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Knitting bullshit

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Re: Knitting bullshit

#191

Post by roxolotl »

surgical_fire wrote: post #184
edbaskerville wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.

Correct. Perhaps I originally phrased it poorly? I am annoyed at my slop detector firing at something completely benign.

It’s not just you. I reread it and it really struck me as odd too lol. I wrote it in bed after just having woken up maybe 5min earlier(note to self what does this say about my internet use habits?).

This does make me wonder if consuming AI writing will cause the style to be subconsciously picked up.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#192

Post by charles_f »

quibono wrote: post #11

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

It's reminding me of twitter. I occasionally open it, half of the content I see is AI garbage (and by that I mean, poor quality AI generated stuff that is obviously AI), and 95% of the replies are bots responses, which aren't even AI based (most of the time not it's garbage, unrelated text)

Re: Knitting bullshit

#193

Post by surgical_fire »

roxolotl wrote: post #191
surgical_fire wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Perhaps I originally phrased it poorly? I am annoyed at my slop detector firing at something completely benign.

It’s not just you. I reread it and it really struck me as odd too lol. I wrote it in bed after just having woken up maybe 5min earlier(note to self what does this say about my internet use habits?). This does make me wonder if consuming AI writing will cause the style to be subconsciously picked up.

For me it did. I used dashes very often when writing prior to AI, and now I mostly replaced it with semicolon.

I am also actively avoiding the same construct you used (not X; Y). It is particularly annoying as I used this very frequently as a rhetorical tool.

And ultimately, I think this is sad. Communication is now less optimal as one has to evaluate if the other is just regurgitating AI. Ideas are important, but so are their shape.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#194

Post by charles_f »

I used claude recently to generate a booklet about a system I had to ramp up on, and which is using technology I don't know. It was pretty interesting to read, especially because a) it was tailored to what I needed, b) didn't have to do the research myself, I had most of the information I needed to at least understand the system[^1]. Nevertheless, it was a very good bootstrap resource.

But if I find an article that was obviously AI generated, I hate it. The podcasts I enjoy all have in common a great host personality, either funny, or very insightful, or have a particularly nice voice. I can't imagine listening to slop like that.

I'm wondering if this is a bit the same pivot as TV -> youtube, media is similar but usage is different. Rather than finding a TV channel you like, you find videos on the exact topic you need -> rather than subscribing to a pod about a subject you're interested in, you generate the content you need at a given moment. New media that comes as a replacement, but as something new. So, not in this garbage form at all.

[^1]: I gather that in the long run, this might be slightly detrimental because i have the information i need, and ONLY the information I need, not the information that would be useful in the future when adding to it.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#195

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

dzink wrote: post #94

The economist in me immediately asks: Where is the financial incentive to do this? Just the same way the programmer would ask what the stack is. Some possibilities: 1) Money laundering - large content farm someone can argue makes xyz in revenue to hide an alternate source of revenue. 2) Ad fraud - leading up podcast charts or SEO results to attract clicks to sell ads. Bot farms could also be making clicks to pretend…

Podcast network is an established and proven business model. You spend money to make episodes, you make money from ads. You make a bunch of different podcasts with a bunch of different target demos to reach a wider range of listeners and this grows your revenue and makes it more consistent. It's not complicated.

The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).

I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#196

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #122
chromacity wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us. So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down…

How is a listen to a podcast counted? If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen? Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.

In some ways it doesn't really matter because once you've got enough data points you'll know what percentage of views result in an ad click (or whatever) and then you can figure out how many views you need to hit your revenue targets.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#197

Post by ghostly_s »

surgical_fire wrote: post #122
chromacity wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us. So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down…

How is a listen to a podcast counted? If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen? Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.

As I understand Spotify et al may do something a bit more sophisticated, but the traditional model for podcast analytics purely tracks downloads, which could very well be your client auto-downloading a subscribed episode you never play. I don't think anyone actually has visibility of "listens". And the traditional model for ad sales is a creator (or an agent on their behalf) emailing a brand "Hey, we make this podcast which gets X monthly downloads, want to buy an ad read?" I think they usually point to iTunes store rankings to somewhat support these claims but again, iTunes just tracks downloads. (Obviously, this is all rife for fraud.)
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