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Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

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Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#171

Post by neaden »

whalesalad wrote: post #95

Drives me nuts. The internet is dead. I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a secon…

IME for home improvement Youtube is the best resource, though I can understand if you were hoping for text and pictures.

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#172

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #103

I wonder: do all the HNers who are excited about their GenAI product or wrapper or startup understand, at a fundamental level, that they are an intrinsic part of this deterioration? Or is this one of those fundamental attribution error things: - MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save time - THEIR product is just a poorly-though-out slop generator Does it occur to people to instead be part of some…

You have only had google image search for what, 20-years? Why do you think it is a fundamental part of humanity's growth story?

You talk about being a part of something "real and visceral" but you're complaining about the demise of being able to sit at your desk and see pictures of wildlife. Maybe it's okay that google image search dies and makes people go out and find the wildlife they want to see.

The internet, even in its best format (e.g. ad-free, free access information for all; and communication with all of humanity) has a ton of real downsides. It's not clear to me that AI should be strangled in its infancy to save the internet (which does _not_ exist in that "best" format).

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#173

Post by doctorpangloss »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #155
doctorpangloss wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but doesn't every technological development have these tradeoffs? You could say what you say about anyone at any time. Where do you draw the line? I guarantee you'll be guilty of the exact same thing. I don't want to generalize, but IMO this sentiment of yours, I hear most loudly from software engineers far removed from ordinary non-technical end users: is making beautiful new LISPs and CNIs and Python package a…

> I hear most loudly from software engineers far removed from ordinary non-technical end users I am absolutely not far removed from non-technical end users. They are my client base, ultimately. As a freelancer I focus on building real things that make things better for people whose faces and voices I get to know. GenAI will be useless to them, because it is antithetical to what they do. And that focus is only getting…

> They are my client base, ultimately... I focus on building real things that make things better for people... faces and voices I get to know.

So what I'm hearing is, "I agree very strongly with the people who pay me." Or to put it in your words:

"MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save time."

"THEIR product is just a poorly-thought-out slop generator"

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#174

Post by duxup »

bongodongobob wrote: post #97
duxup wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping for a picture of a real cat. There's a different look that real photos have. The AI photos all look like computer polished weirdness.

So generate your own.

I do not have the required animal.

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#175

Post by coldpie »

silisili wrote: post #109
rootusrootus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time. I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.

I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL was just ahead of its time. Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app. Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.

> until AI and the bots ruined it all

Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.

But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#176

Post by pavon »

quasse wrote: post #87
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #53

Almost all of the "product X vs Y" results are AI ramblings now. This growth of the dead Internet is making me want to sign up for Kagi. We're going to need a certification for human generated content at some point.

Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search). As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related. I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 year…

That matches my experience. Kagi doesn't surface much content beyond what Google/Bing do. What it does better out of the box is guessing which content is low-quality and displaying so that it takes up less space, allowing you to see a few more pages worth of search results on the first page. And then it lets you permanently filter out sites you consider to be low quality so you don't see them at all. That would have been awesome 10 years ago when search spam was dominated by a few dozen sites per subject that mastered SEO (say expertsexchange), but it is less useful now that there are millions of AI content mills drowning out the real content.

For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this, and find myself using them for the majority of my searches, and only use normal search for subjects where the information must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen" pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better results.

[1] For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2C...

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#177

Post by [deleted] »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #103

I wonder: do all the HNers who are excited about their GenAI product or wrapper or startup understand, at a fundamental level, that they are an intrinsic part of this deterioration? Or is this one of those fundamental attribution error things: - MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save time - THEIR product is just a poorly-though-out slop generator Does it occur to people to instead be part of some…

[deleted]

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#178

Post by ssl-3 »

coldpie wrote: post #129
rootusrootus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time. I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.

It still exists. Currently it looks like Patreons and their associated communities, long-running web forums, small chatrooms on platforms like Discord or Facebook or Instagram, and so on. Small communities, with relatively high barriers to entry.

That's not the same Internet.

Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.

With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).

Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.

Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.

Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.

Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.

Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.

One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.

(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#179

Post by vunderba »

After Google continued to make it progressively more difficult to use their Image search to navigate/download to the actual image I wrote an image search tool that could be hot keyed from your OS to search the google image repository and copy to clipboard in a fast manner using a custom Google Search Engine id.

About a year back I found that 90% of the results I was getting were AI generated, so I added a flag "No AI" which basically acts as a quick and dirty filter by limiting results to pre-2022. It's not perfect but it works as a stopgap measure.

https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

Re: Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated

#180

Post by coldpie »

neaden wrote: post #171
whalesalad wrote: post #95

Drives me nuts. The internet is dead. I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a secon…

IME for home improvement Youtube is the best resource, though I can understand if you were hoping for text and pictures.

Also your local library probably has a bunch of home improvement books. They're probably from the 80s, but trim painting techniques don't change that much.
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