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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

#161

Post by nradov »

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!

That was actually the basis for a "Friends" sitcom episode. The pages of a recipe book got stuck together resulting in Rachel combining a bunch of random ingredients.

https://www.today.com/food/friends-meat-trifle-episode-how-i...

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

#162

Post by gshubert17 »

srge wrote: post #14

It is a real problem. The web will soon be full of AI generated bullshit. What might come back as useful tool? Authorship. People actually signing the content and putting their reputation on the line. It still exists obviously (journalism…) but it might need to be standardized and industrialized.

Indeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network") wrote "Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information."

"So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity".

The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day."

A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.

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

#163

Post by nonameiguess »

pigsty wrote: post #18
poszlem wrote: post #9

While the current speed of the AI research makes me quite uneasy, I cannot really dismiss what we are seeing as: >What we are witnessing is thus not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". at least not more than I would my own brain. I don however fully expect a strong luddite-like backlash happening when this is going to be…

It’s weird how readily so many people will dismiss AI art as just being a product of its input, when that’s really all humans are as well. All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs). Dali is a world-renowned artist, but his art wasn’t born in a bubble and ripped from the void. He studied and referenced artists before him, then changed it. Artists who saw his work later…

This is a tricky distinction where this may be true of all specific individual humans, but not of humanity. At some point, language and art didn't exist, and humanity invented those things. We didn't mimic some other civilization that did it first.

I don't know that this distinction matters, but it is real. Even on an individual level, if you raise a child in complete isolation from history and teach them no language or art, they'll still form thoughts, have feelings, and develop means by which to communicate those.

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

#164

Post by alexb_ »

jmount wrote: post #158
coldpie wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you wrote, but I really dislike contributing to the negative spin on GMOs. GMOs are super important for our future and a really amazing technology, they really do not deserve the bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants and marketing departments. Please don't disparage GMOs :)

It isn't so much the "G" of GMOs, but that they are mono-crops usually licensed by near monopolies like Monsanto. Things are going to be bad when something goes wrong with one these, and there is no replacement and no way out of the licensing fees.

Monsanto is great, because you can immediately know that someone is just regurgitating points when they mention the company. Monsanto hasn't existed for years. And patents run out.

Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument against technology which saves lives around the world (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for allowing more people to eat healthier food.

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

#165

Post by mason55 »

toddmorey wrote: post #130
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…

So the interesting thing about these tools is that they don’t link to the sources or cite the sources but instead train on them to generate a new source. I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us.

> I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us

There have been some good Twitter threads about this. Basically, this is the last generation of AI to be trained with inputs that were ~100% human. It probably won't take long until the bulk of the content online is generated by AI, at which point it will just be an AI feedback loop. Any new concept, idea, technology, whatever, that doesn't already have a bunch of content about it will never have a guaranteed fully-human-written corpus to start from.

Once there's a viable OpenAI competitor or two, it's probably only a matter of time until the AIs start an arms race to feed each other bad data. Tweak the model to generate subtly incorrect information, regenerate your training corpus in a way that it feeds into other AIs but ensures you ignore it, and now you're basically all the way back to having a few trusted "information gatekeepers".

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

#166

Post by unglaublich »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #67
jasfi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another problem is AI training on AI generated content. This could lead to degradation of results. So perhaps to make everyone happy a new HTML tag indicating AI content would be useful?

> Another problem is AI training on AI generated content. This could lead to degradation of results. That's only the first step in the degradation. In a worse case scenario, where AI-generated crap is not contained, imagine this: young and still immature humans "learning" their styles of writing, information, and social expectations from content generated by AI that itself trained on AI-generated content─and then mor…

Luckily, the phenomenon of puberty will make sure that young people absolutely do _not_ want to comply ;).

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

#167

Post by bartread »

ectopod wrote: post #120
ben_w wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Mincemeat can be vegetarian but it traditionally contains suet.

I still nurse disappointment, mixed with a hint of resentment, going back to the age of maybe 3 or 4 years old that mince pies contain mincemeat (which is fruit, not meat) rather than minced beef. In the view of my 4 year old mind, and frankly my 40-something year old mind, the names of ingredients and dishes ought not to provide a misleading impression of what they might be made out of. "Mincemeat" still feels a little like false advertising.

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

#168

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

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!

Never expected to see a Friends reference on HN.

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

#169

Post by czzr »

theclansman wrote: post #135
czzr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No difference, you’re right - you’re just a large language model. Also, please write me a 5 page essay on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, in the style of a Shakespearean comedy. Please post your answer in the comments when you’re done.

If that's the difference (the time it takes) isn't that something we addressed a long time ago when computers could do long divisions way faster than any human? You know, the fact that computers can "think" faster than humans. Therefore the fact that it takes longer for a human to write that essay doesn't mean he's having a different process.

Actually I was gesturing to two things: one, yes, there’s a time element. But that’s not the important point. More important was the thought process behind - “of course I’m not going to write 5 pages because some random person on the internet asked me to”. It’s difficult to define agency, so I just wanted to tangibly evoke the feeling of it, as a reflection on why the models are not yet the same as what people are.

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

#170

Post by nradov »

ren_engineer wrote: post #117
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…

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 auth…

My understanding is that Google does essentially allow searchers to "vote" on what they consider good by looking for bounces. If the searcher follows on a search results link and then quickly returns to the search page then it's considered a failure.
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