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

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

#91

Post by ethbr0 »

hoosieree wrote: post #56
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

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…

What's not to like? Custard? Good! Jam? Good! Meat? Good!

I would be very interested in your meat jam custard recipe. Asking for a friendly AI.

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

#92

Post by ben_w »

hoosieree wrote: post #56
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

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…

What's not to like? Custard? Good! Jam? Good! Meat? Good!

Thinking of my confusion as a British person, the first time I heard about Americans having “biscuits and gravy”. Or the time an American recipe guide got confused in the other direction about the British traditional Christmas “mince pie” and put minced meat in instead of mincemeat (which, despite the name, is vegetarian).

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

#93

Post by nottorp »

GaggiX wrote: post #65

AI training on AI-generated images works like a very complicated Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), only the best images have a chance to be relevant enough to be noticed by a scraper, after being selected by the user who used the AI, and they have probably been shared several times by random people. Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images, the…

> Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images

Translation: There is a lot of human generated original art that you're not aware of, and when you see it in the "AI"'s output you think it's original.

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

#95

Post by ethbr0 »

ginko wrote: post #82
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the web is going to be less and less trustworthy.

For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.

It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality.

Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.

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

#96

Post by wjholden »

pmontra wrote: post #70
neilv wrote: post #45

I've been known to start ranting when I'm searching on some topic that attracts SEO garbage (e.g., Python), and realize I'm in the nth different SEO garbage article search hit. I wonder whether a winning solution to the coming massively-parallel "AI" megaspew will emerge, how it will work, and whether Google will be the ones to do it. Or will the bulk of consumers overwhelmingly submit, and accept it as normal, much…

I almost decided to limit my searches to the search engines of the authoritative sites. Examples in the case of Python: the Python language, the Django framework, Stackoverflow (until it will surrender to AI posts then we see what happens.) I'll end up creating a home page with search boxes to those sites. Very '90s

Your post led me to an interesting little quick experiment.

So in 2020 I self-taught Python during Advent of Code. I remember remarking that official python.org results seldom made it to the top of Google searches. I was used to Java and Julia searches taking me right to the official sites.

Anyways, so an experiment just search for "[language] [feature]". I ended up with W3Schools as my top result for "Java ArrayList", but Oracle JDK8 docs for "Java Socket". "Python Socket" takes me to language reference but "Golang Socket" does not.

Maybe there's a trend to be discovered.

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

#97

Post by PeterisP »

jorgemf wrote: post #20
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

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…

I think the problem you are describing is not only about AI, it is about trusting your sources of information. I can happen with content from humans.

With content from humans, there has to be sufficient motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in your daily life.

Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe" from that, since only people who care about cookies would bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly have to mistrust all sources of all information, which is a new thing.

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

#98

Post by thanatos519 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

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…

The stories aren't just SEO-pandering. They're copyright-pandering: https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-storytellin...

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

#99

Post by stephc_int13 »

I think the most interesting point about this article is not the observation that we're going to or already are drowning in algorithmically generated garbage content but the fact that such content is starting to be fed as input to LLMs.

This could lead to emergent/unexpected behavior for the whole system.

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

#100

Post by burkaman »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

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…

Can you link one? Sounds very interesting.
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