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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#401

Post by l33t7332273 »

smt88 wrote: post #201
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…

> Signed content is the only way to get that. This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it. It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can a…

And it is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to prove that a speaker at defcon that you recognize from last year isn’t an imposter wearing a mission impossible mask; these conditions are too strict.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#402

Post by mrguyorama »

mo_42 wrote: post #268
tonymet wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>But still in the long run BS will be ruled out.

You espouse this like a rule but it just isn't so. Nazi Germany believed themselves to be the righteous rulers of the earth, descended from Ubermen that never existed, commanding more powerful armies than anything, and were allowed to live that delusion right up until the democratic world forced them to reckon with reality. You can avoid that reckoning for arbitrary lengths of time.

It's no different to "the market will remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It's the same rule. Reality can be avoided for as long as you want if you don't have infinite ambition.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#403

Post by josh-sematic »

plagiarist wrote: post #111
titzer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectivel…

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…

This search engine is designed to find such sites: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#404

Post by tokai »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #382
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…

[flagged]

Ridiculous calling someone racist over stating the reality that India has huge seo writing industry.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#405

Post by datagram »

letitbeirie wrote: post #218
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.

It will be like salvaging pre-1945 shipwrecks for their non-irradiated metal.

It's funny, I made the same analogy the other day: https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523

I think something interesting to note is that once we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing steel radiation levels went back down and are almost at normal background levels. So maybe the same thing will happen if we stop using GenAI.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#406

Post by danielovichdk »

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 way out is authenticity.

Funny.

Has it ever been anything else?

Don't feel sorry for people that has no ability to be authentic. They try to hard.

Don't try.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#407

Post by jahsome »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #377
Channel9877 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point about the spelling and grammar. I wonder if that could be used as a method of proving you are a human..

Would just penalize non native speakers.

I think the point would be excluding or otherwise filtering "flawless" copy from search results.

If that were the case I think it would benefit non-native speakers.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#408

Post by benreesman »

LLMs are in this sense the (economically) perfect business to be in: a near perfect solution to a catastrophic problem created by their own existence.

Modern top-flight LLMs are hitting to within 10 or 20% of Google at the very start.

Google in like 2001 or whatever was fucking magic: vast official data had been put on the “information superhighway”, the non-POSIX-spec stuff was people cool enough to host a website, and spam was, like on AOL or something.

You just got a white page, a box, a button, and the answer.

I suspect that for people under 35 or 40, LLMs feel kinda like Google did.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#409

Post by BetaDeltaAlpha »

kbrkbr wrote: post #366
zeruch wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are generally correct in where things will likely go (sometimes correct goop) but the problem I think will be far more existential; when people start to feel like they are in a perpetual uncanny valley of noise, what DO they actually do next? I don't think we have even the remotest grasp of what that might look like and how it will impact us.

That is an interesting thought. Maybe the problem is not the ai generated useless noise, but that it is so easy and cheap to publish it. One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. Handchiseled stone tablets. Offering information costs something.

This was the original use case of bitcoin's Proof of Work system. Initally it was to impose a (nominal) fee on senders of email by mail clients.

If you didn't submit a proof of work of N or greater difficulty the email would be thrown out.

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