8 ms·

Almost all of the "product X vs Y" results are AI ramblings now. This growth of the dead Internet is making me want to sign up for Kagi. We're going to need a c

Almost all of the "product X vs Y" results are AI ramblings now. This growth of the dead Internet is making me want to sign up for Kagi. We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point.

rightbyte 2y ago
> This growth of the dead internet It is quite surreal to witness. It is certainly fueled by the commercialization of internet due to ads and centralization to user hostile platforms. The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost most of its users in the last 15 years...
- chongli 2y ago
  The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost most of its users in the last 15 years.. What do you mean by this? How do you find the old internet?
  - dumbmrblah 2y ago
    Something Awful is a good example. Other forums behind paywalls or ones that are invite only.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      Even non-paywalled forums are pretty good compared to the "open" internet.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    You don't find them easely. That is the point I guess. But I am not reffering to some obscure darkweb here. Many of e.g. the old niche forums still exist. Like, FOSS sites. GNU project sites seemed not to have aged a day in 20 years, i.e. still party like its 2004. Also, I think non English sites are better off since Reddit mainly ate English communities and sites. Facebook is probably what killed most of the living internet. Small community sites. Like the local Kennel club or Boat marina. A good example of the old internet would be Matthew's Volvo site: https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/search.php?search_id=active_topics https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/search.php?search_i...
  - majani 2y ago
    You're on it right now. HN is a very old site with old users and old mods that links to other old sites
CSMastermind 2y ago
It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.
- jonathanstrange 2y ago
  A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is involved but some sane display technology instead.
  - quantified 2y ago
    Without most of what makes the internet useful, sadly.
    - soganess 2y ago
      I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like the regular internet would go away... when you want useful, go there. I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available. But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.
      - coldpie 2y ago
        Start here: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
      - NoGravitas 2y ago
        I'm already treating the WWW and the commercial internet generally as "Babylon". You have to use it for a lot of stuff (doing commerce, interacting with the government), but why would you willingly use it on your own time?
cogman10 2y ago
Most product reviews are simply pumping amazon comments into AI to generate a review. with a final "pros/cons" section that is basically the same summary amazon AI generates.
jsheard 2y ago
Even Google is trying to get into the X vs Y game, with pretty funny results if you ask for a nonsensical comparison. https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549 https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549 ...or a sensical comparison where it just completely misses the point. https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg
- sobellian 2y ago
  Couldn't reproduce - in fact, the second hit is a threads version of the same post - but I get no AI suggestions for this query. Humorous Google queries (or AI queries more generally) are definitely a trope, so I can never really tell if they actually happened or if it's all for karma.
  - amputect 2y ago
    Google also routinely removes AI suggestions for searches that produce embarrassing results (you don't get them for searches about keeping cheese on your pizza anymore, for example), so it's even harder to validate once a result goes viral.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      Look at the bright side: "do a barrel roll" is still a fully-supported Easter egg.
  - neaden 2y ago
    I still get the second one when I search "Difference between sauce and dressing" on Google. The Oven vs Ottoman empire one I don't get an AI overview. Edit: Similar to the second one I just did Panda Bear vs Australia which informed me "Australians value authenticity, sincerity, and modesty. Giant pandas are solitary and peaceful, but will fight back if escape is impossible. "
jonathanstrange 2y ago
Searching with "Reddit" at the end of every query helps but I suppose it's only a matter of time when most content on Reddit is also AI-generated.
- jsheard 2y ago
  It's also not much use to anyone who doesn't use Google ever since Reddit started blocking all crawlers besides Googlebot. Old cached results might still show up in Bing/DDG/Kagi but they can't index any of the newer stuff.
  - alberto_balsam 2y ago
    What makes you say this? I just tried a few Reddit searches about events from the last few days and they work as expected (tested in Kagi)
    - jsheard 2y ago
      https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-that-works-on-reddit-now-thanks-to-ai-deal/ https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha... https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is getting recent Reddit results then they must be either ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also paying Reddit for access like Google. Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.
      - SavioMak 2y ago
        Kagi didn't make it explicit, but based on what they wrote I think they API call Google and other search engines to show as part of their results. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- 2y ago
mFixman 2y ago
Ironically, ChatGPT and similar LLM chatbots are great for those kinds of searches.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  You would have to be soft in the head to rely on any LLM for researching information on a medication you're actively taking.
the__alchemist 2y ago
Kagi's results for "baby peacock" are showing almost the same set (Mostly AI) as Google's.
- louthy 2y ago
  Search “peachick”, it works fine. I assume Google would be the same. I guess using the correct terminology matters.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > I guess using the correct terminology matters. If people were actually searching up "peachick" that'd probably be SEO spammed to hell, too.
- andrewinardeer 2y ago
  Kagi's images are an entirely different set for me.
- p3rls 2y ago
  It's surprising how many times you see this pattern on HN "Google sucks!"(50 upvotes) "That's why I use Kagi!"(45 upvotes) "Actually Kagi has the exact same problem and you have to pay for it."(2 upvotes)
quasse 2y ago
Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search). As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related. I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click. I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.
- frereubu 2y ago
  The UK NHS website is usually pretty good for this so sticking "NHS" in the search terms might help, although I imagine they may not cover non-UK brand names.
  - jerjerjer 2y ago
    "site:" namespace still works on Google... for now.
- pavon 2y ago
  That matches my experience. Kagi doesn't surface much content beyond what Google/Bing do. What it does better out of the box is guessing which content is low-quality and displaying so that it takes up less space, allowing you to see a few more pages worth of search results on the first page. And then it lets you permanently filter out sites you consider to be low quality so you don't see them at all. That would have been awesome 10 years ago when search spam was dominated by a few dozen sites per subject that mastered SEO (say expertsexchange), but it is less useful now that there are millions of AI content mills drowning out the real content. For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches, and only use normal search for subjects where the information must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen" pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better results. [1] For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1980%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F1%2F2015 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2C...
petesergeant 2y ago
> We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point I wrote some ideas up about this many years ago: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certification https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
QuantumGood 2y ago
Any source of content can be controlled or manipulated in non-obvious ways. And we already have strong algorithms for manipulating human attention (resulting in the growth of non-falsifiable conspiracy theories, for one). There is no clear approach leading out of information dystopia.
Analemma_ 2y ago
> We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point. People keep saying this and I keep warning them to be careful what they wish for. The most likely outcome is that "certification of human generated content" arrives in the form of remote attestation where you can't get on the internet unless you're on a device with a cryptographically sealed boot chain that prevents any untrusted code from running and also has your camera on to make sure you're a human. It won't be required by law, but no real websites will let you sign in without it, and any sites that don't use it will be overrun with junk. I hate this future but it's looking increasingly inevitable.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Your unauthorized access has been reported to the Fair Use Bureau.
- Animats 2y ago
  That's how the Internet works in China.
- consteval 2y ago
  There's ways to do this without destroying anonymity. Ideally, you verify you're human by signing up for some centralized service in real-life, maybe at the post office or something. And then people can ask this service if you're real by providing your super-long rotating token. So, just like an existing IDP but big.
drusepth 2y ago
I'm glad that Kagi (and others) exist as an alternative for people who don't want generative AI in their searches. Personally, I'm excited about more generative AI being added to my search results, and I'll probably switch to whichever search engine ends up with the best version of it.
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  This peacock thing was the last straw for me. I installed Kagi just moments ago. And of course the first image for "baby peacock" is the same white chick thing… obviously because this story is making the rounds —_—
- oktoberpaard 2y ago
  Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but they’re not talking about AI features of the search engine itself (Kagi has those too), but about nonsensical AI generated content on the web that exist solely for the purpose of getting you clicking on some ads. Kagi tries to make those sites stand out less on the search results.
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  AI tools on the search page: sure, cool. I use perplexity a lot, actually. I'm in favor of this. Search results that are full of content mills serving pre-genned content: no thanks. It's in the same category as those fake stackoverflow scrape sites.
i80and 2y ago
Unfortunately, as much as I do like Kagi overall, it goes out of its way to inject AI slop into the results with its sketchy summarization feature
ninininino 2y ago
human-verified content is going to be the next billion dollar company.
- timeon 2y ago
  Revival of the curators.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  Perhaps you're thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation. There is plenty of space there for more volunteer editors to verify content, and likewise, WMF operates its own cloud platform where developers are automating tools that do maintenance and transformation on the human-contributed content. Then, there is Wikidata, a machine-readable Wiki. Many other projects draw data from here, so that it can be localized and presented appropriately. Yet, its UI and SPARQL language are accessible to ordinary users, so have fun verifying the content there, too!
  - ninininino 2y ago
    I don't think you understand what I meant by human verified, but I used a very vague term to express what I meant, I meant proving that some input or data that comes from a user was generated by a human (whatever we define that to mean) rather than an LLM or multi-modal image/video/audio model output.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      You mean, like, the Book of Kells and a nice stage production of Lysistrata, vs. a PowerPoint and Star Wars? Interesting.
- consteval 2y ago
  This issue in terms of cost is that if you want this to be truly human-verified for real, you're gonna have to dip into the real world.
dan-robertson 2y ago
My memory is that these were pretty terrible long before the generative ai boom.
tambourine_man 2y ago
We need certification for human generated content for yesterday. Not only that, we desperately need cryptographic prof that content X was produced by person Y.
- bagels 2y ago
  How can that ever work in a world filled with people that are eager to lie to you?
  - FabHK 2y ago
    digital signatures?
    - arp242 2y ago
      But I can generate something with AI and then sign it myself and say "I wrote it, pinky promise". Since most people don't write anything on the internet, I can pay people $5 to use their signature and operate a "sign farm". Look at the effort these people go though to send their spam.
      - tambourine_man 2y ago
        Sure, but we’re working with a real person's reputation. If they are willing to gamble with AI, that’s their problem. I’m hoping for a “this human being validated this message”. I think that alone could solve multiple problems.
        tivert 2y ago
        Maybe OpenAI is really just Sam Altman's last ditch effort to save WorldCoin?
      - tveita 2y ago
        A web of trust or reputation based system can be built on top of the signature scheme - maybe an appearance of smaller invite-only forums that share reputation. Or maybe it will just become an integrated part of the moderation of existing platforms like Reddit, Mastodon and Bluesky If you put your name on AI spam people will flag your post and no-one will bother to see your posts for at least a few years.
b112 2y ago
It won't end until the motivation ends. Referrals , and ad revenue.
BeetleB 2y ago
product X vs Y are not really any worse now than pre-GPT (i.e. they were absolute crap long before GPT came on to the scene).
treflop 2y ago
Before AI, product comparison sites were ramblings of interns paid by people who found out you could make money from SEO-optimized blogs. And long before the Internet, people slapped random concoctions together and sold them as medicine, advertising them as cure-alls.
Nifty3929 2y ago
I'm not sure human-generated content is any better on the whole. BS-laden drivel has been pervasive for some time now, even before AI started taking over. I'm talking about those 300-word, ad-ridden crap articles that are SEO'd right to the top, and if you're lucky you might get the 3-word answer you were looking for: "<300 words of shit>... and in conclusion, <1-step answer>.". Anyway, humans have been getting paid pennies to write those for a while. AI just turns the throughput on that up to 11, where there's just no end in sight. I think this is like the primary failure mode of AI at this point. It's not going to kill us - we're going to use it to kill the internet. OTOH, maybe then we just go outside and play.
- swells34 2y ago
  In the world of content moderation, we refer to this as constructive friction. if you make it too easy to do a thing, the quality of that thing goes down. Difficulty forces people to actually think about what they are writing, whether it is germaine and accurate. So generative AI, as you point out, removes all the friction, and you end up with bland soup.
ndriscoll 2y ago
Whether something is human generated is (mostly) beside the point. The problem is that spam is incentivized today. Any solution must directly attack the financial incentive to spam. Therefore what's needed for a start is for search engines to heavily downweight ads, trackers, and affiliate links (obviously search engines run by ad companies will not do this). Shilling (e.g. on reddit) should be handled as criminal fraud.

rightbyte 2y ago

> This growth of the dead internet It is quite surreal to witness. It is certainly fueled by the commercialization of internet due to ads and centralization to user hostile platforms. The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost most of its users in the last 15 years...

chongli 2y ago
The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost most of its users in the last 15 years.. What do you mean by this? How do you find the old internet?
- dumbmrblah 2y ago
  Something Awful is a good example. Other forums behind paywalls or ones that are invite only.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    Even non-paywalled forums are pretty good compared to the "open" internet.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  You don't find them easely. That is the point I guess. But I am not reffering to some obscure darkweb here. Many of e.g. the old niche forums still exist. Like, FOSS sites. GNU project sites seemed not to have aged a day in 20 years, i.e. still party like its 2004. Also, I think non English sites are better off since Reddit mainly ate English communities and sites. Facebook is probably what killed most of the living internet. Small community sites. Like the local Kennel club or Boat marina. A good example of the old internet would be Matthew's Volvo site: https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/search.php?search_id=active_topics https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/search.php?search_i...
- majani 2y ago
  You're on it right now. HN is a very old site with old users and old mods that links to other old sites

CSMastermind 2y ago

It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.

jonathanstrange 2y ago
A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is involved but some sane display technology instead.
- quantified 2y ago
  Without most of what makes the internet useful, sadly.
  - soganess 2y ago
    I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like the regular internet would go away... when you want useful, go there. I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available. But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.
    - coldpie 2y ago
      Start here: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
    - NoGravitas 2y ago
      I'm already treating the WWW and the commercial internet generally as "Babylon". You have to use it for a lot of stuff (doing commerce, interacting with the government), but why would you willingly use it on your own time?

cogman10 2y ago

Most product reviews are simply pumping amazon comments into AI to generate a review. with a final "pros/cons" section that is basically the same summary amazon AI generates.

jsheard 2y ago

Even Google is trying to get into the X vs Y game, with pretty funny results if you ask for a nonsensical comparison. https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549 https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549 ...or a sensical comparison where it just completely misses the point. https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg

sobellian 2y ago
Couldn't reproduce - in fact, the second hit is a threads version of the same post - but I get no AI suggestions for this query. Humorous Google queries (or AI queries more generally) are definitely a trope, so I can never really tell if they actually happened or if it's all for karma.
- amputect 2y ago
  Google also routinely removes AI suggestions for searches that produce embarrassing results (you don't get them for searches about keeping cheese on your pizza anymore, for example), so it's even harder to validate once a result goes viral.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Look at the bright side: "do a barrel roll" is still a fully-supported Easter egg.
- neaden 2y ago
  I still get the second one when I search "Difference between sauce and dressing" on Google. The Oven vs Ottoman empire one I don't get an AI overview. Edit: Similar to the second one I just did Panda Bear vs Australia which informed me "Australians value authenticity, sincerity, and modesty. Giant pandas are solitary and peaceful, but will fight back if escape is impossible. "

jonathanstrange 2y ago

Searching with "Reddit" at the end of every query helps but I suppose it's only a matter of time when most content on Reddit is also AI-generated.

jsheard 2y ago
It's also not much use to anyone who doesn't use Google ever since Reddit started blocking all crawlers besides Googlebot. Old cached results might still show up in Bing/DDG/Kagi but they can't index any of the newer stuff.
- alberto_balsam 2y ago
  What makes you say this? I just tried a few Reddit searches about events from the last few days and they work as expected (tested in Kagi)
  - jsheard 2y ago
    https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-that-works-on-reddit-now-thanks-to-ai-deal/ https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha... https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is getting recent Reddit results then they must be either ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also paying Reddit for access like Google. Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.
    - SavioMak 2y ago
      Kagi didn't make it explicit, but based on what they wrote I think they API call Google and other search engines to show as part of their results. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
2y ago

mFixman 2y ago

Ironically, ChatGPT and similar LLM chatbots are great for those kinds of searches.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mvdtnz 2y ago
You would have to be soft in the head to rely on any LLM for researching information on a medication you're actively taking.

the__alchemist 2y ago

Kagi's results for "baby peacock" are showing almost the same set (Mostly AI) as Google's.

louthy 2y ago
Search “peachick”, it works fine. I assume Google would be the same. I guess using the correct terminology matters.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > I guess using the correct terminology matters. If people were actually searching up "peachick" that'd probably be SEO spammed to hell, too.
andrewinardeer 2y ago
Kagi's images are an entirely different set for me.
p3rls 2y ago
It's surprising how many times you see this pattern on HN "Google sucks!"(50 upvotes) "That's why I use Kagi!"(45 upvotes) "Actually Kagi has the exact same problem and you have to pay for it."(2 upvotes)

quasse 2y ago

Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search). As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related. I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click. I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.

frereubu 2y ago
The UK NHS website is usually pretty good for this so sticking "NHS" in the search terms might help, although I imagine they may not cover non-UK brand names.
- jerjerjer 2y ago
  "site:" namespace still works on Google... for now.
pavon 2y ago
That matches my experience. Kagi doesn't surface much content beyond what Google/Bing do. What it does better out of the box is guessing which content is low-quality and displaying so that it takes up less space, allowing you to see a few more pages worth of search results on the first page. And then it lets you permanently filter out sites you consider to be low quality so you don't see them at all. That would have been awesome 10 years ago when search spam was dominated by a few dozen sites per subject that mastered SEO (say expertsexchange), but it is less useful now that there are millions of AI content mills drowning out the real content. For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches, and only use normal search for subjects where the information must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen" pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better results. [1] For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1980%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F1%2F2015 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2C...

petesergeant 2y ago

> We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point I wrote some ideas up about this many years ago: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certification https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...

QuantumGood 2y ago

Any source of content can be controlled or manipulated in non-obvious ways. And we already have strong algorithms for manipulating human attention (resulting in the growth of non-falsifiable conspiracy theories, for one). There is no clear approach leading out of information dystopia.

Analemma_ 2y ago

> We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point. People keep saying this and I keep warning them to be careful what they wish for. The most likely outcome is that "certification of human generated content" arrives in the form of remote attestation where you can't get on the internet unless you're on a device with a cryptographically sealed boot chain that prevents any untrusted code from running and also has your camera on to make sure you're a human. It won't be required by law, but no real websites will let you sign in without it, and any sites that don't use it will be overrun with junk. I hate this future but it's looking increasingly inevitable.

throwway120385 2y ago
Your unauthorized access has been reported to the Fair Use Bureau.
Animats 2y ago
That's how the Internet works in China.
consteval 2y ago
There's ways to do this without destroying anonymity. Ideally, you verify you're human by signing up for some centralized service in real-life, maybe at the post office or something. And then people can ask this service if you're real by providing your super-long rotating token. So, just like an existing IDP but big.

drusepth 2y ago

I'm glad that Kagi (and others) exist as an alternative for people who don't want generative AI in their searches. Personally, I'm excited about more generative AI being added to my search results, and I'll probably switch to whichever search engine ends up with the best version of it.

Eric_WVGG 2y ago
This peacock thing was the last straw for me. I installed Kagi just moments ago. And of course the first image for "baby peacock" is the same white chick thing… obviously because this story is making the rounds —_—
oktoberpaard 2y ago
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but they’re not talking about AI features of the search engine itself (Kagi has those too), but about nonsensical AI generated content on the web that exist solely for the purpose of getting you clicking on some ads. Kagi tries to make those sites stand out less on the search results.
jabroni_salad 2y ago
AI tools on the search page: sure, cool. I use perplexity a lot, actually. I'm in favor of this. Search results that are full of content mills serving pre-genned content: no thanks. It's in the same category as those fake stackoverflow scrape sites.

i80and 2y ago

Unfortunately, as much as I do like Kagi overall, it goes out of its way to inject AI slop into the results with its sketchy summarization feature

ninininino 2y ago

human-verified content is going to be the next billion dollar company.

timeon 2y ago
Revival of the curators.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Perhaps you're thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation. There is plenty of space there for more volunteer editors to verify content, and likewise, WMF operates its own cloud platform where developers are automating tools that do maintenance and transformation on the human-contributed content. Then, there is Wikidata, a machine-readable Wiki. Many other projects draw data from here, so that it can be localized and presented appropriately. Yet, its UI and SPARQL language are accessible to ordinary users, so have fun verifying the content there, too!
- ninininino 2y ago
  I don't think you understand what I meant by human verified, but I used a very vague term to express what I meant, I meant proving that some input or data that comes from a user was generated by a human (whatever we define that to mean) rather than an LLM or multi-modal image/video/audio model output.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    You mean, like, the Book of Kells and a nice stage production of Lysistrata, vs. a PowerPoint and Star Wars? Interesting.
consteval 2y ago
This issue in terms of cost is that if you want this to be truly human-verified for real, you're gonna have to dip into the real world.

dan-robertson 2y ago

My memory is that these were pretty terrible long before the generative ai boom.

tambourine_man 2y ago

We need certification for human generated content for yesterday. Not only that, we desperately need cryptographic prof that content X was produced by person Y.

bagels 2y ago
How can that ever work in a world filled with people that are eager to lie to you?
- FabHK 2y ago
  digital signatures?
  - arp242 2y ago
    But I can generate something with AI and then sign it myself and say "I wrote it, pinky promise". Since most people don't write anything on the internet, I can pay people $5 to use their signature and operate a "sign farm". Look at the effort these people go though to send their spam.
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
      Sure, but we’re working with a real person's reputation. If they are willing to gamble with AI, that’s their problem. I’m hoping for a “this human being validated this message”. I think that alone could solve multiple problems.
      - tivert 2y ago
        Maybe OpenAI is really just Sam Altman's last ditch effort to save WorldCoin?
    - tveita 2y ago
      A web of trust or reputation based system can be built on top of the signature scheme - maybe an appearance of smaller invite-only forums that share reputation. Or maybe it will just become an integrated part of the moderation of existing platforms like Reddit, Mastodon and Bluesky If you put your name on AI spam people will flag your post and no-one will bother to see your posts for at least a few years.

b112 2y ago

It won't end until the motivation ends. Referrals , and ad revenue.

BeetleB 2y ago

product X vs Y are not really any worse now than pre-GPT (i.e. they were absolute crap long before GPT came on to the scene).

treflop 2y ago

Before AI, product comparison sites were ramblings of interns paid by people who found out you could make money from SEO-optimized blogs. And long before the Internet, people slapped random concoctions together and sold them as medicine, advertising them as cure-alls.

Nifty3929 2y ago

I'm not sure human-generated content is any better on the whole. BS-laden drivel has been pervasive for some time now, even before AI started taking over. I'm talking about those 300-word, ad-ridden crap articles that are SEO'd right to the top, and if you're lucky you might get the 3-word answer you were looking for: "<300 words of shit>... and in conclusion, <1-step answer>.". Anyway, humans have been getting paid pennies to write those for a while. AI just turns the throughput on that up to 11, where there's just no end in sight. I think this is like the primary failure mode of AI at this point. It's not going to kill us - we're going to use it to kill the internet. OTOH, maybe then we just go outside and play.

swells34 2y ago
In the world of content moderation, we refer to this as constructive friction. if you make it too easy to do a thing, the quality of that thing goes down. Difficulty forces people to actually think about what they are writing, whether it is germaine and accurate. So generative AI, as you point out, removes all the friction, and you end up with bland soup.

ndriscoll 2y ago

Whether something is human generated is (mostly) beside the point. The problem is that spam is incentivized today. Any solution must directly attack the financial incentive to spam. Therefore what's needed for a start is for search engines to heavily downweight ads, trackers, and affiliate links (obviously search engines run by ad companies will not do this). Shilling (e.g. on reddit) should be handled as criminal fraud.