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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#481

Post by willcipriano »

chongli wrote: post #449
willcipriano wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Another example of this behavior. The war on drugs not working didn't stop alcohol companies from lobbying for it, any effect that suppresses compition is valuable and its not like OpenAI and the like will be paying for enforcement, you will be.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#482

Post by jprete »

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?

This would have to work by individuals or organizations building a good reputation over time, so their specific output is trusted. The fact that an LLM outputted the text is not nearly as relevant as whether anyone has staked their reputation on its correctness.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#483

Post by tavavex »

b112 wrote: post #474
tavavex wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of baffles me how people spent the last 15 years or so generating a black hole's worth of SEO content, but Google is at the forefront of "being at fault" for it now. Google has no real incentive to make their product suck for no reason, but SEO people have a never-changing reason to try and break Google. The point of SEO is delivering your content to a user through search results, no matter if it's actually r…

It's not (mainly) Google. It's that SEO won. Poppycock. SEO was a thing 25 years ago. It's the same now, as it was then, it's merely that Google has vastly reduced efforts to maintain their product. It's not that SEO won, it's that Google doesn't care. One way they don't care, is apparent with their ridiculous query aliasing, and spewing pages of random junk before you can even scroll down to actual search results. G…

> SEO was a thing 25 years ago. It's the same now, as it was then

SEO is the same as it was 25 years ago? Do you remember anything resembling modern content mills in 1999? It always kept on evolving, and there's vastly more money dumped into it today than the 90s could ever dream of. Algorithmically generating content became easier and it got more "believable" to a search engine bot.

Again, putting useless search results at the top doesn't benefit Google in any way, not even the short-term profits. It's the telltale sign of SEO garbage because they have an incentive to game the system, while Google has no incentive to make the system less useful. They likely made some bad choices along the way, but 80% of my issues with Google are outside actors trying to make it useless.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#484

Post by stcredzero »

branon wrote: post #5

Never thought I'd say this, but in times like these, with clearnet in such dire straits, all the information siloed away inside Discord doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Remaining unindexable by search engines all but guarantees you'll never appear alongside AI slop or be used as training data. The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they on…

The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they once excelled at.

What if the AI apocalypse takes this form?

    - Social Media takes over all discourse
    - Regurgitated AI crap takes over all Social Media
    - Intellectual level of human beings spirals downward as a result

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#485

Post by krapp »

nicbou wrote: post #464
krapp wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

What alternative do you suggest? Everything you expose to the public internet is now feeding AI, and every interaction is more and more likely to be with an AI than a real human.

This isn't a matter of elitism, but vetting direct personal connections and gatekeeping access seems like the only way to keep AI quarantined and guarantee that real human knowledge and art don't get polluted. Every time I see someone on Twitter post something interesting, usually art, it makes me sad. I know that's now a part of the AI machine. That bit of uniqueness and creativity and humanity has been commoditized and assimilated and forever blighted from the universe. Even AI "poisoning" programs will fail over time. The only answer is to never share anything of value over the open internet.

Corporations are already pouring billions of dollars into "going all in" on AI. Video game and software companies are using AI art. Steam is allowing AI content. SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement allowing the use of AI. Someone is trying to publish a new "tour" of George Carlin with an AI. All of our resources of "knowledge" and "expertise" have been poisoned by AI hallucinations and nonsense. Even everything we're writing here is feeding the beast.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#486

Post by krapp »

grungydan wrote: post #370
bluefirebrand wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the camp where I want AI and automation to free people from drudgery in the hope that it will encourage the biggest HUMAN artwork renaissance ever in history. I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me. And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content…

I'll go one further, though I expect to receive mockery for doing so: I think the internet as we conceive of it today is ultimately a failed experiment. I think that society and humanity would be better off if the internet had remained a simple backbone for vetted organizations' official use. Turning the masses loose on it has effectively ruined so many aspects of our world that we can never get back, and I for one d…

I won't mock you, I get where you're coming from, but I think you're forgetting just how revolutionary many aspects of the internet have been. The ability to publish to a potentially global audience without a corporate mediator. Do commerce without physically going to a store or ordering over a phone. Access to information, culture and education beyond what can fit in one's local library. Bank without an ATM. Even just being able to communicate worldwide without long-distance charges (remember those) or an envelope and stamp. Even social media, which everyone hates, was a revolution in that it got people easily using the web to network and communicate en masse, whereas prior it was just people behind pseudonyms on niche forums. There is a real and tacit improvement in the quality of life for at least millions of people behind each of those.

Reducing the internet to only world-destroying negatives and writing off its positives as "snake oil" seems unnecessarily hyperbolic, as obvious as the negatives are. Although I suppose it's easier to accept the destruction of the internet if you believe that it was never worth anything to begin with. But I disagree that nothing of value is being lost. Much of value is being lost. That's what's tragic.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#487

Post by stcredzero »

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.

My impression of Flat Earthers, is that a lot of them are indeed authentic.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#488

Post by bobthepanda »

indigochill wrote: post #321
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…

> 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.…

It didn't take very long for the first lawyers to get sanctioned for using ChatGPT-made-up cases in legal briefs. https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-us...

It would be hilarious if the end result of all this would be to go back to a 1990s-2000s Yahoo style of web portal where all the links are curated by hand by reputable organizations.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#489

Post by RugnirViking »

jebarker wrote: post #41
naruhodo wrote: post #37

> The people who hold the purse strings for Sports Illustrated are more interested in gaming Google search results and the resultant ad revenue from that practice than actually serving their readers. Then by running an ad blocker I'm doing my part to make the world better.

Not if you're using it to still read Sports Illustrated.

Depends. Do they get paid for adblocker readers? Do they get paid based on the percentage of their readers that use adblock? Do they get paid more if they form over some of this information (and therefore less if it looks bad so they don't)

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#490

Post by stcredzero »

wharvle wrote: post #149
worldsayshi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does that mean that the free (as in beer) internet is dying and ad-tech killed it?

1) No truly-free search can do a good job on the modern Internet. It's too hard. "Free" search must be ad-supported to have any hope of achieving good-enough utility. 2) ... But that's because the incentives of ads (and affiliate programs, which are also just advertising) cause that to be the case. (And of course ad-supported search is also doomed to "enshittification", for reasons that Google explained back at the b…

I remember when the angry mob, lead by the Penny Arcade guys came after Scott McCloud for advocating the end of the ad funded Internet in favor of a micropayment driven one.

Turns out, he was right!

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