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

261–270 of 611 posts

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#261

Post by emsign »

> In the future I fear that people will have no other choice but to ask people for information from the Internet, because right now it’s all full of AI dogshit.

Ha ha ha! That future is now, the value of the web has declined for me dramatically. I hate looking for information on the web now. First it was troll and content farms, now they have a new sibling to help them enshitify the web further in AI. Apart from a few places I trust I've turned away from the web.

The worst thing is that I spent more of my time researching now and I seldom get any results.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#262

Post by ryanisnan »

ravenstine wrote: post #118

Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material and isn't that distinguishable from it. It doesn't help that search engines today sort by prestige over whether your query matches text in a webpage. People aren't…

With respect, I think you're missing a key variable, which is volume.

Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap.

Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#263

Post by boznz »

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?

Extra barriers! LOL. Everything I have every submitted written by me (a human) to HN, reddit and others in the past 12 months gets rejected as self-promotion or some other BS even though it is totally original technical content. I am totally over the hurdles to get anything I do noticed, and as I don't have social media it seems the future is to publish it anywhere and rely on others or AI to scrape it into a publishable story somewhere else at a future date. I feel for the moderator's dilemma, but I am also over the stupid hoop's humans have to jump.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#264

Post by broscillator »

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…

Discord will die and there's no way that I'm aware of to easily export all that information.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#265

Post by MichaelZuo »

lambda_garden wrote: post #243
bluefirebrand wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the camp where I want AI and automation to free people from drudgery in the hope that it will encourage the biggest HUMAN artwork renaissance ever in history. I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me. And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content…

Think how many game developers were able to realize their vision because Unity3D was accessible to them but raw C++ programming was not. We may see similar outcomes for other budding artists with the help of AI models. I'm quite excited!

Except 'their vision' is practically homogeneous. I can't think even think of a dozen Unity games that broke the mould, and genuinely stand out, out of the many tens of thousands (?).

There's Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, Superhot, Beat Saber, Monument Valley, Subnautica, Among Us, Rust, Cities:Skylines (maybe), Ori (maybe), COD:Mobile (maybe) and...?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#266

Post by mrweasel »

red_admiral wrote: post #27

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 hear…

That's an interesting take, but Google won't suffer before the advertisers decide that they are wasting their money on online advertising. Some topics should already have dried up, but perhaps scams are fueling the advertising machine for now on those. You can't really use Google for things like fitness or weight-loss. When we remodeled it also became clear that building materials and especially paint have become unsearchable. In the end I resulted to just go to the store and ask, it as the only way to get reliable information and recommendation.

Google is still working for most areas, but where it's really good is the ads for products. If there's something you want to buy, Googles ads engine will find it for you, you just have to know exactly what you want.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#267

Post by PeterCorless »

That there has always been terribly-rendered dreck on the Internet. Badly-written copy by semi-literate self-appointed "authorities." Kitbashed plagiarism that only half-understood its sources. Conspiracy theories galore from garbage-minded gasbags. Totally muddle-headed hot takes. But it was manually generated. Or semi-automatic at best (like bad machine translations of foreign language sources).

The issue with AI is the fully-automatic engines behind the process. It's not that bad web pages are unique in history. What is unique is the sheer volume and velocity of drek that is being and will be produced.

Combatting this will need technology to, in effect, provide a mark of authenticity. "This was created by a human," in effect, and, more specifically, "By this [human|set of humans]." Contrariwise, "This is a product of system X."

Of course, people will lie and claim their AIs didn't ghostwrite their content or create those images. So against authorship and identities there will be an increasing need to rank authority/authenticity/veracity.

Not all AI-generated content will be horrible. And not all human-generated content will be trustworthy. There will need to be a way to mark reliability based on community-oriented standards. For AI-generated content (and human-generated content too) there will need to be ways to cite sources.

This will all become highly politicized, commercialized and gamed.

Yet if we don't work on such standards, we will continue to be beholden to hidden search engine algorithms of trustworthiness. Why did something get to the answerbox or SERP1? Was it simply through keyword packing? Or did whatever author behind this — human or machine — actually know (or at least seem to know) what the hell they are talking about?

There will need to be Internet-wide ways to create community-oriented ratings. Thumbs up and down.

Maybe this is a popular page with the public. But actual professional astronomers see this as factually misleading.

Maybe this page is popular with political faction X. But others point out it is rife with factually incorrect conspiracy theories.

Just like there are now "community notes" on Twitter (X), the whole Internet needs the equivalent way to ascribe qualitative judgments on any arbitrary page.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#268

Post by mo_42 »

tonymet wrote: post #232
mo_42 wrote: post #192

Generally, I'm an optimistic about current approaches towards AI. I'm using ChatGPT daily for my work. I'm seeing the BS generated from it all the time but it provides many great ideas from which I create something useful (both writing and programming). The sinus example scares me. It's obviously wrong. But what about all the subtle errors that will be generated? Humanity's knowledge is bootstrapped from BS. But most…

You have to account for the amplification effect when a large number of people read false information so it becomes true. “Truth” in the most practical sense is whatever most people believe and espouse. Sure we’re all more sophisticated and intelligent to believe the actual truth, but do you have the willpower to fight that battle every day?

I like that idea. I guess such an amplification effect can lead entire civilizations astray. But still in the long run BS will be ruled out. Here, I disagree with you in that "truth" is also a matter what works and what not. Simply, BS doesn't work. It makes worse models in the heads of people (and possible artificial agents). Worse models will lead to less effective decisions.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#269

Post by CogitoCogito »

a_c wrote: post #150
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 c…

I feel like somehow this is all some economic/psychological version of a heat equation. Anytime someone comes up with some signal with economic value that value is exploited to spread the signal back out.

I think it’s similar to a Matt Levine quote I read which said something like Wall Street will find a way to take something riskless and monetize them so that they now become risky.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#270

Post by broscillator »

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…

the craziest part is that jaron lanier said this like 20 years ago, if not more
Post reply on HN