AI Slop Is Flooding Medium • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#11

Post by bananapub » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

one of the saddest parts of the whole thing is finding out how many fucking arseholes out there have been waiting to flood the internet with crap, and had previously only failed because they were too lazy to do all that typing.

just absolutely embarrassing for us all.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#12

Post by rootusrootus » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere.

I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario.

I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#13

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #5

Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?

[deleted]

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#14

Post by asah » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #6

YouTube allows one to report a video for 11 different reasons. A list below. Unfortunately, AI Slop is not one of them. Sexual content Violent or repulsive content Hateful or abusive content Harassment or bullying Harmful or dangerous acts Misinformation Child abuse Promotes terrorism Spam or misleading Legal issue Captions issue

Spam is close enough.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#15

Post by Uehreka » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #5

Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?

A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it. At least, that’s been my experience coming across AI-written Blender tutorials on YouTube. All this makes it difficult to quickly report as spam. There’s also a lot of plausible deniability since a lot of people have developed a hair-trigger response to writing they don’t like or find compelling and just immediately go “It’s AI!” even when it isn’t.

> why doesn't HN have this problem?

HN comments aren’t easily monetizable.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#16

Post by simonw » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #5

Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?

"(why doesn't HN have this problem?)"

I've seen a few comments on HN that looked likely to have been generated by LLMs, but they tend not to get any replies or up-votes so there's not much incentive for people to keep on trying to post them.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#17

Post by BearOso » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #6

YouTube allows one to report a video for 11 different reasons. A list below. Unfortunately, AI Slop is not one of them. Sexual content Violent or repulsive content Hateful or abusive content Harassment or bullying Harmful or dangerous acts Misinformation Child abuse Promotes terrorism Spam or misleading Legal issue Captions issue

Spam or misleading is the category to use. It's misleading people into thinking humans wrote it, and being AI tripe, it's always spam.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#18

Post by minimaxir » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:24 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #12

Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.

That's more a consequence of "AI" becoming a synonym for "always bad" in creative spaces (and inversely "if it's bad, it must be AI-generated"), despite the fact that there's some nuance there.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#19

Post by bhouston » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:24 PM UTC

I've seen this on Substack as well. For example, I ran across this account on Substack is posting a lot of ChatGPT-generated articles to reddit. This is clearly ChatGPT-generated based on a very simple prompt:

https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-i...

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#20

Post by welder » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 7:25 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #12

Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.

Yep, I analyzed bot activity recently on PH. [0] I think it's only going to get more common.

[0] https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots