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

Though the only way to do that is probably to end up in a world where most worthwhile content is locked behind hard paywalls so there's one class who pays a lot for gated content (which was more or less the historical state of affairs, public libraries notwithstanding) and the plebes have to filter through all the ad-laden crap.

Won’t help.

This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points / karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will eventually dwarf all human-generated content.

With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people think they’re reacting to their friends’ posts of real things.

No, forget violent killbots. Today’s tech puts the nail in the coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn’t have to be right about stuff to destroy our systems.

We’ve been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9 humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content exchange.

Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better on many metrics but will F everyone on the others.

They will do reputational attacks at scale against rivals like nytimes.org and optimize for more reshares.

Right now we consider what 1 AI actor can do among 9 humans at a poker table. Now imagine 1000-1 ratio of AI actors to humans on every network. And no way to weed them out.

The way we consume most online content isnt even a Turing test but passive skimming - and GPT-4 can pass turing tests. None of your friends will really be able to tell that bullshit fake article with fake video was autogenerated by a bot. The botswarm will be able to manufacture any public opinion it wants overnight and “authoritative” voices arguing against it will be drowned out — or worse, reputationally attacked in a coordinated manner. This is assuming that they even know what is real anymore themselves!!

Human capital and content will be managed completely by AI and regulation will be useless — not only because enforcement won’t be feasible but because the network effect of all the human content and capital will gradually shrink. Every organization will start to PREFER bots to humans, in their communities, and any humans who complain will evenutually be booted or ignored by the majority (which will eventually be 99.99999% bots).

If you think this is far fetched — it already happened with trading and markets. Everyone prefers to have a bot and bot trading dwarfs human trading, and takes their money and capital. Content generation isn’t that different.

You think your social capital matters enough for your friends to care more about your relationship than bots… but ask yourself this… do you prefer to ask Google than your parents? Do you prefer to spend long hours at a corporation that you could be spending with your kids and do you put your elderly parents in nursing homes so you can work more? These are just examples.

That’s with TODAY’s tech. Now, already. Nothing more needed except swarming behavior. And the key is that the communities will begin to PREFER the bots !

Also, there is no way to stop it because organizations prefer AI to humans and will develop and deploy it regardless of what you say or do. Organizations aren’t humans, and neither is AI. Humans are literally not stopping this, no matter how they organize. It’s GAME OVER for society.

PS: After such a sobering message, I would just like to say that trying to escape from this and live in enclaves without AI will be like the Unabomber — finding society ever more encroaching on the wilderness he removed himself into. He and Frank Herbert’s Dune have glimpsed the problem of advancing technology — but they have underestimated how all-pervasive its utter destruction of all human society and meaning will be. And unlike their romantic notions, it cannot be stopped, not by a revolution nor by any activity of man.

Strangely, recipes in particular are generally untested and so faulty as to fail when done strictly according to the written instructions.

That might make it a little harder to recognize when an AI is 'pulling your leg'

there's a paper that basically shows these LLMs are pretty much tapped out in terms of quality data to train on, not sure if there are any legit architecture improvements in the works to improve results quality but it seems brute force training with more data may be about over - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf

As for SEO, Google is going to have to stop being lazy and relying so much on backlinks and domain authority. They might have to consider allowing searchers to essentially vote on what they consider good. I don't see any other way low quality AI content doesn't dominate SERPs, established players will spin up entire sites and spam backlinks to them all. There are also people working on using AI to identify obvious AI content by finding patterns in the output which is probably our only hope.

For social media and forums they will have to rely even harder on captcha or they will be taken over by bots talking to other bots

I think the nearby comment that points out that this is more closely related to editing than to creation as it has recently been understood is correct. Which is not a value judgement per se, but the distinction between those two activities is useful and to me provides a useful lens to understand this change.