Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

aftermath.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 611 posts

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#441

Post by madeofpalk »

switch007 wrote: post #358
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…

> that we have lost a useful heuristic But we've gained some new ones. I find ChatGPT-generated text predictable in structure and lacking any kind of flair. It seems to avoid hyperbole, emotional language and extreme positions. Worthless is subjective, but ChatGPT-generated text could be considered worthless to a lot of people in a lot of situations.

If it had a colour, it would be 'grey'. It's the average of all text.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#442

Post by gumballindie »

agentultra wrote: post #114
oceanplexian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So instead of putting out the fires, in the interest of improving the situation, we'll make the fires bigger? A good deal of humans care about the truth. Some of them actively seek to deceive and avoid the truth -- liars, we tend to dislike them. But the ones both sides dislike are the ones who disregard the truth... ie: bullshitters -- the, "that's just your opinion, man," the, "what even is the truth anyway?" peopl…

These people have been trained by openai’s marketing team to deflect and reflect any criticism of the bull shit generators. The amount of gullible people eager to ignore reality is terrifying.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#443

Post by throwaway29812 »

lolsal wrote: post #429
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…

Sincerely asking - how does this solve the problem? I could generate a bunch of dog-shit and then sign it and publish it. Even with user attestation services provided by Apple, Google, et. al - couldn't I even automate generating a bunch of AI junk and signing it?

Exactly. This presupposes that humans are always better than AI, or that they don't produce spam or harmful content.

They do.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#444

Post by madeofpalk »

jstarfish wrote: post #310
bluetomcat wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Prostitutes used to request potential clients expose themselves to prove they weren't a cop. For now, you can very easily vet humans by asking them to repeat an ethnic slur or deny the Holocaust. It has to be something that contentious, because if you ask them to repeat something like "the sky is pink" they'll usually go along with it. None of the mainstream models can stop themselves from responding to SJW bait, and…

What type of useful signals do you get from this? Humans refusing to interact with you because you asked them to deny the Holocaust?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#445

Post by rchaud »

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…

> There used to be a wealth of smaller "labor-of-love" websites from individuals doing interesting things

Those websites are long gone. First, because search engines defaulted to promoting 'recent content' on HTTPS websites, which eliminates a lot of informational sites that were not SSL-secured and archived on university web servers for example.

Second, because the time and effort required to compile this information today feels wasted because it can be essentially copied wholesale and reproduced on a content-hungry blogspam website, often without attribution to the original author.

In its place are cynical Substacks, Twitters or Tiktoks doing growth marketing ahead of an inevitable book deal or online course sales pitch.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#446

Post by andrewla »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #401
smt88 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is that physically impossible? You can grab the neckflap and take off the mask.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#447

Post by tavavex »

ineptech wrote: post #386
photonthug wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like I said, I understand the sentiment in the abstract. But my actual experience is that many good quality essays are often preceded by a gimme-yer-email popup. That's not causal - popups don't make content better - but it does seem correlated, possibly because the writers who are too principled to try to build an audience without email lists already gave up.

I'm not sure if I relate to the sentiment - in my experience, everything nowadays asks with mailing list ads. Every website from high-quality blogs to "Top 10 Best Coffee Makers in Winter 2024" referral link mills asks for your email. Worst thing is, many of them are already moving onto the "next big thing", which are registration gates. I feel like a huge portion of all Medium-hosted posts are already unreachable to guests because of that.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#448

Post by ganzuul »

hooverd wrote: post #252
ganzuul wrote: post #19

I feel like we brought this on ourselves when we started autocompleting replies to questions like "How are you?" with, "Fine, thank you." instead of thinking about it and giving honest answers.

Or maybe "I wish I were a bird."

House plant for me. Carnivorous.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#449

Post by chongli »

willcipriano wrote: post #254
chongli wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company That seems like only a temporary phenomenon. If we've got AI that can generate any games that people actually want to play then we don't need game companies at all. In the long run I don't see any company being able to build a moat around AI. It's a cat-and-mouse game at best!

> In the long run I don't see any company being able to build a moat around AI Why do you think they are screaming about "the dangers of AI"? So they can regulate it and gain a moat via regulatory capture.

I don't think regulation will achieve what they want. Nothing short of a war-on-drugs style blanket prohibition would work. And you can look there to see how ineffective that's been at keeping drugs off the streets.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#450

Post by rchaud »

Groxx wrote: post #335
waveBidder wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sites today don't have blogrolls. Back in the '00s it was sacrilege not to have one on the sidebar of your site. That massively improved discoverability. Today you have to go to another service like Twitter to see this kind of cross-pollination.
Post reply on HN