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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#111

Post by plagiarist »

titzer wrote: post #64
branon wrote: post #5

Never thought I'd say this, but in times like these, with clearnet in such dire straits, all the information siloed away inside Discord doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Remaining unindexable by search engines all but guarantees you'll never appear alongside AI slop or be used as training data. The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they on…

The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectivel…

There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things. The weeds have grown over them and made it difficult to find these from the public web because these individuals cannot devote the same resources to SEO and SEM as teams of adtech affiliate marketers with LLM-generated content.

When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#112

Post by rightbyte »

oblio wrote: post #94
asylteltine wrote: post #91

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.

At this rate many exams will just become oral exams :-)

Or like ... normal paper exams in a class room?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#114

Post by agentultra »

oceanplexian wrote: post #9
erellsworth wrote: post #4

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.

Humans are the original bullshit generator. AI is only doing what humans have been doing since forever.

So instead of putting out the fires, in the interest of improving the situation, we'll make the fires bigger?

A good deal of humans care about the truth. Some of them actively seek to deceive and avoid the truth -- liars, we tend to dislike them. But the ones both sides dislike are the ones who disregard the truth... ie: bullshitters -- the, "that's just your opinion, man," the, "what even is the truth anyway?" people.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#115

Post by [deleted] »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #74

Google ≠ the internet. This reads more like a rant against Google’s search product. Yes, Google might go under due to AI (Clayton says, thank you and goodbye) but that doesn’t mean the internet as a whole is doomed. To be frank, the internet is already awash with dogshit. It’s doing pretty well so far.

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#116

Post by MisterBastahrd »

I'm a sports fan who follows basketball and football. Here's something I see a lot of nowadays in my feed:

set a new record last night

And when you go to click into it?

An AI created post about how the athlete in question is now in position 1258 all time at something or other.

Awesome. Such a great use of technology. Yet this will be the primary use of AI outside of materials research. Making clickbait clickbaitier.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#117

Post by WJW »

7thaccount wrote: post #69
firecall wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to email each links to cool websites! And there were services like Hotline! And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!

Oh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.

The web was invented in 1989, so mostly it didn't. Before that there were BBSes that you could dial into. From there, you could chat with other users who happened to be logged onto the same server or download text documents and whatnot that others had uploaded.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#118

Post by ravenstine »

Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material and isn't that distinguishable from it. It doesn't help that search engines today sort by prestige over whether your query matches text in a webpage.

People aren't really using the web much now anyway. They're living in apps. I don't see people surfing webpages on their phone unless they're "googling" a question, and even then they aren't usually going more than 1 level deep before returning to their app experience. The web has been crap for a very long time, and it has become worse, but soon it's not going to matter anymore.

You, the reader, were the frog slowly boiling, except now the heat has been turned way up and you are now aware of your situation.

If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop.

EDIT: People seem to be misunderstanding me by thinking I am not considering the change in volume of spam. I invoked the boiling frog analogy specifically to make the point that the volume has significantly increased.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#119

Post by WJW »

fnordian_slip wrote: post #85
soared wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI solves that problem - it’s pretty easy to look at behavioral data and identify low v high quality users. Optimize towards what the AI thinks is users likely to convert and the problem Is solved.

What prevents this from becoming a game of cat and mouse? I mean, AIs can pretend to be high quality users, too, right? I won't pretend to be able to look into the future with any kind of certainty, even if the scope is only a couple of years, but it wouldn't surprise me if we have created a way to make the dead internet theory real.

It is already a game of cat and mouse and has been since forever. There's nothing wrong with cat-and-mouse games from the viewpoint of an advertiser, it just means they have to keep innovating.
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