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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

aftermath.site

411–420 of 611 posts

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#411

Tongue in cheek: is public key cryptography the solution to verifying content authorship on the internet? Should all major OSes establish and bundle proof of authenticity for every phrase and image created in them using an input device attached to them?

Authenticity is so much more than "I am using a non-public number to mathematically sign this data", that's the whole problem. It's the same as crypto people not understanding that pretty much zero theft/fraud/crime happens through a simple man in the middle attack, so building a terrible machine that can ONLY prevent that method is mediocre at anything else.

Gram and Gramp are going to get their keys phished. An LLM screed signed by Gramps stolen key isn't authentic even though it 100% mathematically is. Authenticity is about the mindset and intentions of the creator.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except 'their vision' is practically homogeneous. I can't think even think of a dozen Unity games that broke the mould, and genuinely stand out, out of the many tens of thousands (?). There's Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, Superhot, Beat Saber, Monument Valley, Subnautica, Among Us, Rust, Cities:Skylines (maybe), Ori (maybe), COD:Mobile (maybe) and...?

Yeah, I can definitely see how Beat Saber, Hollow Knight, and Tunic didn’t really do anything particularly creative or impressive. /s

I mentioned Beat Saber? Did you skip reading the list?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. I thought I missed the internet before ClosedAI ruined it but man, I would love to go back to 2020 internet now. LLM research is going to be the downfall of society in so many ways. Even at a basic level my friend is taking a masters and EVERYONE is using chatgpt for responses. It’s so obvious with the PC way it phrases things and then summarizes it at the end. I hope they just get expelled.

I think this is hyperbole, and similar to various techno fears throughout the ages. Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one. So looking at prior transformational technology I think we'll be just fine. Life may be forever changed for sure, but I think we'll crack reliability and we'll just cope with intelligence being a n…

> Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.

Now, let me tell you about this man, his 95 theses and a thirty years war. Europe did emerge better from it all, but the cost was high, very high.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except 'their vision' is practically homogeneous. I can't think even think of a dozen Unity games that broke the mould, and genuinely stand out, out of the many tens of thousands (?). There's Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, Superhot, Beat Saber, Monument Valley, Subnautica, Among Us, Rust, Cities:Skylines (maybe), Ori (maybe), COD:Mobile (maybe) and...?

and Outer Wilds!

True, it definitely would count, at least more so than COD:Mobile.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#415

One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for AI-generated garbage. Its command of the language is perfect - in fact, it's much better than that of most human beings. Anyone can instantly generate superficially coherent posts. You no longer have to hire a co…

> You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do. I used to do SEO copywriting in high school and yeah, ChatGPT's output is pretty much at the level of what I was producing (primarily, use certain keywords, secondarily, write a surface-level informative article tangential to what you want to sell to the customer). > At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.…

I've rarely found stackoverflow to give useful answers. If I am looking for how to do something with Linux programming, I'll get a dozen answers, half of which are only partial answers, the other half don't work.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sewage has already been flowing for years. Now we're just going to have more of it. Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.

You see how that’s worse, don’t you?

The thing that you initially said was, as I interpreted, that there’s a very large difference between no sewage and a little, since a low concentration is still dangerous. The response to you pointed out that we already have sewage in the supply, implying it may not make a huge difference to add more. I feel like you’re goalpost moving.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#417

The way out is authenticity. Signed content is the only way to get that. You can't take anything at face value. It might be generated, forged, et. When anyone can publish anything and when anyone is outnumbered by AIs publishing even more things, the only way to filter that is by relying on reputation and authenticity so you can know who published what and what else they are saying. Web of trust has of course been tr…

> The way out is authenticity. Signed content is the only way to get that. This is the real play IMO. With the push for identity systems that support attestation [1], it doesn't matter if AI is successful at producing high quality results or if it only ever produces massive amounts of pure garbage. In the latter case, it's a huge win for platform owners like Apple, Google, or Microsoft (via TPM) because they're the o…

> My fear is that eventually you'll start seeing government services where identity and auth are handed off to private companies like Google and Apple

One enticing alternative (for the government!) is to require you to upload your actual documents and use some government sanctioned attestation service.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#418

One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for AI-generated garbage. Its command of the language is perfect - in fact, it's much better than that of most human beings. Anyone can instantly generate superficially coherent posts. You no longer have to hire a co…

A work-friend and I were musing in our chat yesterday about a boilerplate support email from Microsoft he received after he filed a ticket, that was simply chock full of spelling and grammar errors, alongside numerous typos (newlines where inappropriate, spaces before punctuation, that sort of thing) and as a joke he fired up his AI (honestly I have no idea what he uses, he gets it from a work account as part of some…

I can imagine soon - within the next year or so - that business emails will simply be AI talking to AI. Especially with Microsoft pushing their copilot into Office and Outlook.

You'll need to email someone so you'll fire up Outlook with its new Clippy AI and tell it the recipient and write 2 or 3 bullet points of what you want it to include. Your AI will write the email, including the greeting and all the pleasantries ("hope this email finds you well", etc) with a wordy 3 or 4 paragraphs of text, including a healthy amount of business-speak.

Your recipient will then have an email land in their inbox and probably have their AI read the email and automatically summarise those 3 or 4 paragraphs of text into 3 or 4 bullet points that the recipient then sees in their inbox.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#419
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signed content is the only way to get that. This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it. It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can a…

And it is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to prove that a speaker at defcon that you recognize from last year isn’t an imposter wearing a mission impossible mask; these conditions are too strict.

Once we have the technology to convincingly create imposters at Defcon for pennies at scale, your analogy will matter. Until then, it's irrelevant because we don't have a reason to suspect a motivated party has the means and opportunity to create that convincing imposter.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Or maybe it would be a combination of pre-AI content plus some extra barriers to entry for newer content that would increase the likelihood the content was generated by real people?

Silly prediction: the only way to get guaranteed non-ai generated content will be to go to live performances of expert speakers. Kind of like going to the theater vs. TV and cinema or attending a live concert vs. listening to Spotify.

Until the experts are replaced by "experts" with teleprompter/earpieces.
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