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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#271

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #216
j0hnyl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this points to downfall of society. IMO it's clearly a paradigm shift that we need to adjust to and adjustment periods are uncomfortable and can last a long time. LLMs are massive productivity boosters.

Do you remember when email first came around and it was a useful tool for connecting with people across the world, like friends and family? Does anyone still use email for that? We all still HAVE email addresses, but the vast majority of our communication has moved elsewhere. Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists. The same thing happened with the telephone. It's not just text mess…

> Does anyone still use email for that?

Sure. Same as in the olden days. Txt for short form, email for long form. Email for the infrequently contacted.

Even back when I used SM, I never comm'd with IRL people on SM. SM was 100% internet people.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#272

Post by trey-jones »

tonymet wrote: post #240
trey-jones wrote: post #193

Before the "AI" takeover, it was already full of SEO-mandated human-generated bullshit, so we haven't actually lost that much in the last couple of years. I've been saying it for almost as long as I've been in the industry, which is well over a decade now.

If this is true it implies all news and history for the past 10 years is also human-generated bullshit. I’m not saying you’re wrong – just that you have to follow your beliefs to their conclusions.

I apologize; I didn't mean to imply anything about ALL of anything. My main complaint is that the things that are not bullshit on the internet have largely been buried beneath bullshit for a long time.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#273

Post by chasd00 »

izzydata wrote: post #71
dartos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We could also abandon the internet as a place to interact with people and go back to meat space. The internet can be a place exclusively for doing work such as filing taxes and paying bills, etc..

instead of abandoning the internet maybe just abandon www. The best technology enabled human interaction i have is a group imessage chat with some old college buddies. My teen son has done the same with his friend group at his middleschool.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#274

Post by broscillator »

oceanplexian wrote: post #9
erellsworth wrote: post #4

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.

Humans are the original bullshit generator. AI is only doing what humans have been doing since forever.

Yeah, we also produce literal shit, and we have a toilet and plumbing to deal with that.

If you welcomed a giant robot in your house that produces 100x as much shit as a human, you don't have the infrastructure to deal with it.

It was never an issue of yes or no, it's an issue of how much.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#276

Post by stefantalpalaru »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #101
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#277

Post by autoexec »

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?

> Could there be a market for pre-AI era content?

Yes, but largely it'll be people who don't want to train their AIs on garbage produced by other AIs

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#278

Post by bluetomcat »

philwelch wrote: post #249
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…

With practice I’ve found that it’s not hard to tell LLM output from human written content. LLM’s seemed very impressive at first but the more LLM output I’ve seen, the more obvious the stylistic tells have become.

It's a shallow writing style, not rooted in subjective experience. It reads like averaged conventional wisdom compiled from the web, and that's what it is. Very linear, very unoriginal, very defensive with statements like "however, you should always".

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#279

Post by jstarfish »

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…

Nah, you got the right of it. It feels like the end of Usenet all over again, only these days cyber-warlords have joined the spammers and trolls.

Mastodon sounded promising as What's Next, but I don't trust it-- that much feels like Bitcoin all over again. Too many evangelists, and there's already abuse of extended social networks going on.

Any tech worth using should sell itself. Nobody needed to convince me to try Usenet, most people never knew what it was, and nobody is worse off for it.

We created the Tower of Babel-- everyone now speaks with one tongue. Then we got blasted with babble. We need an angry god to destroy it.

I figure we'll finally see the fault in this implementation when we go to war with China and they brick literally everything we insisted on connecting to the internet, in the first few minutes of that campaign.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#280

Post by mrkramer »

nicbou wrote: post #160
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…

I strongly disagree. I've been answering immigration questions online for a long time. People frequently comment on threads from years ago, or ask about them in private. In other words, public content helps a lot of other people over time. On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best. If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Disco…

>On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best.

>If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.

Exactly; open web is better because everything is public and "easy" to find....well if you have a good search engine.

Deep web is huge: Facebook, Instagram, Discord etc. and unfortunately unsearchable.

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