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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

#31

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.

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

That’s by design. They load the results with crap so you click on the ads instead of the result. Ads generate revenue for Alphabet, search _results_ less so.

Simple as.

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

#32
It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game and nobody can say for sure.

As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about YouTube algorithms:

1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad videos, or thousands even.

2. Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised people would leave and it would hurt your stats.

3. Generating large amounts of videos may be profitable because it's like collecting peanuts with automation, but that would never reach the mainstream audience like Mr. Beast.

This is because the algorithm promotes videos that are frequently clicked and fully watched. Generated or not, the content must be good enough to be watched through, in order to please the algorithm.

You see, there are a lot of bootleg versions of Stackoverflow, but many of them are terrible. Some of them get ranked because they're still helpful (to the 80% majority of programmers, probably not for the HN elites). We can imagine there would certainly LLM generated versions of those, but very likely with better quality. Generated or not, it's still an arms race to generate more helpful and higher quality content to get traffic.

Also, HN people have been complaining about how the quality of Google degrade over time. It might be Google's fault, but I believe there's another important factor that hurts search engines as a whole - There are too many walled gardens nowadays: Instagram, Discord, and now Twitter, etc. Value information is hiding behind those, which would certainly make search engines less helpful over time.

For example, when I play not very popular video games I wish there are wikis or guides for that. In the old days, I know I can find most of the information in several forums and check the top posts. Now I need to go through Discord and scroll through casual chats and wonder if I missed something.

With LLMs, people would likely be draining that information from walled gardens and compiling them into helpful insights.

Again, there are a lot of dynamics, and it's hard to tell how things would turn out. Maybe it would kill Google and possibly the old Web, maybe it would make the Web great again.

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

#33

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.

I've heard from recruiters that some software will export submitted resumes in plain text in a standard format for review, I wonder if the tiny white font tags show up as well

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

#34

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.

It doesn't even need to recognize every AI article. It can simply ban the sites known for putting such crap up without tagging it as AI. But then they could have cracked on SEO spam this way, but won't. They won't because their business thrives on shifting through shitty content to give a slightly less shitty results.

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

#35

Hopefully this serves as an incentive to Google to improve their search results. I find GPT-4 works so much better for finding answers (even in cases when it's wrong) than searching Google, especially for trivial ones. Add plugin features like code interpreter and the usefulness is not even close for most of the cases I use it. It's always worth verifying the answers, but that's also true for google results, and with…

Probably it won't, at least not at first. Google's customers are advertisers. GPT thus far is a subscription-based service, it's not competing for Google's customers.

So what if Google has a few less users? Since Google Ads is auction-based, it means a few less impressions will be available, and the cost of impressions will go up. Advertisers will pay a bit more for less but Google's sort of the only game in town so it won't make a huge difference.

Now if Bing achieves 30% market share on the back of its great GPT integration or something, maybe that gets Google off its ass. I think LLMs might be the beginning of the end for Google but they're so entrenched it'll take 20 years.

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

#36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't lie either. I just spit out words that is in alignment with my mental model for optimizing my future.

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

#37

It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game and nobody can say for sure. As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about YouTube algorithms: 1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad videos, or thousands even. 2. Clickbait works in terms of ge…

I think it makes it worse. There is only so much it can index.

I was searching a municipal website that had a bunch of pdfs. Instead of downloading them I'll I figured I'd sure the "site:__" to look through them. It didn't work. It seemed to index only 3 of those files. sigh.

One of the appeals of using "chat bot" is you get an answer without all the ad crap the web delivers. I think thats the appeal of stackoverflow and Redit.. Using AI to make the web worse is something...

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

#38
post #11

Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.

> Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.

Very well said.

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

#40
post #7

I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing. I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we should all be working on ways to confound and confuse and generally screw up the companies who are sucking up all the personal info. This kind of runs parallel to that. Google search has been pretty bad for some time now, might be worth "burning this thing down…

The problem generally speaking is that any successor search engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling. I don’t know that making the web less usable in general is worth it.

I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a lot better.
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