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

ploum.net

181–190 of 452 posts

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

#181
So, wait, in what sense is AI-generated content garbage? It is (admittedly by the author) fascinating and even beautiful. Is it the fact that it was generated by an algorithm, and the idea then is that all algorithmically-generated content is garbage? But the author doesn't even begin to deal with the idea that humans themselves operate according to algorithms: an algorithm is simply a strategy for doing something.

I won't even critique the rest of the article; there's no need. If AI-generated content is beneficial and helpful to humans, then I think one is hard-pressed to call it garbage, and the underlying thesis fails. And to my knowledge, no one — not even the article's author — denies that AI products can be beneficial.

AI is a tool, just like, say, Photoshop is a tool, or a compiler is a tool. No points are awarded for having human beings do by hand all the tedious work that tools can do better. In the end, creators, whether it be of paintings, or poetry, or essays, or software, will stand on the shoulders of these tools and thereby accomplish things that previous generations could only dream about.

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

#182
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows … TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching and constantly bitching about it online. It is like complaining is a hobby in itself and they are almost looking for…

I don’t understand it either… if you don’t like it, walk away. Don’t contribute to the toxic commentary and above all don’t contribute to the viewing numbers, because if they can hold your gaze you’ll get more of the same.

I find the meta-content this generates pretty funny thought. I haven't watched any of the new Trek content since the last movie (Beyond), but I love watching Mike and Rich tear it apart on RedLetterMedia.

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

#183
post #95
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video is just a better format than text for many recipes, at least for novice cooks. The results often depend on technique as much as ingredients, and it's hard to convey technique through text.

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

#184
Sorry, I had to do it. I asked GPT3...

How can we prevent drowning in garbage generated by AI?

> Preventing drowning in AI-generated garbage can be a challenging task, but there are a few things that can be done to reduce the amount of garbage that is generated. One approach is to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality content, rather than relying on large amounts of data to produce mediocre results. Additionally, using tools and techniques such as data filters and validation can help to identify and remove low-quality or irrelevant content. Finally, creating and enforcing strict guidelines and standards for the use and generation of AI-generated content can help to prevent the proliferation of garbage.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Never expected to see a Friends reference on HN.

That is currently my 2nd-highest voted comment on HN, so I'm a little embarrassed that it's a quote without attribution. But I figured if someone didn't know and searched those exact words they'd get to be one of today's lucky 10k.

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

#187
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But at least artists have some agency, all that stuff that they ingested goes through them and are somewhat limited by human hardware. Very little is original indeed but that percentage may as well go down even more as more and more AI generated soup unleashed on the world.

What about artists that used random generators in their art? Jackson Pollock used to randomly splatter paint on canvases and when some random pattern struck his fancy he went with it. That's not all that different from picking the pictures you like from a Stable Diffusion prompt and then further honing them with inpainting, image-to-image and so on.

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

#188
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

true, but that's part of the reason for the life stories being told on recipe sites that the parent comment was talking about. Bounce rate is another metric that SEOs have gamed by throwing a bunch of fluff onto pages where people have to dig to find what they want

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side effects? "Content" is already maximally cheap: just copy and paste. AI-generated material – at least, with the current genre of GPT-style predictive text algorithms – doesn't produce original content; it just serves to dilute our global knowledge base with semantic white noise and lossy copies of existing knowledge.

Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.

You can only say that if you also say that the creativity of human beings themselves is just a way to launder copyright.

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

#190
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…

Search engines like Google are probably a dying technology. The next disruptive innovation in that space will be "answer engines" that use GPT like technology to dynamically generate specific answers to questions rather than linking users to third-party sites. This will allow for controlling the entire user experience and serving ads embedded in the generated content.
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