These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns. That paragraph comes from this [1] now-deleted blog post from OpenAI in 2019 when they decided not to release GPT-2 due to "concerns about malicious applications of the technology". It's hard to argue that GPT and friends are not "tools to generate spam" when the researchers themselves argued that point years ago. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190214171619/https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190214171619/https://blog.opena...
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
Yes, they ARE more a tool to generate spam than text, because they can do everything a single text does, but in addition it can also generate text. So strictly more spam.
samatman 3y ago
C'mon, be serious. It isn't the only thing they're good at, but they are very good at generating spam. I would even argue that it's what they're best at, because it's the one application where the tendency to confabulate is irrelevant to the use case.

codethatwerks 3y ago

> Seems Predictable Nice pun

glaslong 3y ago

it is good to hear they dogfood their products so heavily