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AI garbage is already polluting the internet
- mikestew 3y agoOriginal title (though I'll allow for some A/B testing): A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture And here's a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opinion/ai-internet-x-youtube.html?ugrp=u&unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.U5Ee.kvPE0e0DodvZ&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opinion/ai-internet-x-you...
- Alifatisk 3y agoI appreciate the gift link
- andy99 3y agoThe scale is going to keep getting worse though there has been SEO crap, blogspam etc etc since the internet started. This is just the latest. There's an opportunity to build a search mechanism that is immune to the broadening underbelly of the internet, just like there was in the early days.
- vivzkestrel 3y agoand how exactly do you propose that this search works?
- Larrikin 3y agoI assume it will be with a PhD thesis similar to how Google started and not an off the cuff response to an Internet comment. Although it would be nice if it truly were that easy.
- adaptbrian 3y agoIt is that easy, the thesis is already on the internet. reboot pagerank and dump the NLP. Flag sites that create content too fast and let users find webpages that match their query. This would be difficult today because this would still be a niche thing as that ship has sailed since Google has tethered itself everywhere.
- ssl-3 3y agoEvery time you enumerate another method for making a functional search engine right now, you also posit a way for it to be circumvented in an hour or two. "Oh, it's easy! Just bring PageRank back, and flag sites that create content too fast!" Later that afternoon: sites multiply, and individually generate content slowly
- __loam 3y agoIt does feel like people don't give Google enough credit that, even in it's current state, they still do a pretty good job in the face of basically every bad actor on the internet.
- dontupvoteme 3y agothe pragmatic solution is simply to build your own, personal, dead internet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hot_gril 3y agoGoogle is at an advantage here. They can see into their own blackbox and instantly change the rules whenever they want. The abusers have to wait a while to see the results of their experiments, knowing that Google can put all that effort to waste instantly.
- JohnFen 3y agoPagerank alone was subverted pretty early on, which is why Google started bring additional signals into things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hansonkd 3y agoI disagree with the authors assertion that a simple watermark would solve the issue. I don't see how you can ever enforce something like a "Clean Air act" against AI. AI is a spectrum and thus it will be a gray area. It would require a draconian system in place that would make people swear that content their posting isn't AI and then have steep penalties for breaking "the oath". But what if someone used a spell checker? Grammar checker? or sentence rewriting in Grammarly? should they be punished for breaking the "clean internet act"? If an honor system doesn't work, then one possibility is to use an economic system so that there is a cost and value associated with the content being produced. However as we have seen with the decline of journalism, is that is hard to get people to pay for quality content. so the cheaper content would still win. Maybe something like a legal tax for content produced could work though. If you produce over Xmb of content as an individual you start to get taxed on your "pollution" to the internet. Single internet user just posting: no tax, influencer posting youtube videos: small tax, AI company dumping out 1000s of books and 1000s of videos: big tax.
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoThe size difference between text and video is enough to kill a tax per gigabyte proposal.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago>tax Don’t see why politicians should get to profit from it
- overstay8930 3y agoThis article implies most content on the internet wasn’t already pollution anyways. It was already possible to min max SEO with bash scripts, AI doesn’t change any of that.
- p10_user 3y agoWasn't the NY times founded way before the microchip? zing!
- loldk 3y ago[dead]
- wruza 3y agoIs it really bad, or is it yet another “kids playing games nowadays” bad? We just invented new instruments for being lazy. The articles were diluted to meet page quota before. The absurd, idiotic videos for kids didn’t start with AI. Models knew about collapse from the start, they’ll figure out. IMO, the article is a low-key FUD piece with no goal.
- karmakaze 3y agoThe internet pollution is being done by humans. They're only now using AI to do so. > In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. AI is the lazy tool at the moment, but the internet was already polluted by humans using other means for other reasons besides publishing papers. Every technological convenience or economic cost reduction has similar effects: email spam, SMS, automated calls, ...
- mediumsmart 3y agoPolluting the internet. lol