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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 abou

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?

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?