Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

aftermath.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 611 posts

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#21

Post by visarga »

dartos wrote: post #14
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #2

> The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines. I mean, it always has been on its lowest layers. The "is this incoming data from the Internet originated by a human being" problem hasn't really been solved, and is probably not truly solveable. It probably wasn't a good idea…

It doesn’t need to be solved before as most internet users could easily identify algorithmically generated stuff and stop spreading it, but not so anymore. Maybe one day we’ll all be able to “smell” ai generate text easily, but we’re not there yet

> allegorically generated stuff

mmm, I want some of that allegorical stuff, I like symbols

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#22

Post by rightbyte »

ganzuul wrote: post #19

I feel like we brought this on ourselves when we started autocompleting replies to questions like "How are you?" with, "Fine, thank you." instead of thinking about it and giving honest answers.

Ye like the canned responses in Teams. Removes the fine grained nuances.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#23

Post by AnimalMuppet »

It's not going to get better. Maybe 5-10% of content is AI generated now. Wait until it's 90%. Wait as we keep piling more nines onto that number.

How do we keep the internet useful to humans while this is going on?

Maybe this is the new search engine challenge. Google rose to the top because, at the time, they were able to mine the links' references to each other to determine which were the best sites. If a search engine can solve the problem of finding the best (realest?) information in this mess, then they can rise to the top.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#27

Post by red_admiral »

At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars.

Google will start dealing with this problem when it starts appearing in their budget in big enough numbers. The tech layoffs we're hearing about from one company after another - google is mentioned in another HN thread today - may be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#28

Post by pawelmurias »

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.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#29

Post by novagameco »

flyinghamster wrote: post #11
novagameco wrote: post #3

This is also known as the dead internet theory, which sounded a bit stupid before 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory > The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe thes…

I never really thought it was stupid, more that it was hyperbole - but very mild hyperbole with a solid basis in reality. The endless tide of email spam would be a good example where the theory rings true.

I think the stupid part is the idea that the government was intentionally ruining the internet. I also think that around 2016 and 2017, bot spam was pretty easy for anybody with a frontal lobe to detect. The problems we saw in the 2016 election with fake news was markov-chain generated articles with explosive headlines about Hillary Clinton: the headline sounded real, the domain name sounded like a real news publication, and skimming the site it looked like a real wordpress site. However, if you read any of the content for more than 10 seconds you would realize that it was barely English and was generated by a very rudimentary bot that any CS freshman could cobble together. Their only advantage was relying on the fact that most people on the internet only read headlines. To believe, at that point, that the majority of interactions on the internet were these kind of stone age systems, was pure paranoia.

Today the situation is different. LLMs are capable of making content which is only verifiably AI generated with a few tell-tale signs as well as good old fashioned fact-checking. I dread this election year in the US because it will be so so so much easier for Russia or China to spread even more convincing misinformation automatically. They could create armies of bots which hold intense arguments with each other and have every reply seem logically sound.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#30

Post by HPsquared »

novagameco wrote: post #3

This is also known as the dead internet theory, which sounded a bit stupid before 2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory > The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe thes…

It's the "grey goo" scenario playing out in cyberspace.
Post reply on HN