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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#321

Post by indigochill »

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…

> You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do.

I used to do SEO copywriting in high school and yeah, ChatGPT's output is pretty much at the level of what I was producing (primarily, use certain keywords, secondarily, write a surface-level informative article tangential to what you want to sell to the customer).

> At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I think over time there could be a weird eddy-like effect to AI intelligence. Today you can ask ChatGPT a Stack Overflow-style and get a Stack Overflow-style response instantly (complete with taking a bit of a gamble on whether it's true and accurate). Hooray for increased productivity?

But then, looking forward years in time, people start leaning more heavily on that and stop posting to Stack Overflow and the well of information for AI to train on starts to dry up, instead becoming a loop of sometimes-correct goop. Maybe that becomes a problem as technology evolves? Or maybe they train on technical documentation at that point?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#322

Post by winddude »

Sounds more like google search has gone to dog shit. But a lot of the internet has as well, but it's been happening before AI has become mainstream, I blame walled gardens like linkedin and facebook, as well as signup and paywall blocks.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#323

Post by EnigmaFlare »

nerdponx wrote: post #229
nicbou wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, the issue is not that people don't appreciate good content. The issue is that it's harder for people to find it. It's an entrenching of the existing phenomenon where the only way to know what to trust on the Web is word of mouth.

That's always been the case. Surely you didn't used to trust random information? Ask any schoolteacher how to decide what to trust on the internet at any point in time. They're not going to say "If it's at the top of Google results" or "If it's a well-designed website", or "If it seems legit".

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#324

Post by [deleted] »

monkeynotes wrote: post #286
asylteltine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. I thought I missed the internet before ClosedAI ruined it but man, I would love to go back to 2020 internet now. LLM research is going to be the downfall of society in so many ways. Even at a basic level my friend is taking a masters and EVERYONE is using chatgpt for responses. It’s so obvious with the PC way it phrases things and then summarizes it at the end. I hope they just get expelled.

I think this is hyperbole, and similar to various techno fears throughout the ages. Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one. So looking at prior transformational technology I think we'll be just fine. Life may be forever changed for sure, but I think we'll crack reliability and we'll just cope with intelligence being a n…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#325

Post by markburns »

bluetomcat wrote: post #278
philwelch wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

This is true of ChatGPT 4 with the default prompt maybe but that’s just the way it responds after being given its specific corporate friendly disclaimer heavy instructions. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pick up anything in particular once there are thousands of GPTs in regular use. Which could be already.

But I agree we will probably very often recognise 2023 GPT4 defaults.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#327

Post by red_admiral »

burkaman wrote: post #67
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…

Why wouldn't it result in humans spending dollars? The ads are real and the visitors are real, it doesn't matter if the content is real. In fact people are probably more likely to click on an ad if the page it's on is generic and uninteresting.

My reasoning is, there's topics where I don't bother to go to google anymore because I know the results will be crap. That way google loses any way to show me ads when I'm searching for these topics, or get paid for click-throughs, or to profile my interests as accurately as they could otherwise.

There's categories of products where I spend money regularly, but I go directly to category-specific sites so google again loses out on the ability to take their cut as middleman, which I'd happily let them take - and maybe discover vendors other than the ones I know - if they provided me with higher-quality results than they do now.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#328

Post by photonthug »

ineptech wrote: post #238
mtillman wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM trash is one thing but if you follow OP link all I see is the headline and a giant subscribe takeover. Whenever I see trash sites like this I block the domain from my network. The growth hack culture is what ruins content. Kind of similar to when authors started phoning in lots of articles (every newspaper) or even entire books (Crichton for example) to keep publishers happy. If we keep supporting websites like t…

I understand the sentiment, but those email signup begs are to some extent caused by and a direct response to Google's attempts to capture traffic, which is what this article is discussing. And "[sites like this] is what ruins content" doesn't really work in reference to an article that a lot of people here liked and found useful.

OP has a point.. Like-and-subscribe nonsense started the job of ruining the internet, even if it will be llms that finish the job. It's a bit odd if proponents of the first want to hate the second, because being involved in either approach signals that content itself is at best an ancillary goal and the primary goal is traffic/audience/influence.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#329

Post by koliber »

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?

Silly prediction: the only way to get guaranteed non-ai generated content will be to go to live performances of expert speakers. Kind of like going to the theater vs. TV and cinema or attending a live concert vs. listening to Spotify.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#330

Post by qingcharles »

I agree there is a lot of dogshit out there.

In 2006 a fellow developer showed me a bot he had coded to write blog posts that just "spun" existing articles it scraped from other sites. He was making a fortune from fake blogs full of thousands of reworked articles, so this dogshit has been steaming for a long time.

I use GPT4 and Claude to write drafts of blog posts and wiki articles, often starting by having them summarize 250 page documents. The output is very high quality, adds a lot of value (because many of the original documents cannot be shared) and completes a task that no human could easily do (read thousands of long documents in hours).

So, I can't write AI off -- it is a tool that can be used for good or bad.

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