491–500 of 611 posts
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…
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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 re…
Well, they should have incentives, it's called user retention. And they are so very complacent, it's hilarious. Here we have, one of the most dramatic shifts in search engine technology in decades, as AI iterates crazy fast, and they're sitting on their past achievements, and hoping user stickiness wins.
Look at how fast Firefox went from the dominant browser to barely existent. Things can shift in the blink of an eye.
Today, more than anything, Google needs to be at the top of its game. Bing is fast becoming far far better than Google Search, and they can pull in crazy user numbers if they wish.
Microsoft has a big bag of cash, and could pay Firefox, Apple, and a dozen other competitors when they deem strike time is a go.
Google, comparatively, seems in a decadent daze of debilitating dormant dreams, damned to derlictness.
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> 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.
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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.
It's probably people who waste others' time with baseless complaints like this that completely ignore substance that have ruined the internet, and not the fact that authors of interesting substantive content that actually gets consumed, whom also ask for some form of support that have ruined the internet.
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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 informatio…
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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!
For most people, the alternative to browsing most of what they look at on, say, their phone day-to-day, if it vanished, isn't to pay for more content (maybe a little... but mostly it won't be the same content) but to, IDK, play the Nokia Snake Game. The value is nearly nonexistent, for most visitors.
For those advocating for “dead internet” aka “it was all dogshit anyway” – where is the boundary for non-dogshit information? Presumably everything we consume originated from or is adjacent to content from the internet. Even original content & sources are reading the internet themselves. Perhaps you are internet aristocracy advocating “Google for thee and arXiv.org for me” . Are the folks writing our peer reviewed st…
You can in digital communication because we have cryptography. That's the reason we can have secure https traffic over a really insecure web. The future is probably that almost everything authentic is going to be signed and everything else we'll just assume comes from a bot.
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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.
So…the current system?
This is an old problem that LLM-generated content only accelerated. LMGTFY died when Google tripled down on growing their ad revenue and adtech dominance and SEO ran rampant throughout search results. It is fairly difficult to get non-biased factual information from a naked query these days, which is why I try to search for info on Reddit first. This isn't a panacea either given that it's been chock-ful of astroturfe…
Finally switched to Kagi when I realized Google could not find a particular ThreeJS class doc page for me no matter what keywords I used, I had to paste the very URL of the page for it to appear at the top of my search results. Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.