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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

#81
post #46

As someone who avoided the Twitter firehose like the plague, I've noticed the slow, then rapid decline of traditional 'websites' over the past decade as they succumbed to SEO keyword optimization and driving traffic from social networks. . Due to the incentives of the players involved, there is no solution that would lead to a neater, less blogspam-infested internet. The concept of a 'website' as Tim Berners Lee and…

You're on this site talking to generally smart people who are not paying for the privilege of using this site complaining that everything good on the internet is already paywalled. If you don't know how to find what you're looking for, just ask. Paywalls aren't a real thing that have to be obeyed, nor is there ever only one spigot for any digital fountain.

I have yet to find a paywall that has stopped me from reaching the content within a click or two of one of my browser extensions.

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

#82
post #51

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…

I always thought that "confabulate" would have been the best word to describe what LLMs do:

> Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false. Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal.

> Can include autobiographical and non-personal information, such as historical facts, fairy-tales, or other aspects of semantic memory.

> The account can be fantastic or coherent.

> Both the premise and the details of the account can be false.

> The account is usually drawn from the patient's memory of actual experiences, including past and current thoughts.

> The patient is unaware of the accounts' distortions or inappropriateness, and is not concerned when errors are pointed out.

> There is no hidden motivation behind the account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Description

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

#83
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

If an article is posted to a blog, and nobody is there to read it, does it even matter if it lies?

What they want is to optimise the ranking Google gives them. If Google's ranking filters out falsehoods then lies can be optimised away automatically.

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

#84
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,…

The reason I can't stand ChatGPT answers is that it's trained on overly wordy SEO articles that need at least 500 words

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

#85
post #36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you aware that what you are saying is not true?

If you are aware then it's a "Lie". If you are not aware then it's a "Mistake".

LLM's are not aware, so saying "lie" is not correct.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems similar to, maybe even a restatement of, the "how do you detect AI-written content" problem. If someone could provide a way to programmatically detect accurate, high quality content, it would solve the SEO spam problem. It would also as a side-effect solve the AI-content problem. Or maybe it's the other way around and it would solve the AI-content problem and as a side effect the SEO spam problem. Well, th…

The detection needs to be almost perfect for it not to be worth it for the AI to simply retry until it's passed the detection.

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

#89
post #87

What is G/O, pleaase?

That question is answered in the first sentence of the article:

> "In early July, managers at G/O media, the digital publisher that owns sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel, published four stories that had been almost entirely generated by AI engines."

More about them on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is an interesting take. Google can only "reward" videos that people watch for longer because they own the site. That is, they can tell when people leave. For a good chunk of sites, they still can because of Google's ad market share, but for a r…

Even if I’m not using Chrome, if I search for a term and the first link isn’t helpful, I would quickly go back to the search results and click another link. Google should be able to get a signal from that

Yes, they get the signal. Let me remind you, Google want you to see more ads so the sooner you find your information the less time you linger around. If they use that signal, their best interest is to bury your optimal result further down.
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