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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#141

Post by ToucanLoucan »

worldsayshi wrote: post #126
causal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally switched to Kagi when I realized Google could not find a particular ThreeJS class doc page for me no matter what keywords I used, I had to paste the very URL of the page for it to appear at the top of my search results. Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.

So does that mean that the free (as in beer) internet is dying and ad-tech killed it?

The free Internet was only free because corporate interests didn't see it as an avenue worth pursuing, yet. It was a niche curiosity full of nerds talking about their interests, in boring text of all things, and nobody was shopping. Now that's flipped. Now everyone is on the Internet, and everybody's got built-in payment methods, so corporations have leveraged their power in the space. And like every other third space we had, it's been commodified to piss and back so you can't so much as walk down an e-street anymore without being screamed at by 900 assholes selling drop-shipped watches, pills to make your dick hard, mobile games that are 90% softcore porn by volume, and of course, weight loss drugs.

I hate the way we ruin everything.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#142

Post by jprete »

betaby wrote: post #124
peppermint_gum wrote: post #89

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…

> Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. Or just a post from a non-native speaker.

Often it was possible to tell these apart on repeat interactions.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#143

Post by jprete »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #133
peppermint_gum wrote: post #89

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…

Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have never been _proof_ of good communication, they were just _correlated_ with it.

Both emails are equally bad from a communication purist viewpoint, it's just that one has the traditional markers of effort and the other does not.

I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality, and in my own writing. But it's really hard to unlearn habits from childhood.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#144

Post by BizarreByte »

pawelmurias wrote: post #28
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…

AI spam bots will invade discord.

Mods will ban them and new users will be forced to verify via voice/video chat/livestream.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#146

Post by pavel_lishin »

cauliflower99 wrote: post #134
pavel_lishin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should start donating more heavily to archive.org - the way back machine may soon be the only way to find useful data on the internet, by cutting out anything published after ~2020 or so.

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?

> Could there be a market for pre-AI era content?

Like the market for pre-1940s iron resting at the bottom of seas and oceans, unsullied by atmospheric nuclear bomb testing.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#147

Post by jillesvangurp »

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 tried but it never got out of the it's a geeky things for tin foil hat wearing geeks kind of corner. It may be time to give that another try.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#148

Post by mihaaly »

> The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless. You are as likely to return incorrect information as you are complete fabrications

To me this came when I realised that SEO this and SEO that SEO here and SEO there was as innate as googling for answers. And is still incomprehensible to me how people can argue with serious face for actively and forcefully distorting the search results that they so eagerly want to build their goodwill on top of.

Machines only taking over the killing of the internet search with incredible efficiency.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#149

Post by wharvle »

worldsayshi wrote: post #126
causal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally switched to Kagi when I realized Google could not find a particular ThreeJS class doc page for me no matter what keywords I used, I had to paste the very URL of the page for it to appear at the top of my search results. Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.

So does that mean that the free (as in beer) internet is dying and ad-tech killed it?

1) No truly-free search can do a good job on the modern Internet. It's too hard. "Free" search must be ad-supported to have any hope of achieving good-enough utility.

2) ... But that's because the incentives of ads (and affiliate programs, which are also just advertising) cause that to be the case.

(And of course ad-supported search is also doomed to "enshittification", for reasons that Google explained back at the beginning, then years later ignored to make Line Go Up—so yes, paid is the only kind that can be good, now, and yes, that's because of ad-tech, on multiple fronts)

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#150

Post by a_c »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #89

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…

Things go in cycle. Search engine was so much better at discovering linked websites. Then people play the SEO game, write bogus articles, cross link this and that, everyone got into writing. Everyone write the same cliches over and over, quality of search engine plumets. But then since we are regurgitating the same thought over and over again, why not automate it. Over time people will forget where the quality post comes up in the first place. e.g. LLM replaces stackoverflow replaces technical documentation. When the cost of production is dirt cheap, no one cares about quality. When enough is enough, people will start to curate a web of word of mouth of everything again.

What I typed above is extrememly broad stroking and lacking of nuances. But generally I think quality of online content will go to shit until people have had enough, then behaviour will swing to other side

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