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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#181

Post by [deleted] »

b112 wrote: post #61
netsharc wrote: post #13

Before ChatGPT, it was already full of bot-generated garbage; google any celebrity name and crappy sites are recommended with their net worth or relationship status.

This is the worst of it. All of googles' top suggestions, highlights, and whatever other garbage they put in the top two scroll pages, is just junk. Garbage. It's right perhaps 5% of the time for me. So not only do I have to hunt through their horrible search results, I have to hunt through junk they add on top of that. The sad part is, their buffoonery in aliasing words is 90% of the problem. No, I searched for Davi…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#182

Post by samtho »

visarga wrote: post #32

It all started with the "Traffic==Money" idea, a long time ago. LLMs weren't even around a couple of years ago in any meaningful way and the internet was still full of dogshit. Maybe we can have better dogshit made with AI.

The problem is that the dogshit machine was constrained in its output by the organization creating it. Sure you may have paid small amounts per article but your resources were still limited as cost scaled linearly with content creation. Now any size of organization can make a metric tonne of lexically unique content with a fixed cost given the incentive to do so at the moment, it’s all but inevitable.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#183

Post by bno1 »

"The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people"

But the examples given are... google search results and articles from big publishers, things made to cast a wide net. Those were never good ways to communicate with other people online imo. If you want to interact with real people look for smaller communities and individual creators.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#184

Post by [deleted] »

wharvle wrote: post #149
worldsayshi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#186

Post by ToucanLoucan »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #167
riversflow wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been trying kinda hard to relax on my spelling, grammar and punctuation. For me it’s not just a habit I learned in childhood, but one that was rather strongly reinforced online as a teenager in the era of grammar nazis. I see it now as the person respecting their own time.

Yeah, there's this weird stigma about making typos, but in the end writing online is about communication and making yourself understandable. Typos here and there don't make a difference and thinking otherwise seems like some needless "intellectual" superiority competition. Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

> Growing up people associate it with intelligence so many times, it's hard to not feel ashamed when making typos.

I mean, maybe you should? Like... everything has a spell checker now. The browser I'm typing this comment in, in a textarea input with ZERO features (not a complaint HN, just an observation, simple is good) has a functioning spellcheck that has already flagged for me like 6 errors, most of which I have gone back to correct minus where it's saying textarea isn't a word. Like... grammar is trickier, sure, that's not as widely feature-complete but spelling/typos!? Come on. Come the fuck on. If you can't give enough of a shit to express yourself with proper spelling, why should I give a shit about reading what you apparently cannot be bothered to put the most minor, trivial amount of effort into?

I don't even associate it with intelligence that much, I associate it far more with just... the barest whiff of giving a fuck. And if you don't give a fuck about what you're writing, why should I give a fuck about reading it?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#187

Post by dbttdft »

There's no difference. Web search has been useless for over 15 years now. This is barely any worse than the previous situation which was where that any question, if not immediately answered with marketing pages for all the first results, would lead to some thinly veiled marketing crap a la a "blog". I would never trust someone whose career is "content creation" or "monetized blogging" to answer any question I have, like, how to was a toilet. The only difference between the example in the article and what you'd get 10 years ago, is that the former is obviously wrong and the latter would be something you would need to spend several days to refute unless you so happen to work in the relevant field.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#189

Post by volkk »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #147

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…

agree 100%. there's no going back at this point and it's an inevitable problem anyway. so we need to innovate further.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#190

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

The windows bluescreen in German has had grammatical errors (maybe it still does in the most recent version of Win10).

Luckily you don't see it very often these days, but I first thought it would be one of those old anti-virus scams. Seems QA is less a focus at Microsoft right now.

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