Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ploum.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 452 posts

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

#291

Post by EamonnMR »

notacoward wrote: post #205
baxtr wrote: post #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 r…

That's honestly one of the best comments in this entire thread. Instead of veering predictably into philosophy or anecdote, it provides concrete and feasible steps toward improvement. No better way to make the point that "AI generated" is not the problem and "garbage" is.

In this case though, it's not a solution at all. The question isn't how producers of garbage produce less garbage, it's how consumers of content can avoid being inundated by garbage. We may well ask 'please don't produce less garbage' and the producers have given us a resounding 'no.'

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

#292

Post by TeMPOraL »

ren_engineer wrote: post #188
nradov wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So that's why they're doing it. I've been wondering for a while now just why so many sites make you work hard to fish out the information you're after. I assumed ad exposure, but I had this feeling that it's not the whole story. Delaying people to fool Google bounce metrics is the idea I missed.

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

#293

Post by bcrosby95 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #266
tylerrobinson wrote: post #123

I see parallels here with industrialization and automation in manufacturing and food production. Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text for some purposes and opt for "the real…

Everyone is (rightfully) picking on your GMO example, but I want to address something else: > Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. Correct. > In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a product that's not low-quality garbage -…

I feel this so much in my life. I used to be a mid price buyer but eventually what I bought ended up in the "expensive, but still crap" category far too many times. Now I just buy crap all the time, it lasts just as long, and at least I know I'm getting what I pay for.

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

#294

Post by archon1410 »

avereveard wrote: post #258
archon1410 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it still makes others uneasy. a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with GMO crops and AI poems—they will not be able to tell the difference between actual cr…

GMO difference is not mystical. GMO allows for massive quantities of weed killer to enter our environment with not well understood effects. It has been recently linked to the bee collapse for example. And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by corporations, which are well documented.

I had not there was as much non-mystical opposition to GM crops. A cursory Google search seems to suggest the evidence for GMs contributing to colony collapse disorder is very weak (and the amount of pesticides in the environment might not have much relation to GM crops). But going forward I will keep in mind that it's not as simple as I had imagined it to be.

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

#295

Post by visarga »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #239
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…

Here’s a solution: Go ask ChatGPT your question about python. It’s spew is probably better than the SEO spew. I feel like species traitor taking the side of the AI, but I think this is probably a decent way of answering a lot of questions based on a factual and rational basis that have been answered multiple times. A lot of hoopla is made over the fact you can trick it with a false premise into giving a false answer…

The solution will be to chain Google with chatGPT. A system that allows chatGPT to perform Google searches and use the retrieved documents as reference when formulating the response. This means we don't need to actually see Google or the website, but still have grounded responses with references.

Instead of Google it could also be a big dump of text, like 1TB of well curated web text, so with local search you get more privacy and speed. And instead of chatGPT we will use "chatStability", a LM running on the local machine, in privacy. This could be the end of ads and the creation of a new private creative space for people.

I think Google is in big trouble and that explains why they are second when it comes to LLMs - this line of development will make it easier to escape their ads and tracking. There's no profit in it for them.

Even though the Transformer was invented at Google 5 years ago, from all the authors only one still works there, most of them have left to implement their own visions, a bunch of startups. Why have they left Google if they wanted to innovate? Because they could not do it inside. Google got to protect the current revenue streams first.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-the-authors-behind-the-tra....

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

#296

Post by LesZedCB »

jhbadger wrote: post #206
emj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Butlerian Jihad" that was the most surprising for me reading Dune that they had a limit on how smart computers could be. The movie was very vague on the subject, and was more of a Star Wars like lo-fi.

It was even more surprising if you realize that "Butlerian" is referring to the 19th century writer Samuel Butler (although, yes, Herbert later invented a character to explain the name in-universe). Samuel Butler wrote an 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines" which predicted that machines would improve in a way analogous to natural selection and would so so faster than humans could evolve, and therefore they might e…

indeed, and selection pressure is not on the domain of physical bodies like for us fleshy species, but profitability for digital computational species in the domain of capital.

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

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #115
jefe_ wrote: post #108

The challenge is that AI generated content will only register as garbage to those who fall 1-2 standard deviations away from the mean interest level for whatever content the AI is producing. For everybody else, it will typically be a 'good enough' story, recipe, video, etc. Several months ago, I wanted to cook chicken curry, so I googled and chose a top result. The recipe was fine, but it wasn't what I wanted. I then…

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'

Agreed. A person who cooks regularly will just adapt on the fly and might even not realize they're correcting an error in the recipe. A person who cooks infrequently will stick to the recipe, fail, and then blame themselves for their own inexperience. This is already the case with human-produced recipes, and, as you say, it'll make it harder to recognize you're dealing with AI-generated nonsense instead of regular human mistakes or occasional cluelessness.

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

#299

Post by di456 »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #123

I see parallels here with industrialization and automation in manufacturing and food production. Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text for some purposes and opt for "the real…

I've thought about spending $8 towards a local paper subscription, inspired by Twitter's paid version.

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

#300

Post by practice9 »

notacoward wrote: post #205
baxtr wrote: post #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 r…

That's honestly one of the best comments in this entire thread. Instead of veering predictably into philosophy or anecdote, it provides concrete and feasible steps toward improvement. No better way to make the point that "AI generated" is not the problem and "garbage" is.

An important threshold will be when an important physics, math or biology problem is going to be solved with one of these AIs, or by a scientist who uses AI for "ghostwriting".

If scientists will verify the solution and find it to be correct, the mainstream sentiment about "garbage" will change very quickly. Maybe except various neo-luddites who will find different reasons to hate these models

Post reply on HN