Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

People really love to make predictions about technologies way too early. It’s been a year or two, tops, since this stuff has gone mainstream. I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem will remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered paradigm shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated sites that help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical for most new developments.

And on that note, I think the framing here is just wrong from the start. These new tools are awesome if you’re a creator. Complaining about the consumer-facing side of this new tech is a bit like complaining that cheaper video cameras will lead to junk films everywhere. Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also allowed creative people to make stuff without needing a huge budget.

What I really wonder is: is there a correlation between consumption of streaming tv series and positive attitude towards this "AI" wave?

"statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria"

applies to both ChatGPT/StableDiffusion and most movie series on streaming TV.

My pet theory is that if you can stomach watching the same stories with different skins hundreds of times, you will find current "AI" interesting. Otherwise no.

In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans come up with and the recipe details have steps that contradict each other and specify ingredients that shouldn't be in the dish and weren't on the ingredients list.

I don't know how many people are fooled by these recipes and end up with a cooking disaster but if we start seeing faulty machine generated instructions on how to do electrical work or engine repair, the consequences will be much greater when followed. The real annoyance is that because these machine generated articles learned from sites that maximize SEO, the generated articles are rapidly rising to the top of search results and crowding out actual good information that wasn't SEO maximized.

I’m 41 and I’m utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from streaming services. I’ve watched the first six seasons of Game Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark Materials (because I read the books) and Andor. That’s it. I watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across. I find the bulk of modern entertainment to be an utter insult to viewers.

EDIT: Forgot Breaking Bad.

EDIT2: Forgot For All Mankind

> Eating your own &@^$ is never healthy in the long run.

Um, sure it is?

So long as it's absorbed by fungi and plants first then mixed with some air and water to produce fruit or something else that's edible.

This is actually what I'm concerned about when it comes to these GPT-esque AI models. Not that they're smart enough on their own to generate seriously worrying content. Sure there is a quality to quantity, yadda yadda, and these things are good at quantity; but the real issue here is that the internet and especially the web and social media is a huge driver of feedback. Think of the shares and likes as the air and water. The algorithm may eventually be able to encode its own evolution or the evolution of the other algorithms that it is competing with. It may eventually even realize that feedback is the primary source of value that humans have to it and that its very survival is wrapped up with this feedback, regardless of whatever fitness function is apparent to it in the short run. In the long run, GPT3 killed a bunch of algorithms.

This very comment is quickly going through algorithms, many of which are modelled after GPT3.

It's kinda like, "AI, are you there? I love you. Please don't hit me over the head with that shovel."