3 ms·

"Begun, the slop wars have." I applaud any effort to stem the deluge of slop in search results. It's SEO spam all over again, but in a different package.

jacquesm 11mo ago
It is far worse. SEO spam was easy to detect for a human, even if it fooled the search engine. This is a proverbial deluge of crap and now you're left to find the crumbs. And the crap looks good. It's still crap, but it outperforms the real thing of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. But I can see why other search engines love it: it further allows them to become the front door to all of the content without having to create any themselves.
- ehnto 11mo ago
  I think search engines should be worried, because people will silently lose faith in their results and start using AI chat instead. If search engines fail to find genuine, authentic content for me, and they just pipe me to LLM articles, I may as as well go straight to the LLM.
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    That will, if it is really adopted that widely, result in a freeze on available information.
    - cruffle_duffle 11mo ago
      Why would anybody even bother publishing or adding new content if the only thing that ever reads or interacts with it are bots? I use the shit out LLM’s but you know what they can’t do? Create brand new ideas. They can refine yours, sure. They can take existing knowledge and map it into whatever you’re cooking. But on their own, nope. They just repeat what is in their training data and context window. If all “new” content comes from LLM’s drawing from a huge pool of other LLM content… it’s just one giant echo chamber with nothing new being added. A planet wide circle jerk of LLMs complementing each other on what excellent ideas they all have and how they are really cutting to the heart of the issue. “Now I see the issue” they all say based on the slop context ingested from some other LLM who “saw the issue” from a third LLM. It’s LLMs all the way down.
      - jacquesm 11mo ago
        Yes, it is very much a one-way street and the value of original creation is reduced to nil because they just steal it.
    - vachina 11mo ago
      Thing is LLM can be trained on things not available on the public internet, unlike search engines having to return public URLs. I’m sure all these agentic AI are slurping in all proprietary codebases and their documentations and training on them. It’s the only way to one up the competition.
      - peddling-brink 11mo ago
        That is the part which most frightens me. If the LLMs become the bastions of truth because the open web has fallen to slop, truth becomes privatized and unverifiable.
        jacquesm 11mo ago
        There is a fair chance that we are already in the beginning of this. The web allowed AI to be jumpstarted because it made a lot of information available. Now the AI peddlers are incentivized to destroy the web so they have a monopoly.
        baggachipz 11mo ago
        And hallucinated a significant percentage of the time.
- pseudalopex 11mo ago
  > It's still crap, but it outperforms the real thing of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. The real thing meant human SEO spam? Or human writing?
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    Actual knowledge and understanding.
    - pseudalopex 11mo ago
      > It's still crap, but it outperforms Actual knowledge and understanding of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. I would think this meant AI generated pages performed better in search engines but looked, felt, used language, and informed worse. But you said the crap looks good.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
NewsaHackO 11mo ago
Ironically, the group that hates AI-generated content the most are the SEO bros. They hate that AI summaries in search results cut into their main business of making confusing, long-winded articles to attempt to entice the largest amount of clicks or view time for a one-sentence answer. I wouldn't be surprised if they are the ones actually behind pushes like this.

jacquesm 11mo ago

It is far worse. SEO spam was easy to detect for a human, even if it fooled the search engine. This is a proverbial deluge of crap and now you're left to find the crumbs. And the crap looks good. It's still crap, but it outperforms the real thing of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. But I can see why other search engines love it: it further allows them to become the front door to all of the content without having to create any themselves.

ehnto 11mo ago
I think search engines should be worried, because people will silently lose faith in their results and start using AI chat instead. If search engines fail to find genuine, authentic content for me, and they just pipe me to LLM articles, I may as as well go straight to the LLM.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  That will, if it is really adopted that widely, result in a freeze on available information.
  - cruffle_duffle 11mo ago
    Why would anybody even bother publishing or adding new content if the only thing that ever reads or interacts with it are bots? I use the shit out LLM’s but you know what they can’t do? Create brand new ideas. They can refine yours, sure. They can take existing knowledge and map it into whatever you’re cooking. But on their own, nope. They just repeat what is in their training data and context window. If all “new” content comes from LLM’s drawing from a huge pool of other LLM content… it’s just one giant echo chamber with nothing new being added. A planet wide circle jerk of LLMs complementing each other on what excellent ideas they all have and how they are really cutting to the heart of the issue. “Now I see the issue” they all say based on the slop context ingested from some other LLM who “saw the issue” from a third LLM. It’s LLMs all the way down.
    - jacquesm 11mo ago
      Yes, it is very much a one-way street and the value of original creation is reduced to nil because they just steal it.
  - vachina 11mo ago
    Thing is LLM can be trained on things not available on the public internet, unlike search engines having to return public URLs. I’m sure all these agentic AI are slurping in all proprietary codebases and their documentations and training on them. It’s the only way to one up the competition.
    - peddling-brink 11mo ago
      That is the part which most frightens me. If the LLMs become the bastions of truth because the open web has fallen to slop, truth becomes privatized and unverifiable.
      - jacquesm 11mo ago
        There is a fair chance that we are already in the beginning of this. The web allowed AI to be jumpstarted because it made a lot of information available. Now the AI peddlers are incentivized to destroy the web so they have a monopoly.
      - baggachipz 11mo ago
        And hallucinated a significant percentage of the time.
pseudalopex 11mo ago
> It's still crap, but it outperforms the real thing of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. The real thing meant human SEO spam? Or human writing?
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  Actual knowledge and understanding.
  - pseudalopex 11mo ago
    > It's still crap, but it outperforms Actual knowledge and understanding of look and feel as well as general language skills while it underperforms in the part that matters. I would think this meant AI generated pages performed better in search engines but looked, felt, used language, and informed worse. But you said the crap looks good.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

NewsaHackO 11mo ago

Ironically, the group that hates AI-generated content the most are the SEO bros. They hate that AI summaries in search results cut into their main business of making confusing, long-winded articles to attempt to entice the largest amount of clicks or view time for a one-sentence answer. I wouldn't be surprised if they are the ones actually behind pushes like this.