5 ms·

AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

78 points by minimaxir 2y ago

tartoran 2y ago
AI Slop is everywhere and soon to overtake man made content.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
altdataseller 2y ago
Replace “Medium” with internet. Otherwise this is just a paid promo piece for Medium
walterbell 2y ago
Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?
- jgalt212 2y ago
  Before LLMs, the cost to generate spam content was non-zero. Now, it's effectively zero. These infinite supplies of AI Slop should be handled differently and more aggressively that legacy spam.
- doe_eyes 2y ago
  Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    > Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique patterns.
    - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
      > Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique patterns. It probably drives engagement, so there's no need to interfere. Perhaps it should be encouraged even..
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Uehreka 2y ago
  A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it. At least, that’s been my experience coming across AI-written Blender tutorials on YouTube. All this makes it difficult to quickly report as spam. There’s also a lot of plausible deniability since a lot of people have developed a hair-trigger response to writing they don’t like or find compelling and just immediately go “It’s AI!” even when it isn’t. > why doesn't HN have this problem? HN comments aren’t easily monetizable.
  - jerf 2y ago
    "A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it." And it's only going to get worse. I don't know what the limits of LLMs are, even before we start discussing future architectures and capabilities, but it certainly seems to me that if they just scale a bit farther on their current trajectory it is going to be very hard to detect AIs simply by the content. One of the adaptations I've adopted is that if your content looks like it was generated from a simple prompt, no matter how long the resulting content, I just toss it. "Write me a beginner's tutorial for Python" isn't going to produce a document that the internet needs another copy of or that social media sites need to spend time linking to. Unfortunately that means even if the "tutorial" was human-generated, it's probably getting the axe too, unless it has a very interesting or unusual approach, but it isn't clear to me that that is actually a large problem.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    > HN comments aren’t easily monetizable. Why isn't it? As far as I can remember, all the forums had lot of outright spam, even forums which are orders of magnitude less popular than HN. You can even see spam in usenet. Reddit/Discord is full of it. I wonder are dang/moderators the only reason for this?
- simonw 2y ago
  "(why doesn't HN have this problem?)" I've seen a few comments on HN that looked likely to have been generated by LLMs, but they tend not to get any replies or up-votes so there's not much incentive for people to keep on trying to post them.
- unsignedint 2y ago
  To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments, including this one. However, I put in substantial input by outlining my thoughts in detail, so I treat it more as a sophisticated grammar checker. As a non-native speaker, my writing is sufficient for business, but I don’t consider myself a strong writer. GenAI helps me convey my thoughts more clearly and efficiently, which has been tremendously valuable.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    Out of curiosity, can we see the chat history that you went through to get to this output?
    - unsignedint 2y ago
      Sure, --- Please refine: To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments including this one. I do, however put in substantial input outlining my thought in detail, so I use it more like a glorified grammar checker. It helps me a lot as I'm not a good writer (as being non-native, just sufficient to be able to thrive in business environment, just not a good writer. It helps me tremendously to get my thought across efficiently.
      - init2null 2y ago
        Perhaps I'm naive or old fashioned, but I prefer this unpolished version. You clearly have an unclosed parenthesis that's attached to a rough sentence, but two minutes of rephrasing will serve you well in improving both your writing and your speech. If you must use it, I'd suggest asking for suggestions rather than rewrites. Writing is not just about syntax, but also about communicating who you are. This is your true voice.
        unsignedint 2y ago
        Thank you—I understand where you're coming from. My interest in using GenAI stems from its ability to catch subtle implications or unintended double meanings in my writing. I've had plenty of "that's not what I meant" moments in the past, so using AI helps me align my phrasing with my true intent. It offers an objective lens, making it easier for me to convey my thoughts clearly, especially since I sometimes find it challenging to step out of my own subjective perspective. Some roughness in my recent writing comes from being on mobile, which makes reviewing even harder! My writing has improved, though, even when I’m working without AI, likely from exposure to better writing flows. I’d say I used to rely more on edits (20% input to 80% edits), but now it’s closer to 75% input and 25% edits. Hopefully, I can refine it even further.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Websites have a perverse incentive to not remove AI Slop since it increases their UGC metrics. (e.g. amount of new content, engagement rate) In the case of blatantly false images like on Facebook, they get a surprising amount of organic engagement: https://x.com/FacebookAIslop/status/1806416249259258189 https://x.com/FacebookAIslop/status/1806416249259258189
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  > why doesn't HN have this problem? Because it's already filled with russian bots.
jgalt212 2y ago
YouTube allows one to report a video for 11 different reasons. A list below. Unfortunately, AI Slop is not one of them. Sexual content Violent or repulsive content Hateful or abusive content Harassment or bullying Harmful or dangerous acts Misinformation Child abuse Promotes terrorism Spam or misleading Legal issue Captions issue
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Why should it be one of them? It's either spam or not a problem beyond “I find it distasteful.”
- asah 2y ago
  Spam is close enough.
- BearOso 2y ago
  Spam or misleading is the category to use. It's misleading people into thinking humans wrote it, and being AI tripe, it's always spam.
  - gs17 2y ago
    But do they actually remove it for that?
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  Being in the AI game themselves, it wouldn't make sense for them to give AI negative perception.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
tbh Medium was slop long before AI slop
- stemlord 2y ago
  Agreed its just the linkedin feed with fancier css
- yesiamyourdad 2y ago
  Medium was flooded with human-created slop before OpenAI got big. I work in Spark a lot, and basically every question I put into Google has a few lame Medium articles that basically recap the docs or have some trivial example code. Ironically, I turn to Claude now as my primary source. It's very good at Spark.
bananapub 2y ago
one of the saddest parts of the whole thing is finding out how many fucking arseholes out there have been waiting to flood the internet with crap, and had previously only failed because they were too lazy to do all that typing. just absolutely embarrassing for us all.
- LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
  It's an incentives problem, and the ad industry is largely to blame. It's the same cause as much of the destruction and centralization of the web, the rise of clickbait, rising extremism and political polarization, negativity-driven engagement, and myriad other public problems. An attention-drivin economy is disastrous for mental and public social health. And some people still defend the ad industry, even going so far to laud it as a public good, even talking about it as if it's a charity and not a very rich industry, funding a "free Internet". We missed the boat long ago on dismantling or neutering the ad industry before it did massive irreparable damage. Whatever we do to fix this mess is still going to leave prominent scars for generations.
  - smackeyacky 2y ago
    I don't see the clickbait / extremism promoting content as anything particularly new. In the UK the "red top" newspapers used to supply it and in the recent past it was Fox News. It was always possible to cocoon yourself into news and opinion you agreed with. AI slop does seem a little different, if only because it's machine generated and the sheer amount of it would not have been possible when rubbish was human generated and the gatekeepers of publishing were newspaper editors.
rootusrootus 2y ago
Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  That's more a consequence of "AI" becoming a synonym for "always bad" in creative spaces (and inversely "if it's bad, it must be AI-generated"), despite the fact that there's some nuance there.
  - spwa4 2y ago
    You forget exactly who is complaining that AI is always bad, with no nuance. It's a bit like observing that in every book and movie writers have a very strong tendency to be rich superheroes with incredible morals and 50 admirers on every finger.
- welder 2y ago
  Yep, I analyzed bot activity recently on PH. [0] I think it's only going to get more common. [0] https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots
- caekislove 2y ago
  That sounds exactly like what an AI would say!
  - gamerDude 2y ago
    This is clearly just a bot responding.
- jsheard 2y ago
  There's so many LLM bots on Twitter now, presumably trying to game the revenue sharing system. Some of them even seem to be getting fancy with multi-modal models because they try to respond to the content of images rather than just the text like they used to do.
bhouston 2y ago
I've seen this on Substack as well. For example, I ran across this account on Substack is posting a lot of ChatGPT-generated articles to reddit. This is clearly ChatGPT-generated based on a very simple prompt: https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-islamic-fundamentalism?utm_medium=ios https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-i...
- everybodyknows 2y ago
  It's full of anecdotes from apparently real individuals. Are these rewrites of content scraped from real news?
  - bhouston 2y ago
    I think they give it the URL of the original article and ask it to re-write it with a specific political slant.
whalesalad 2y ago
People still use Medium? Garbage platform for ages.
dcchambers 2y ago
> CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it. It seems like the leaders of all of these online platforms are going to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this massive problem isn't one. This AI trend is absolutely going to destroy many (most?) of these companies. For better or worse, the new age of the internet is already here.
- yungporko 2y ago
  is there anything they can realistically do?
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    Maybe this is just a Band-Aid, but Medium has a "boost" mechanism. I'm not sure of the exact machinations, but the times that my posts have been boosted, it's always been by a publication on Medium where a human editor has read my content and 1) asked that I submit to their publication and 2) submitted to Medium for boosting. Seems like this type of filter -- as long as they actually keep humans in the loop -- can potentially work to keep high quality content more visible.
    - kelvinjps10 2y ago
      That's exactly what they are doing
  - yifanl 2y ago
    The same thing Amazon would have to do to detract fake listings: Add friction. Of course, even mentioning the f-word is forbidden, so...
  - tim333 2y ago
    They could use an algo to rate for AI slopness and de-rank that in search and the like.
- caekislove 2y ago
  Why wouldn't they? They've spent the last decade pretending that the clickbots sustaining the internet ad model are no big deal and apparently the market agrees with them!
crtasm 2y ago
Currently on ChatGPT three of the top picks on the explore page are "AI Humanizers" for making generated content appear like it was created by a human. Slop slop slop.
- disqard 2y ago
  So, the progression is: * humans creating things * algorithms emulating (humans creating things) * human-in-the-loop guiding (algorithms emulating (humans creating things)) * ai that mimics the (human-in-the-loop guiding (algorithms emulating (humans creating things))) * what next???
LorenDB 2y ago
https://archive.ph/OAlBt https://archive.ph/OAlBt
xnx 2y ago
If anything good comes of AI slop, it will be stronger (and possibly more personalized) collaborative filtering. I wish I could upvote and downvote more content in more places in a way that my feedback would be used by people who have chosen to trust me (and vice versa). Amongst the others things that walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok have taken is the open availability of social signals to rank content. Previously Google used links to build some trust metric, but almost no real person creates public links anymore.
bongoman42 2y ago
Is it particularly worse if it is AI slop? Slop has been flooding a lot of platforms before AI, AI slop makes it harder to detect if it is artificially generated but some of it is better than human slop.
jameslk 2y ago
I’m waiting for the point in time when content platforms no longer try to downplay their generated content but instead simply embrace it and even go as far as excluding human only content. Like for example a TikTok, but all the videos are generated by the platform itself using likes/skips to drive its algorithm to generate more addicting content. That seems like the logical conclusion of where all of this is going. They can then drop the creator side of the market and a lot of moderation issues that come with it, while gaining full ownership, control, and monetization of the underlying content.
maxspero 2y ago
Hey it's me, Max. I ran the analysis for WIRED and got them their initial 47% number for AI content. The CEO accused me of trying to extort him because I sent a short email with our findings prior to the publication of this article. He also casts doubt on the efficacy of AI detection (fair) but I think our AI detection model is orders of magnitude more accurate than the others and I stand by its predictions.
- stvltvs 2y ago
  What gives you confidence in this AI detection model?
  - maxspero 2y ago
    We benchmark on pre-2023 datasets of O(10M) documents not in our training set. Other detectors seem to have between 1-3% false positive rate and ours is around 1 in 10,000 as of our latest model update. We do a lot of active learning + core set selection to keep FPR low and improve recall on larger LLMs. Our white paper with some methodology is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14873 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14873
    - Wheatman 2y ago
      Interesting read. I noticed something, you achieved near 100% accuracy on most domains in every domain but scientific which made me wonder, how much is that could be due to how "strict" and "profrssional" these papers could be, or maybe how a slightly disproportionate number of the training data for these LLM could be from science based articles and papers, as they are generally viewed to be "high quality" Interesting read either way, best of luck on your project (:
QuantumGood 2y ago
Provable quality human curation has always been valuable, but hard to identify. It's becoming a smaller slice of the pie as it fills up with AI slop. Good time for newsletters and podcasts to be out in force if the higher quality content can be identified.
Icy0 2y ago
I’ve come to simply realize the problem isn’t AIs, it’s humans. More specifically, humans who feel the need to make a quick buck. Actually, the problem isn’t those humans, it’s the societal structure creating incentives and pressures that lead to a large percentage of humans feeling like they need to make a quick buck. Whether that quick buck be for cost of living or for social status gain.
- yesiamyourdad 2y ago
  I'm sure there are thousands of resumes out there with a Medium blog URL on them, which probably impresses HR but not so much if you actually read them. It's all just another way to "build your personal brand".
smooke 2y ago
"Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)"
musicale 2y ago
I have trouble differentiating AI-generated slop from human-generated slop on Medium. > The 12-year-old publishing platform basically

78 points by minimaxir 2y ago

tartoran 2y ago

AI Slop is everywhere and soon to overtake man made content.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

altdataseller 2y ago

Replace “Medium” with internet. Otherwise this is just a paid promo piece for Medium

walterbell 2y ago

Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?

jgalt212 2y ago
Before LLMs, the cost to generate spam content was non-zero. Now, it's effectively zero. These infinite supplies of AI Slop should be handled differently and more aggressively that legacy spam.
doe_eyes 2y ago
Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  > Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique patterns.
  - karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    > Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique patterns. It probably drives engagement, so there's no need to interfere. Perhaps it should be encouraged even..
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Uehreka 2y ago
A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it. At least, that’s been my experience coming across AI-written Blender tutorials on YouTube. All this makes it difficult to quickly report as spam. There’s also a lot of plausible deniability since a lot of people have developed a hair-trigger response to writing they don’t like or find compelling and just immediately go “It’s AI!” even when it isn’t. > why doesn't HN have this problem? HN comments aren’t easily monetizable.
- jerf 2y ago
  "A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it." And it's only going to get worse. I don't know what the limits of LLMs are, even before we start discussing future architectures and capabilities, but it certainly seems to me that if they just scale a bit farther on their current trajectory it is going to be very hard to detect AIs simply by the content. One of the adaptations I've adopted is that if your content looks like it was generated from a simple prompt, no matter how long the resulting content, I just toss it. "Write me a beginner's tutorial for Python" isn't going to produce a document that the internet needs another copy of or that social media sites need to spend time linking to. Unfortunately that means even if the "tutorial" was human-generated, it's probably getting the axe too, unless it has a very interesting or unusual approach, but it isn't clear to me that that is actually a large problem.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  > HN comments aren’t easily monetizable. Why isn't it? As far as I can remember, all the forums had lot of outright spam, even forums which are orders of magnitude less popular than HN. You can even see spam in usenet. Reddit/Discord is full of it. I wonder are dang/moderators the only reason for this?
simonw 2y ago
"(why doesn't HN have this problem?)" I've seen a few comments on HN that looked likely to have been generated by LLMs, but they tend not to get any replies or up-votes so there's not much incentive for people to keep on trying to post them.
unsignedint 2y ago
To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments, including this one. However, I put in substantial input by outlining my thoughts in detail, so I treat it more as a sophisticated grammar checker. As a non-native speaker, my writing is sufficient for business, but I don’t consider myself a strong writer. GenAI helps me convey my thoughts more clearly and efficiently, which has been tremendously valuable.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, can we see the chat history that you went through to get to this output?
  - unsignedint 2y ago
    Sure, --- Please refine: To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments including this one. I do, however put in substantial input outlining my thought in detail, so I use it more like a glorified grammar checker. It helps me a lot as I'm not a good writer (as being non-native, just sufficient to be able to thrive in business environment, just not a good writer. It helps me tremendously to get my thought across efficiently.
    - init2null 2y ago
      Perhaps I'm naive or old fashioned, but I prefer this unpolished version. You clearly have an unclosed parenthesis that's attached to a rough sentence, but two minutes of rephrasing will serve you well in improving both your writing and your speech. If you must use it, I'd suggest asking for suggestions rather than rewrites. Writing is not just about syntax, but also about communicating who you are. This is your true voice.
      - unsignedint 2y ago
        Thank you—I understand where you're coming from. My interest in using GenAI stems from its ability to catch subtle implications or unintended double meanings in my writing. I've had plenty of "that's not what I meant" moments in the past, so using AI helps me align my phrasing with my true intent. It offers an objective lens, making it easier for me to convey my thoughts clearly, especially since I sometimes find it challenging to step out of my own subjective perspective. Some roughness in my recent writing comes from being on mobile, which makes reviewing even harder! My writing has improved, though, even when I’m working without AI, likely from exposure to better writing flows. I’d say I used to rely more on edits (20% input to 80% edits), but now it’s closer to 75% input and 25% edits. Hopefully, I can refine it even further.
minimaxir 2y ago
Websites have a perverse incentive to not remove AI Slop since it increases their UGC metrics. (e.g. amount of new content, engagement rate) In the case of blatantly false images like on Facebook, they get a surprising amount of organic engagement: https://x.com/FacebookAIslop/status/1806416249259258189 https://x.com/FacebookAIslop/status/1806416249259258189
TiredOfLife 2y ago
> why doesn't HN have this problem? Because it's already filled with russian bots.

jgalt212 2y ago

YouTube allows one to report a video for 11 different reasons. A list below. Unfortunately, AI Slop is not one of them. Sexual content Violent or repulsive content Hateful or abusive content Harassment or bullying Harmful or dangerous acts Misinformation Child abuse Promotes terrorism Spam or misleading Legal issue Captions issue

idle_zealot 2y ago
Why should it be one of them? It's either spam or not a problem beyond “I find it distasteful.”
asah 2y ago
Spam is close enough.
BearOso 2y ago
Spam or misleading is the category to use. It's misleading people into thinking humans wrote it, and being AI tripe, it's always spam.
- gs17 2y ago
  But do they actually remove it for that?
handfuloflight 2y ago
Being in the AI game themselves, it wouldn't make sense for them to give AI negative perception.

123yawaworht456 2y ago

tbh Medium was slop long before AI slop

stemlord 2y ago
Agreed its just the linkedin feed with fancier css
yesiamyourdad 2y ago
Medium was flooded with human-created slop before OpenAI got big. I work in Spark a lot, and basically every question I put into Google has a few lame Medium articles that basically recap the docs or have some trivial example code. Ironically, I turn to Claude now as my primary source. It's very good at Spark.

bananapub 2y ago

one of the saddest parts of the whole thing is finding out how many fucking arseholes out there have been waiting to flood the internet with crap, and had previously only failed because they were too lazy to do all that typing. just absolutely embarrassing for us all.

LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
It's an incentives problem, and the ad industry is largely to blame. It's the same cause as much of the destruction and centralization of the web, the rise of clickbait, rising extremism and political polarization, negativity-driven engagement, and myriad other public problems. An attention-drivin economy is disastrous for mental and public social health. And some people still defend the ad industry, even going so far to laud it as a public good, even talking about it as if it's a charity and not a very rich industry, funding a "free Internet". We missed the boat long ago on dismantling or neutering the ad industry before it did massive irreparable damage. Whatever we do to fix this mess is still going to leave prominent scars for generations.
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  I don't see the clickbait / extremism promoting content as anything particularly new. In the UK the "red top" newspapers used to supply it and in the recent past it was Fox News. It was always possible to cocoon yourself into news and opinion you agreed with. AI slop does seem a little different, if only because it's machine generated and the sheer amount of it would not have been possible when rubbish was human generated and the gatekeepers of publishing were newspaper editors.

rootusrootus 2y ago

Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.

minimaxir 2y ago
That's more a consequence of "AI" becoming a synonym for "always bad" in creative spaces (and inversely "if it's bad, it must be AI-generated"), despite the fact that there's some nuance there.
- spwa4 2y ago
  You forget exactly who is complaining that AI is always bad, with no nuance. It's a bit like observing that in every book and movie writers have a very strong tendency to be rich superheroes with incredible morals and 50 admirers on every finger.
welder 2y ago
Yep, I analyzed bot activity recently on PH. [0] I think it's only going to get more common. [0] https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots
caekislove 2y ago
That sounds exactly like what an AI would say!
- gamerDude 2y ago
  This is clearly just a bot responding.
jsheard 2y ago
There's so many LLM bots on Twitter now, presumably trying to game the revenue sharing system. Some of them even seem to be getting fancy with multi-modal models because they try to respond to the content of images rather than just the text like they used to do.

bhouston 2y ago

I've seen this on Substack as well. For example, I ran across this account on Substack is posting a lot of ChatGPT-generated articles to reddit. This is clearly ChatGPT-generated based on a very simple prompt: https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-islamic-fundamentalism?utm_medium=ios https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-i...

everybodyknows 2y ago
It's full of anecdotes from apparently real individuals. Are these rewrites of content scraped from real news?
- bhouston 2y ago
  I think they give it the URL of the original article and ask it to re-write it with a specific political slant.

whalesalad 2y ago

People still use Medium? Garbage platform for ages.

dcchambers 2y ago

> CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it. It seems like the leaders of all of these online platforms are going to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this massive problem isn't one. This AI trend is absolutely going to destroy many (most?) of these companies. For better or worse, the new age of the internet is already here.

yungporko 2y ago
is there anything they can realistically do?
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  Maybe this is just a Band-Aid, but Medium has a "boost" mechanism. I'm not sure of the exact machinations, but the times that my posts have been boosted, it's always been by a publication on Medium where a human editor has read my content and 1) asked that I submit to their publication and 2) submitted to Medium for boosting. Seems like this type of filter -- as long as they actually keep humans in the loop -- can potentially work to keep high quality content more visible.
  - kelvinjps10 2y ago
    That's exactly what they are doing
- yifanl 2y ago
  The same thing Amazon would have to do to detract fake listings: Add friction. Of course, even mentioning the f-word is forbidden, so...
- tim333 2y ago
  They could use an algo to rate for AI slopness and de-rank that in search and the like.
caekislove 2y ago
Why wouldn't they? They've spent the last decade pretending that the clickbots sustaining the internet ad model are no big deal and apparently the market agrees with them!

crtasm 2y ago

Currently on ChatGPT three of the top picks on the explore page are "AI Humanizers" for making generated content appear like it was created by a human. Slop slop slop.

disqard 2y ago
So, the progression is: * humans creating things * algorithms emulating (humans creating things) * human-in-the-loop guiding (algorithms emulating (humans creating things)) * ai that mimics the (human-in-the-loop guiding (algorithms emulating (humans creating things))) * what next???

LorenDB 2y ago

https://archive.ph/OAlBt https://archive.ph/OAlBt

xnx 2y ago

If anything good comes of AI slop, it will be stronger (and possibly more personalized) collaborative filtering. I wish I could upvote and downvote more content in more places in a way that my feedback would be used by people who have chosen to trust me (and vice versa). Amongst the others things that walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok have taken is the open availability of social signals to rank content. Previously Google used links to build some trust metric, but almost no real person creates public links anymore.

bongoman42 2y ago

Is it particularly worse if it is AI slop? Slop has been flooding a lot of platforms before AI, AI slop makes it harder to detect if it is artificially generated but some of it is better than human slop.

jameslk 2y ago

I’m waiting for the point in time when content platforms no longer try to downplay their generated content but instead simply embrace it and even go as far as excluding human only content. Like for example a TikTok, but all the videos are generated by the platform itself using likes/skips to drive its algorithm to generate more addicting content. That seems like the logical conclusion of where all of this is going. They can then drop the creator side of the market and a lot of moderation issues that come with it, while gaining full ownership, control, and monetization of the underlying content.

maxspero 2y ago

Hey it's me, Max. I ran the analysis for WIRED and got them their initial 47% number for AI content. The CEO accused me of trying to extort him because I sent a short email with our findings prior to the publication of this article. He also casts doubt on the efficacy of AI detection (fair) but I think our AI detection model is orders of magnitude more accurate than the others and I stand by its predictions.

stvltvs 2y ago
What gives you confidence in this AI detection model?
- maxspero 2y ago
  We benchmark on pre-2023 datasets of O(10M) documents not in our training set. Other detectors seem to have between 1-3% false positive rate and ours is around 1 in 10,000 as of our latest model update. We do a lot of active learning + core set selection to keep FPR low and improve recall on larger LLMs. Our white paper with some methodology is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14873 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14873
  - Wheatman 2y ago
    Interesting read. I noticed something, you achieved near 100% accuracy on most domains in every domain but scientific which made me wonder, how much is that could be due to how "strict" and "profrssional" these papers could be, or maybe how a slightly disproportionate number of the training data for these LLM could be from science based articles and papers, as they are generally viewed to be "high quality" Interesting read either way, best of luck on your project (:

QuantumGood 2y ago

Provable quality human curation has always been valuable, but hard to identify. It's becoming a smaller slice of the pie as it fills up with AI slop. Good time for newsletters and podcasts to be out in force if the higher quality content can be identified.

Icy0 2y ago

I’ve come to simply realize the problem isn’t AIs, it’s humans. More specifically, humans who feel the need to make a quick buck. Actually, the problem isn’t those humans, it’s the societal structure creating incentives and pressures that lead to a large percentage of humans feeling like they need to make a quick buck. Whether that quick buck be for cost of living or for social status gain.

yesiamyourdad 2y ago
I'm sure there are thousands of resumes out there with a Medium blog URL on them, which probably impresses HR but not so much if you actually read them. It's all just another way to "build your personal brand".

smooke 2y ago

"Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)"

musicale 2y ago

I have trouble differentiating AI-generated slop from human-generated slop on Medium. > The 12-year-old publishing platform basically