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AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

wired.com

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Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#51

Post by karmakurtisaani »

handfuloflight wrote: post #41
doe_eyes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.

> Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything. Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique pattern…

> Tell that to Elon Musk. He seems to unable or unwilling to stop a certain type of fake female bot spam on X that has extremely simple to spot and unique patterns.

It probably drives engagement, so there's no need to interfere. Perhaps it should be encouraged even..

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#52

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Uehreka wrote: post #15
walterbell wrote: post #5

Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?

A lot of the time, AI slop is difficult to discern from authentic content until you’re somewhere in the middle, at which point something starts to feel off about it. At least, that’s been my experience coming across AI-written Blender tutorials on YouTube. All this makes it difficult to quickly report as spam. There’s also a lot of plausible deniability since a lot of people have developed a hair-trigger response to…

> HN comments aren’t easily monetizable.

Why isn't it? As far as I can remember, all the forums had lot of outright spam, even forums which are orders of magnitude less popular than HN. You can even see spam in usenet. Reddit/Discord is full of it. I wonder are dang/moderators the only reason for this?

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#53

Post by init2null »

unsignedint wrote: post #45
handfuloflight wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, can we see the chat history that you went through to get to this output?

Sure, --- Please refine: To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments including this one. I do, however put in substantial input outlining my thought in detail, so I use it more like a glorified grammar checker. It helps me a lot as I'm not a good writer (as being non-native, just sufficient to be able to thrive in business environment, just not a good writer. It helps me tremendously to get my thought…

Perhaps I'm naive or old fashioned, but I prefer this unpolished version. You clearly have an unclosed parenthesis that's attached to a rough sentence, but two minutes of rephrasing will serve you well in improving both your writing and your speech. If you must use it, I'd suggest asking for suggestions rather than rewrites.

Writing is not just about syntax, but also about communicating who you are. This is your true voice.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#54

Post by maxspero »

Hey it's me, Max. I ran the analysis for WIRED and got them their initial 47% number for AI content.

The CEO accused me of trying to extort him because I sent a short email with our findings prior to the publication of this article.

He also casts doubt on the efficacy of AI detection (fair) but I think our AI detection model is orders of magnitude more accurate than the others and I stand by its predictions.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#55

Post by nicbou »

rootusrootus wrote: post #12

Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.

Human curation will become more and more valuable, perhaps precisely because it does not scale.

You know which travel advice I prefer? The one from a small, local blogger that loves their city. You know where I find my music? At house parties. More and more, I also crawl the profiles of individual users for content that I might like.

The cosy web is my refuge from scale and its consequences.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#56

Post by smackeyacky »

LegibleCrimson3 wrote: post #25
bananapub wrote: post #11

one of the saddest parts of the whole thing is finding out how many fucking arseholes out there have been waiting to flood the internet with crap, and had previously only failed because they were too lazy to do all that typing. just absolutely embarrassing for us all.

It's an incentives problem, and the ad industry is largely to blame. It's the same cause as much of the destruction and centralization of the web, the rise of clickbait, rising extremism and political polarization, negativity-driven engagement, and myriad other public problems. An attention-drivin economy is disastrous for mental and public social health. And some people still defend the ad industry, even going so fa…

I don't see the clickbait / extremism promoting content as anything particularly new. In the UK the "red top" newspapers used to supply it and in the recent past it was Fox News.

It was always possible to cocoon yourself into news and opinion you agreed with.

AI slop does seem a little different, if only because it's machine generated and the sheer amount of it would not have been possible when rubbish was human generated and the gatekeepers of publishing were newspaper editors.

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#57

Post by everybodyknows »

bhouston wrote: post #19

I've seen this on Substack as well. For example, I ran across this account on Substack is posting a lot of ChatGPT-generated articles to reddit. This is clearly ChatGPT-generated based on a very simple prompt: https://theglobalistperspective.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-i...

It's full of anecdotes from apparently real individuals. Are these rewrites of content scraped from real news?

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#58

Post by gs17 »

BearOso wrote: post #17
jgalt212 wrote: post #6

YouTube allows one to report a video for 11 different reasons. A list below. Unfortunately, AI Slop is not one of them. Sexual content Violent or repulsive content Hateful or abusive content Harassment or bullying Harmful or dangerous acts Misinformation Child abuse Promotes terrorism Spam or misleading Legal issue Captions issue

Spam or misleading is the category to use. It's misleading people into thinking humans wrote it, and being AI tripe, it's always spam.

But do they actually remove it for that?

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#59

Post by stvltvs »

maxspero wrote: post #54

Hey it's me, Max. I ran the analysis for WIRED and got them their initial 47% number for AI content. The CEO accused me of trying to extort him because I sent a short email with our findings prior to the publication of this article. He also casts doubt on the efficacy of AI detection (fair) but I think our AI detection model is orders of magnitude more accurate than the others and I stand by its predictions.

What gives you confidence in this AI detection model?

Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

#60

Post by unsignedint »

init2null wrote: post #53
unsignedint wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, --- Please refine: To be honest, I do use GenAI to help me format my comments including this one. I do, however put in substantial input outlining my thought in detail, so I use it more like a glorified grammar checker. It helps me a lot as I'm not a good writer (as being non-native, just sufficient to be able to thrive in business environment, just not a good writer. It helps me tremendously to get my thought…

Perhaps I'm naive or old fashioned, but I prefer this unpolished version. You clearly have an unclosed parenthesis that's attached to a rough sentence, but two minutes of rephrasing will serve you well in improving both your writing and your speech. If you must use it, I'd suggest asking for suggestions rather than rewrites. Writing is not just about syntax, but also about communicating who you are. This is your true…

Thank you—I understand where you're coming from. My interest in using GenAI stems from its ability to catch subtle implications or unintended double meanings in my writing. I've had plenty of "that's not what I meant" moments in the past, so using AI helps me align my phrasing with my true intent. It offers an objective lens, making it easier for me to convey my thoughts clearly, especially since I sometimes find it challenging to step out of my own subjective perspective.

Some roughness in my recent writing comes from being on mobile, which makes reviewing even harder! My writing has improved, though, even when I’m working without AI, likely from exposure to better writing flows. I’d say I used to rely more on edits (20% input to 80% edits), but now it’s closer to 75% input and 25% edits. Hopefully, I can refine it even further.

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