What’s the chance that some of these comments are AI bots? Genuine question. When will OpenAI create an AI PR team?
On HN? I'm going to guess it's pretty low. There's no monetary incentive to generating content or getting HN's "karma".
The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
461–470 of 611 posts
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#462This article has some good points but suffers from rosy retrospection where it seems to think the Internet wasn't wildly full of misinformation before LLMs and AI articles. The sad fact is LLM's now are often more articulate and more accurate than an unfortunately large percentage of actual people posting on the Internet. Google has always had inaccuracies and is constantly tweaking their search algorithm and ranking system. Google giving you inaccurate results on a couple edge cases is not proof positive Internet is full of AI "Dogshit". Issues with Google is a Google problem not an AI Internet content problem.
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's it. Google is loosing the ground here. It is no longer "the gateway to the Internet." There has always been dog shit, it's just there will now be much more dog shit than ever. Indexing dog shit is not working anymore. There is still Internet out there with useful information, it's just you cannot access it by searching. Are we back to the era of curated sources, encyclopedias and web rings?
I'm already back to it, by following the blogs I like and by bookmarking every interesting sources I come across, as it's unlikely to get back to it via googling. I also more diligent with taking notes, and building a personal knowledge base due to the rate of information disappearing, especially recommendations.
I'm doing the same thing. I build database of links I find interesting.
For example. https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#464Earlier 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…
"Sharing useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience," unfortunately, is the worst possible thing you can do nowadays. I hate that the internet is turning me into that guy, but everything is turning into shit and cancer, and AI is only making an already bad situation worse. Bots, trolls, psychopaths, psyops and all else aside, anything put on to the public web now only contributes to its metastasis by feedin…
But what about people that are not yet in the community? Are we going to make "it's not what you know but who you know" our default mode of finding answers?
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sometimes the truth is more complicated than your binary characterization. Most of the time, probably.
Complicated is fine, but knowable. You can accept the truth or deceive others but regardless of your intentions you can recognize the truth exists.
While I'm aware of the criticisms of Frankfurt's definition of bullshit [0], I think a useful part of it is the idea that there are folks who don't even care what the truth is. This seems to be the intended purpose of generative AI; ie: hallucinations exist by design and cannot be removed without recognizing that the approach needs to change.
I think that's what gets people like the author to write criticisms like this. We detest bullshit in a number of critical areas such as information retrieval and search.
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who will create the information then? They won't have traffic, an audience or even any recognition. Who would want to do that?
AI-assisted information creation will be treated the same way electronic music is considered now.
It's hardly comparable.
How will AI discover new facts in the real world? What is the AI equivalent of boots-on-the-ground journalism? Of learning by doing?
A lot of reality happens in meatspace, and someone eventually needs to put that information into computers. AI can only rehash what's already there.
My question is who will do that work if you rob them of any satisfaction for doing it? A man running a widget review blogs could get reader mail, online friendships, advertising partnerships, a sense of making his mark. If everything a person creates just feeds an AI, what do they get in return?
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#467Earlier 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.
I think we have plenty of examples of published “noise”, probably just not on the same scale. (“Noise” is subjective of course: I don’t watch reality television but others do, for example.) For the most part, I just ignore “noise”, so I suspect that the entire World Wide Web will eventually be considered “noise” by many. Instead it seems like it will be necessary to deploy AI to retrieve information as it will be nec…
"(“Noise” is subjective of course: I don’t watch reality television but others do, for example.)"
This brings up a good sub-topic. "Noise" as I mean it is where it's something you cannot definitely validate the veracity of in short order, or you do and it's useless.
The trash TV thing is a great example: if you are watching Beavis & Butthead because you know its trash and you need to zone out, that's a conscious, active decision, and you are in effect, 'in on the joke'...if you can't discern that it's satire and find yourself relating to the characters, you might be part of the problem :)
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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've rarely found stackoverflow to give useful answers. If I am looking for how to do something with Linux programming, I'll get a dozen answers, half of which are only partial answers, the other half don't work.
Weird, I've found hundreds of useful SO answers that worked for me.
I've also learned a lot from chatting with Bing AI. The caveat is there that you all the time have in the back of your mind that the answer might be wrong. It helps to keep asking more detailed questions and check whether the set of answers keep on making sense as a whole. That way of using it has helped me a lot. See it as getting info from a very smart friend who sometimes had too much to drink.
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#469Opinion pieces "against AI" are getting just as boring and unimaginative as AI-generated content. I feel like all the arguments have been made at this point.
Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
#470The 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…
>It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content.
That's the entire point of cryptocurrencies. They do that as well as is possible right now in a distributed network, conceding the point about key theft.
I would argue it's not all-or-nothing. Signing would verify the the majority of content from creators that have not had their keys stolen. Adding currency/value to this equation boosts the quality further and discourages spamming "content based marketing" garbage. The obstacles are usability and behavior changes, and also that any given user can now copy/paste LLM prompt responses, of course.