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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

#61

Post by munificent »

version_five wrote: post #4

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.

Using a gillnet to catch 1,000 fish in an hour is not really different from using a rod and reel to catch a few a day. It's just cheaper and faster.

But the gillnetting can easily lead to extinction and death of an ecosystem whereas recreational fishing rarely does.

Scale matters.

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

#62

Post by dang »

Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-plan-is-to-f..., which points to this.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#63

Post by renegat0x0 »

squarefoot wrote: post #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?

I prefer subscribing to good, valuable sources rather than having a filter for recommendations.

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

#64

Post by TillE »

munificent wrote: post #61
version_five wrote: post #4

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. Using a gillnet to catch 1,000 fish in an hour is not really different from using a rod and reel to catch a few a day. It's just cheaper and faster. But the gillnetting can easily lead to extinction and death of an ecosystem whereas recreational fishing rarely does. Scale matters.

We already have plenty of non-AI autogenerated spam which is apparently good enough to please Google, LLMs just make that slightly better.

So the scale already exists, and we're really just talking about quality.

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

#65

Post by JohnFen »

gwright wrote: post #51
barbariangrunge wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is to fight back against the term "hallucinate" that everyone on here is using

That is an interesting point. I'm not sure why, but "hallucinate" doesn't bother me as much as "lie". Maybe it is because of all the ancillary baggage that "lie" has related to our current culture wars (lies, misinformation, disinformation, gaslighting, etc.) I just asked (another anthropomorphic verb) ChatGPT for a better word and it came up with "fabricate". > The term "fabricate" could be used to describe AI's ten…

"Fabricate" has the same problem as "lie" and "hallucinate". All of those terms imply a cognition that isn't actually happening.

I think the best way to refer to these things is the more accurate "error". The LLM isn't lying, it's in error.

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

#66

Post by TillE »

imglorp wrote: post #14
jrm4 wrote: 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 resolution to burning it down is replacing it with something that works. Quality, human curated, perhaps niche, search is what we should be encouraging and paying for with actual money, and not by renting our brains out.

It's gonna be really funny if we've looped all the way back to the Yahoo Directory circa 1998.

It's hard to argue against the basic idea of human curation as a necessary component. I'm envisioning something like a search engine on top of a community-curated, categorized list of sites. I'd prefer something that works like Wikipedia, rather than a service controlled by a private company.

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

#67

Post by jerf »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #17

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.

No, this isn't an arms race. AI eventually reaches the point where it is indistinguishable from human text. It's pretty close to it now. The only thing even providing the illusion that we can detect ChatGPT or similar chatbots is that so many people use them with their "default voice", which you can learn how to detect, but it is trivial to avoid that.

You also have to remember the future of AI is not just LLMs getting larger and larger. There will be something after them, and something after that. I'd guess we're maybe 2-4 years away from an AI that hooks up to an LLM but has "actual" knowledge of things so it doesn't confabulate new facts, which would remove one of the major signals I'm currently looking for in GPT content.

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

#68

Post by BoorishBears »

JohnFen wrote: post #65
gwright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an interesting point. I'm not sure why, but "hallucinate" doesn't bother me as much as "lie". Maybe it is because of all the ancillary baggage that "lie" has related to our current culture wars (lies, misinformation, disinformation, gaslighting, etc.) I just asked (another anthropomorphic verb) ChatGPT for a better word and it came up with "fabricate". > The term "fabricate" could be used to describe AI's ten…

"Fabricate" has the same problem as "lie" and "hallucinate". All of those terms imply a cognition that isn't actually happening. I think the best way to refer to these things is the more accurate "error". The LLM isn't lying, it's in error.

It doesn't. Hallucination in this context means 'an unfounded or mistaken impression or notion'.

There's one side of the current zeitgeist that over-anthropomorphizes these models. But there's another side that seems to be terrified that LLMs could be anything resembling intelligent

Both sides are pretty emotion over facts though. A lot of their "human-like" behavior is emergent from things that don't work the same way in a humans... but we also don't understand cognition enough to then say there's no overlap between what LLMs are doing and what some part of our own thought process is like. If anything we have more studies that imply the opposite going back decades: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09266...

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

#70

Post by circuit10 »

gwright wrote: post #29
barbariangrunge wrote: post #19

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.

It’s a reasonable way to describe it. LLMs are designed to talk like humans so using human terms to describe them works quite well
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