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G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

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Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#21
post #6

It's the natural evolution of content marketing & SEO. I work at an IT company where we have ~15 ppl building and managing a few SaaS apps for the travel industry, and we have 50-60 ppl doing marketing as a service for our customers. They write page after page of content that barely get read. It all just exists to make the google bot happy. And that works. They bring in more customers & revenue apparently. (honestly,…

Those 60 people can have a new job: fact checking the lies that the new ais produce

Why would they? Google sees more content so you now have more nodes connected to you, so you appear higher. Whether it's true or false doesn't matter to Google.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#22
That was pretty much a given, and in the meantime they already filled YouTube with crappy collage videos with clickbaity titles+captions and voiced by AI. Any plans to build a blacklist (+ browser extension?) that along ads and malware sites will also allow to nuke that rubbish from search results?

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#23
post #3

My suspicion is there will be a lot of new jobs that revolve around verifying random internet content or school work and such, not to tell if it is LLM generated but to simply validate the facts claimed in the post,essay,video,etc... I don't see why this can't be an economy either, a reputation scoring and content validity notarizing economy. Business idea! Lol.

I think a new rise of trusted publishers is more likely than professional information-vetting services/jobs becoming widespread. It's sort-of the same thing, I guess, but with the due diligence up front rather than trying to sort out what's good from the vast sea of information pollution after the fact.

Most really good material is already better found in books (even if ebooks) from real publishers than by trawling the Web, anyway. Even before the LLM apocalypse, the Web has always been rather disappointing at the whole "all the world's knowledge" thing. Great for trivia, great for a few aspects or presentations of a few topics, kinda shit for the rest. AI garbage wrecking the Web doesn't seem like a complete change of the current state of things, but a shift in where exactly the "Web is good for this / Web is not good for this" line falls.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#25

If AI can write articles that fool Google, Google can use AI to detect it. Heck, maybe there will be an AI model that specifically recognizes AI content and can be used to filter it out. A lot of electricity spent for nothing, but it's not like the human species hasn't been its own worst enemy since it appeared.

There are many things LLMs might be able to do, today or in the future, but the single task they are unambiguously capable of doing is generating text that is statistically indistinguishable from their training corpus. The endgame given the technology which presently exists is that spam generation methods will be more robust and effective than spam filtering methods, and I am not convinced that fundamentally better filtering methods are inevitable.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#26

Remember when websites would have a long list of keywords in the background color and tiny font at the bottom? I keep seeing these "AI will destroy X" articles, I've never seen one that wasn't ultimately referring to a minor incremental extension of something already prevalent. Keywords gave way to link farms gave way to shitty outsourced "content" and now LLMs will be part of SEO. It's not really different from gett…

I still do the tiny font keyword list for my resume. I have occasionally left out certain keywords but then hear back from recruiters that if I had keyword x or y then I would be perfect for the job. Back to a 5 page resume.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#27

If AI can write articles that fool Google, Google can use AI to detect it. Heck, maybe there will be an AI model that specifically recognizes AI content and can be used to filter it out. A lot of electricity spent for nothing, but it's not like the human species hasn't been its own worst enemy since it appeared.

I believe efforts of this nature will fall afoul of a very similar effect to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[0]: the amount of effort required to detect AI-written content is (at least) an order of magnitude greater than that required to generate them in the first place. And as LLMs get further fine-tuned to generate more and more human-like text, it will get even harder. Even now, I wouldn't give an "AI Text Detector", even one built with all of Google's resources, more than about a 60% chance of correctly telling AI-generated text from human-generated.

The big problem is false positives—human-written text that gets incorrectly flagged as being written by AI. There's going to be so many false positives in any scheme like this, it'll barely be worth it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#28
i have always augmented my more traditional music projects with avant-garde and experimental stuff. particularly focusing on found sounds, noise, and free improvisation. i record everything, but i treat it more as a journal of "free writing" than actual music output. the recordings are often formless, noisy, and chaotic and frequently contain experiments in polyrhythms or free time. over the years i've amassed an enormous amount of audio data that i treat more as an intellectual curiosity for myself than music i would show to other people.

however, with all of the debates around attribution and ownership for human creators in the age of AI art, combined with the apparently legally and ethically dubious means by which these megacorps obtain their training data, i have began to think about what are some avenues that the general public could try to protest the actions of these megacorps by discretely poisoning the well of their training data.

with the gigabytes and gigabytes of data i have generated of mostly incoherent audio, i have considered releasing this music for the first time by innocuously labeling it as a music audio dataset with the intention of trying to make it appear extremely attractive to megacorps scouring the internet for free data. my individual contribution probably couldn't amount to much, but if a concentrated mass of people did this in their respective fields, perhaps this could be a way of at least obstructing these corporations from freely capitalizing on the hard work of real artists.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#29
post #6

It's the natural evolution of content marketing & SEO. I work at an IT company where we have ~15 ppl building and managing a few SaaS apps for the travel industry, and we have 50-60 ppl doing marketing as a service for our customers. They write page after page of content that barely get read. It all just exists to make the google bot happy. And that works. They bring in more customers & revenue apparently. (honestly,…

Those 60 people can have a new job: fact checking the lies that the new ais produce

I think it confuses things immensely to anthropomorphize large language models. LLMs don't lie or tell the truth they just spit out text that is in alignment with the training model. Don't give them agency they don't have.

Re: G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics

#30

Remember when websites would have a long list of keywords in the background color and tiny font at the bottom? I keep seeing these "AI will destroy X" articles, I've never seen one that wasn't ultimately referring to a minor incremental extension of something already prevalent. Keywords gave way to link farms gave way to shitty outsourced "content" and now LLMs will be part of SEO. It's not really different from gett…

> It's not really different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt

Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page of a search are crap.

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