4 ms·

Though I'm still pissed at Kagi about their collaboration with Yandex, this particular kind of fight against AI slop has always striked me as a bit of Don Quixo

by laacz 11mo ago

Though I'm still pissed at Kagi about their collaboration with Yandex, this particular kind of fight against AI slop has always striked me as a bit of Don Quixote vs windmill. AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. I am terrified of AI generated content taking over and consuming search engines. But this tagging is more a fight against bad writing [by/with AI]. This is not solving the problem. Yes, now it's possible somehow to distinguish AI slop from normal writing often times by just looking at it, but I am sure that there is a lot of content which is generated by AI but indistinguishable from one written by mere human. Aso - are we 100% sure that we're not indirectly helping AI and people using it to slopify internet by helping them understand what is actually good slop and what is bad? :) We're in for a lot of false positives as well.

sjs382 11mo ago
> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. In that case, I don't think I consider it "AI slop"—it's "AI something else". If you think everything generated by AI is slop (I won't argue that point), you don't really need the "slop" descriptor.
- laacz 11mo ago
  Then the fight Kagi is proposing is against bad AI content, not AI content per-se? Then that's very subjective...
  - sjs382 11mo ago
    I don't pretend to speak for them, but I'm OK in principle dealing in non-absolutes.
  - Thrymr 11mo ago
    Explicitly in the article, one of the headings is "AI slop is deceptive or low-value AI-generated content, created to manipulate ranking or attention rather than help the reader." So yes, they are proposing marking bad AI content (from the user's perspective), not all AI-generated content.
    - laacz 11mo ago
      Which troubles me a bit, as 'bad' does not have same definition for everyone.
      - Thrymr 11mo ago
        How is this any different from a search engine choosing how to rank any other content, including penalizing SEO spam? I may not agree with all of their priorities, but I would welcome the search engine filtering out low quality, low effort spam for me.
      - SllX 11mo ago
        There’s a whole genre of websites out there that are a ToC and a series of ChatGPT responses. I take it to mean they’re targeting that shit specifically and anything else that becomes similarly prevalent and a plague upon search results.
      - harimau777 11mo ago
        A simple definition would be: Its bad if it isn't labeled as AI content or if there is not a mechanism that allows you to filter out AI content.
      - sjs382 11mo ago
        That's fine.
      - feedyourhead 11mo ago
        Yes, that's why we'll publish a blog post on this subject in the coming weeks. We've been working on this topic since the beginning of summer, and right now our focus is on exploring report patterns. Matt also shared insights about the other signals we use for this evaluation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920720 And we are still exploring other factors, 1/ is the reported content ai-generated? 2/ is most content in that domain ai-generated (+ other domain-level signals) ==> we are here 3/ is it unreviewed? (no human accountability, no sources, ...) 4/ is it mindlessly produced? (objective errors, wrong information, poor judgement, ...)
abnercoimbre 11mo ago
> Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. Are we personally comfortable with such an approach? For example, if you discover your favorite blogger doing this.
- laacz 11mo ago
  Should we care? It's a tool. If you can manage to make it look original, then what can we do about it? Eventually you won't be able to detect it.
  - Brian_K_White 11mo ago
    If your wife can't detect that you told your secretary to buy something nice, should she care?
    - cschep 11mo ago
      This is an absurd comparison - you (presumably) made a commitment to your wife. There is no such commitment on a public blog?
      - recursive 11mo ago
        Norms of society. I made no commitment that says I won't intensely stare at people on the street. But I just might be a jerk if I keep doing it. "You're not wrong, Walter. you're just an asshole."
      - SkyBelow 11mo ago
        Is it that absurd? We have many expectations in society which often aren't formalized into a stated commitment. Is it really unreasonable to have some commitment towards society to these less formally stated expectations? And is expecting communication presented as being human to human to actually be from a human unreasonable for such an expectation? I think not. If you were to find out that the people replying to you were actually bots designed to keep you busy and engaged, feeling a bit betrayed by that seems entirely expected. Even though at no point did those people commit to you that they weren't bots. Letting someone know they are engaging with a bot seems like basic respect, and I think society benefits from having such a level of basic respect for each other. It is a bit like the spouse who says "well I never made a specific commitment that I would be the one picking the gift". I wouldn't like a society where the only commitments are those we formally agree to.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger At that point, the context changes. We're not there yet. Once we reach that point––if we reach it––it's valuable to know who is repeating thoughts I can get for pennies from a language model and who is originally thinking.
VHRanger 11mo ago
> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. Hey, Kagi ML lead here. For images/videos/sound, not at the current moment, diffusion and GANs leave visible artifacts. There's a bit of issues with edge cases like high resolution images that have been JPEG compressed to hell, but even with those the framing of AI images tends to be pretty consistent. For human slop there's a bunch of detection methods that bypass human checks: 1. Within the category of "slop" the vast mass of it is low effort. The majority of text slop is default-settings chatGPT, which has a particular and recognizable wording and style. 2.Checking the source of the content instead of the content itself is generally a better signal. For instance, is the author posting inhumanly often all of a sudden? Are they using particular wordpress page setups and plugins that are common with SEO spammers? What about inboud/outbound links to that page -- are they linked to by humans at all? Are they a random, new page doing a bunch of product reviews all of a sudden with amazon affiliate links? Aggregating a bunch of partial signals like this is much better than just scoring the text itself on the LLM perplexity score, which is obviously not a robust strategy.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  > Are they using particular wordpress page setups and plugins that are common with SEO spammers? Why doesn't Kagi go after these signals instead? Then you could easily catch a double digit percentage of slop and maybe over half of slop (AI generated or not), without having to do crowd sourcing and other complicated setups. It's right there in the code. The same with emojis in YouTube video titles.
  - hananova 11mo ago
    You’re responding to the Kagi ML lead. They are using those signals in addition to crowd sourcing.
    - carlosjobim 11mo ago
      Are you certain? I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, except for now. And lot's of SEO WordPress spam is still showing up in Kagi queries.
immibis 11mo ago
If you're concerned about money ending up at companies that are taxed by countries that mass murder people, you should be as pissed about Google, Microsoft, DuckDuckGo, Boeing, Airbus, Walmart, Nvidia, etc... there is almost no company you should not be pissed off by. I would be happy that Google is getting some competition. It seems Yandex created a search engine that actually works, at least in some scenarios. It's known to be significantly less censored than Google, unless the Russian government cares about the topic you're searching for (which is why Kagi will never use it exclusively).

by laacz 11mo ago

sjs382 11mo ago

> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. In that case, I don't think I consider it "AI slop"—it's "AI something else". If you think everything generated by AI is slop (I won't argue that point), you don't really need the "slop" descriptor.

laacz 11mo ago
Then the fight Kagi is proposing is against bad AI content, not AI content per-se? Then that's very subjective...
- sjs382 11mo ago
  I don't pretend to speak for them, but I'm OK in principle dealing in non-absolutes.
- Thrymr 11mo ago
  Explicitly in the article, one of the headings is "AI slop is deceptive or low-value AI-generated content, created to manipulate ranking or attention rather than help the reader." So yes, they are proposing marking bad AI content (from the user's perspective), not all AI-generated content.
  - laacz 11mo ago
    Which troubles me a bit, as 'bad' does not have same definition for everyone.
    - Thrymr 11mo ago
      How is this any different from a search engine choosing how to rank any other content, including penalizing SEO spam? I may not agree with all of their priorities, but I would welcome the search engine filtering out low quality, low effort spam for me.
    - SllX 11mo ago
      There’s a whole genre of websites out there that are a ToC and a series of ChatGPT responses. I take it to mean they’re targeting that shit specifically and anything else that becomes similarly prevalent and a plague upon search results.
    - harimau777 11mo ago
      A simple definition would be: Its bad if it isn't labeled as AI content or if there is not a mechanism that allows you to filter out AI content.
    - sjs382 11mo ago
      That's fine.
    - feedyourhead 11mo ago
      Yes, that's why we'll publish a blog post on this subject in the coming weeks. We've been working on this topic since the beginning of summer, and right now our focus is on exploring report patterns. Matt also shared insights about the other signals we use for this evaluation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920720 And we are still exploring other factors, 1/ is the reported content ai-generated? 2/ is most content in that domain ai-generated (+ other domain-level signals) ==> we are here 3/ is it unreviewed? (no human accountability, no sources, ...) 4/ is it mindlessly produced? (objective errors, wrong information, poor judgement, ...)

abnercoimbre 11mo ago

> Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. Are we personally comfortable with such an approach? For example, if you discover your favorite blogger doing this.

laacz 11mo ago
Should we care? It's a tool. If you can manage to make it look original, then what can we do about it? Eventually you won't be able to detect it.
- Brian_K_White 11mo ago
  If your wife can't detect that you told your secretary to buy something nice, should she care?
  - cschep 11mo ago
    This is an absurd comparison - you (presumably) made a commitment to your wife. There is no such commitment on a public blog?
    - recursive 11mo ago
      Norms of society. I made no commitment that says I won't intensely stare at people on the street. But I just might be a jerk if I keep doing it. "You're not wrong, Walter. you're just an asshole."
    - SkyBelow 11mo ago
      Is it that absurd? We have many expectations in society which often aren't formalized into a stated commitment. Is it really unreasonable to have some commitment towards society to these less formally stated expectations? And is expecting communication presented as being human to human to actually be from a human unreasonable for such an expectation? I think not. If you were to find out that the people replying to you were actually bots designed to keep you busy and engaged, feeling a bit betrayed by that seems entirely expected. Even though at no point did those people commit to you that they weren't bots. Letting someone know they are engaging with a bot seems like basic respect, and I think society benefits from having such a level of basic respect for each other. It is a bit like the spouse who says "well I never made a specific commitment that I would be the one picking the gift". I wouldn't like a society where the only commitments are those we formally agree to.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger At that point, the context changes. We're not there yet. Once we reach that point––if we reach it––it's valuable to know who is repeating thoughts I can get for pennies from a language model and who is originally thinking.

VHRanger 11mo ago

> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results. Hey, Kagi ML lead here. For images/videos/sound, not at the current moment, diffusion and GANs leave visible artifacts. There's a bit of issues with edge cases like high resolution images that have been JPEG compressed to hell, but even with those the framing of AI images tends to be pretty consistent. For human slop there's a bunch of detection methods that bypass human checks: 1. Within the category of "slop" the vast mass of it is low effort. The majority of text slop is default-settings chatGPT, which has a particular and recognizable wording and style. 2.Checking the source of the content instead of the content itself is generally a better signal. For instance, is the author posting inhumanly often all of a sudden? Are they using particular wordpress page setups and plugins that are common with SEO spammers? What about inboud/outbound links to that page -- are they linked to by humans at all? Are they a random, new page doing a bunch of product reviews all of a sudden with amazon affiliate links? Aggregating a bunch of partial signals like this is much better than just scoring the text itself on the LLM perplexity score, which is obviously not a robust strategy.

carlosjobim 11mo ago
> Are they using particular wordpress page setups and plugins that are common with SEO spammers? Why doesn't Kagi go after these signals instead? Then you could easily catch a double digit percentage of slop and maybe over half of slop (AI generated or not), without having to do crowd sourcing and other complicated setups. It's right there in the code. The same with emojis in YouTube video titles.
- hananova 11mo ago
  You’re responding to the Kagi ML lead. They are using those signals in addition to crowd sourcing.
  - carlosjobim 11mo ago
    Are you certain? I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, except for now. And lot's of SEO WordPress spam is still showing up in Kagi queries.

immibis 11mo ago

If you're concerned about money ending up at companies that are taxed by countries that mass murder people, you should be as pissed about Google, Microsoft, DuckDuckGo, Boeing, Airbus, Walmart, Nvidia, etc... there is almost no company you should not be pissed off by. I would be happy that Google is getting some competition. It seems Yandex created a search engine that actually works, at least in some scenarios. It's known to be significantly less censored than Google, unless the Russian government cares about the topic you're searching for (which is why Kagi will never use it exclusively).