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Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

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Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#411

Post by rcarr »

fleddr wrote: post #401
rcarr wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative take: No-one likes being lied to. AI is the ultimate deception. People will stop using the internet for anything other than information retrieval for problems. Artists will create on digital tools and then return to analogue publishing formats and distribution networks. People will follow them because artists are cool and tech bros aren’t. There will be an emphasis on becoming a local success story rather…

I'm all for nostalgia, retro gaming would be another example. But let's not kid ourselves that this makes a dent. Most art is utility. A logo, an illustration for a magazine, an asset to be used in a game. It's completely irrelevant how it was created.

I was using artist in the broad sense to include writers, musicians, filmmakers etc as well as traditional artists. I'd say traditional art is the least problematic as it is the most subjective. People won't be upset at an image you show them that was generated by AI. People won't be upset if you personify the AI and give it a backstory if they know that it's an AI. They will be upset if you tell them the image was made by a human and you give them a backstory about the artist and they later find out that all of that was complete bullshit.

Not only will they be upset, they will no longer trust both those around them and themselves. If they no longer trust, they will become increasingly suspicious and fearful. And as Master Yoda said:

'Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering."

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#413

Post by at-w »

thefreeman wrote: post #360
TeMPOraL wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why they're doing it. I've been wondering for a while now just why so many sites make you work hard to fish out the information you're after. I assumed ad exposure, but I had this feeling that it's not the whole story. Delaying people to fool Google bounce metrics is the idea I missed.

that’s not actually why they do it. it’s because recipes are not copyrightable. so they throw in a “story” to make it something they can copyright and try to prevent people from duplicating.

How would having additional content above the recipe change the copyright status of the recipe itself, divorced from the additional content? It prevents directly copying the entire article, but not the actual recipe (and Google already heavily penalizes exact duplicate content).

What would make more sense is that they are actually taking the recipes from elsewhere and adding the stories to avoid directly duplicating another page, and the Google ranking penalty associated with exact or close duplicates.

My moderate experience with SEO suggests it's a combination of factors. First, Google generally rewards longer content (https://www.sweor.com/seocontentlength), or at least content longer than the few hundred words a simple recipe would likely be limited to.

Secondly, there is (mixed) evidence that Google rewards sites on which people spend longer before clicking back.

Thirdly, the longer format allows them to insert more keywords/longer tail keywords vs. a short format where inserting lots of keywords would be seen as keyword stuffing.

I'd also guess that as much as some people dislike superfluous stories when looking for a recipe, it is a positive for a subset of users that are more likely to subscribe to/return to that site directly in the future.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#414

Post by nova27 »

baxtr wrote: post #184

Sorry, I had to do it. I asked GPT3... How can we prevent drowning in garbage generated by AI? > Preventing drowning in AI-generated garbage can be a challenging task, but there are a few things that can be done to reduce the amount of garbage that is generated. One approach is to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality content, rather than relying on large amounts of data to produce mediocre r…

"One approach is to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality content" - sure, but how will you accomplish this is the million dollar question

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#415

Post by spoils19 »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #215
kneebonian wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity because people like the way it sounds. Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does something that offends the sensibilities of the internet crowd and then everyone goes and do…

People are already appending "reddit" to their search queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to base search results for anything that's not plain uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as such. For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search needs. AI generated…

Myself, I append hackernews to my search queries as the discourse quality is much higher as well as the communities maturity. Vox populi, Vox de!

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#416

Post by drdaeman »

moe091 wrote: post #375
drdaeman wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I honestly do want to support this approach because unlike the alternative it might (just "might", though) work, I regretfully must also admit that the huge problem with this is collateral damage. There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even live…

I agree with your point, but also think this trajectory is kind of inevitable in a way. As we can already see, a LOT of people are living deep in a world of BS news stories and made up facts, to the point where they're basically in a different reality. Ideally, we'd find a way to go backwards from where we are now, maybe future generations will grow up with this flood of false info and learn to navigate it, but I thi…

I appreciate your comment. Thinking of it - you are probably right. It is a matter of time, as long as we don't accidentally take a wrong turn toward some dystopia. Won't happen in my lifetime, but future generations raised observing this state of discord would naturally learn how to deal with it. And us old farts with our susceptibility for delusion (because we, en masse, have only encountered it past our youth, when learning and adapting is harder) will be history.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#417

Post by duskwuff »

lamontcg wrote: post #368
DoughnutHole wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are already appending "reddit" to their search queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to base search results for anything that's not plain uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as such. For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search needs. AI generated…

Lots of reddit is already pretty useless, drowning in people who are desperate to sound clever by regurgitating one of the same 50 meme jokes with some minor twist to it. And the astroturfing on the political reddits are likely to start hitting the niche ones with products getting pushed by manufacturers. Just buy accounts that have been built by bots on front-page subreddits, then have them make AI-driven positive c…

Reddit is also having some pretty serious problems with bots reposting highly upvoted content, both in posts and comments. Sometimes it gets spotted -- especially when the bots pick content which was specific to some point in time, or when they repost a comment out of context -- but a lot of it goes unnoticed, especially in comment threads.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#419

Post by fattless »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans…

Similarly, I have found a ton of beginner coding tutorials that contain mountains of useless/unrelated text. I bet a ton of it is SEO, but you gotta wonder if its just generated by something.

Especially now that things like chatGPT seem to write coding tutorials pretty easy (with less bloat than the ones I find on google)

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#420

Post by jon_richards »

fattless wrote: post #419
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans…

Similarly, I have found a ton of beginner coding tutorials that contain mountains of useless/unrelated text. I bet a ton of it is SEO, but you gotta wonder if its just generated by something. Especially now that things like chatGPT seem to write coding tutorials pretty easy (with less bloat than the ones I find on google)

Same! I was trying to figure out async diesel in rust and I couldn’t figure out why the tutorials weren’t working. There were several that had similar code snippets, but different (and sometimes nonsensical) explanations. Couldn’t get anything to compile. I finally found a GitHub repo that they all seemed to be stealing from and managed to figure out the missing parts.
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