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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

aftermath.site

331–340 of 611 posts

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#331

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…

> Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts.

Timee to stert misspelling and using poorr grammar again. This way know we LLM didn't write it. Unlearn we what learned!

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#333
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this rate many exams will just become oral exams :-)

The paradigm is changed beyond that. Exams are irrelevant if intelligence is freely available to everyone. Anyone who can ask questions can be a doctor, anyone can be an architect. All of those duties are at the fingertips of anyone who cares to ask. So why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge? An exam certifies you know how to do something, well if you can ask questions you can do anythi…

> why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge?

The only thing that has changed is the speed of access. Before LLMs went mainstream, you could buy whatever book you wanted and read it. No one would stop you from it.

You still should have a professional look over the work and analyze that it is correct. The output is only as good as the input on both sides (both from the training data and the user's prompt)

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#334

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…

I’ve thought about that a lot - a while back I heard about problems with a contract team supplying people who didn’t have the skills requested. The thing which are it easiest to break the deal was that they plagiarized a lot of technical documentation and code and continued after being warned, which removed most of the possible nuance. Lawyers might not fully understand code but they certainly know what it means when the level of language proficiency and style changes significantly in the middle of what’s supposed to be original work, exactly matching someone else’s published work, or code which is supposedly your property matches a file on GitHub.

An LLM wouldn’t have made them capable of doing the job but the degree to which it could have made that harder to convincingly demonstrate made me wonder how much longer something like that could now be drawn out, especially if there was enough background politics to exploit ambiguity about intent or the details. Someone must already have tried to argue that they didn’t break a license, Copilot ChatGPT must have emitted that open source code and oh yes I’ll be much more careful about using them in the future!

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things. The weeds have grown over them and made it difficult to find these from the public web because these individuals cannot devote the same resources to SEO and SEM as teams of adtech affiliate marketers with LLM-generated content. When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following…

such websites still get made all the time, they're just not useful for Google to surface. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I've pretty much just seen evidence that this segment keeps growing, and is now much MUCH larger than the Internet in The Good Old Days.

Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane.

Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#336

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.…

They find a way to validate the utility of the information instead of the source.

It doesn't matter if the training data is AI generated or not, if it is useful.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#337
post #102

Wondering whether 10-12 years from now the internet becomes a hostile, corpo-inhibited medium, while the personal LLMs are what we take knowledge from. In reality some (of us) already do so, the only thing is that we don't really know what the LLMs were fed to begin with, but is assumed to be a reality-based information. Your personal Search Engine is your personal model which you evolve to your needs. Safely includi…

Actually if AIs become good at reasoning, composition, logic better than humans, AI content will be sought-after and more trusted than human content for the sheer ability of AIs to better at those tasks than humans. Of course there will be need for human bubbles for "authentic" experiences but for most of technical content AI will be preferred for its ability to tailor it (for brevity, style, recipient's technical know-how, language, context).

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#338
Doesn't help that Google search is increasingly useless, across the board. Text Search sucks (yeah sure, you only got 8 results, I don't believe you stop lying to me Google), Image Search sucks, Maps Search even sucks now it refuses to find a direct ask I know is on the street I'm focused on and instead zoom out to highlight something 10 miles+ away on the other side of the city. YouTube search sucks shows like 3 results then starts showing things you've already watched or are just 8+ million views unrelated viral or gross out videos.

In retrospect it'll be obvious why Google wont be relevant at all in 15 years.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could hash the hoard and stick the signature on a blockchain.

If only it was 2018, we could do this as a startup and make a mint.

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