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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#521

Post by mrkramer »

jampekka wrote: post #86

To prevent the impending total enshittification of the Internet we'd probably need e.g. something like cryptographically signing human-generated content with some way of proving humanness. Although nothing like this (or other solutions) is probably gonna materialize. The world, and especially the Internet, is driven by short-term commercial interests, and not-enshittifying things doesn't seem to make enough return on…

>To prevent the impending total enshittification of the Internet we'd probably need e.g. something like cryptographically signing human-generated content with some way of proving humanness.

Perhaps cryptography can be useful but already irl you can buy "hand-made" products but ofc you can not fully trust that something was really hand-made or that web content was made really by human but at the end of the day it all comes down to trust. Web sites and web publishers need to build up trust in order to gain traction among web users and web customers.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#522

Post by WalterBright »

mort96 wrote: post #435
WalterBright wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And to be fair, I've rarely found ChatGPT to give useful answers ... so I guess it produces perfect StackOverflow-like answers?

When I've used chatgpt and bard to write example code, it's always generated a complete example, not half of one.

Of course, I carefully frame the query so that's what I get.

However, when I asked stackoverflow, google, and bard a question about how to do something with github, all I received were wrong answers. I finally had to throw in the towel and ask people. I think it was the third person I asked who gave an answer that worked.

google itself has an annoying habit of answering a fundamentally different question than what I type in.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#523

Post by jmjanzen »

bombela wrote: post #347
Aurornis wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. I feel the same way. I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me. I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the t…

I failed a remote technical interview by writing a bad abstraction and mudding myself with it. After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology. The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.

Wow I am not looking forward to that in my future interviews. At least showing atomic little micro commits should probably give potential employers a view into your thought process?

Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then.

I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#524

Post by mort96 »

WalterBright wrote: post #522
mort96 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to be fair, I've rarely found ChatGPT to give useful answers ... so I guess it produces perfect StackOverflow-like answers?

When I've used chatgpt and bard to write example code, it's always generated a complete example, not half of one. Of course, I carefully frame the query so that's what I get. However, when I asked stackoverflow, google, and bard a question about how to do something with github, all I received were wrong answers. I finally had to throw in the towel and ask people. I think it was the third person I asked who gave an an…

I often also get a complete example from ChatGPT when the question calls for it, it's just usually an incorrect complete example.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#526

Post by wharvle »

stcredzero wrote: post #516
wharvle wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think micropayments can work, either. The vast majority of Internet content—and I mean stuff that does get seen, not obscure sites with a dozen visits a years—isn't even worth a penny to most (not all, but most) of the people who "consume" it, but is worth a lot more than micropayment-amounts to some smaller set of people. Enforcing micropayments wouldn't, for nearly all sites that rely on ad revenue now, res…

I don't think micropayments can work, either. What I meant, was that Scott McCloud was right, in the sense that ad supported content had some serious problems.

Ah. Yes, that's certainly true, both due to the nature of what ads are, and how that business model affects the relationship between creator and audience.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#527

Post by kossTKR »

ravenstine wrote: post #118

Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material and isn't that distinguishable from it. It doesn't help that search engines today sort by prestige over whether your query matches text in a webpage. People aren't…

Okay so this is pretty bleak isn't it, for the entrepreneurs, grassroots, startups, or just free enterprise in the most basic form?

I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore.

Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#528

Post by visarga »

samtho wrote: post #182
visarga wrote: post #32

It all started with the "Traffic==Money" idea, a long time ago. LLMs weren't even around a couple of years ago in any meaningful way and the internet was still full of dogshit. Maybe we can have better dogshit made with AI.

The problem is that the dogshit machine was constrained in its output by the organization creating it. Sure you may have paid small amounts per article but your resources were still limited as cost scaled linearly with content creation. Now any size of organization can make a metric tonne of lexically unique content with a fixed cost given the incentive to do so at the moment, it’s all but inevitable.

Yes but the Google Bot LLMs will filter out drivel with their superior language understanding and network analysis of spam clues. I mean it could, if only Google wanted to clean up its act. Well, in the meantime I hopped on phind.com and use Google about 25%, when I just wan to go to a specific site or article. Slowly weaning off. Phind is fantastic, even its search results on the right side bar are clean.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#529

Post by espe »

donmcronald wrote: post #260
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. Signed content is the only way to get that. This is the real play IMO. With the push for identity systems that support attestation [1], it doesn't matter if AI is successful at producing high quality results or if it only ever produces massive amounts of pure garbage. In the latter case, it's a huge win for platform owners like Apple, Google, or Microsoft (via TPM) because they're the o…

> My fear is that eventually you'll start seeing government services where identity and auth are handed off to private companies like Google and Apple. Imagine having your real identity tied to an attestation by one of those companies.

a general taste for dysfunctional public-private partnerships and the fact that auth is a seriously hard problem at scale, make this scenario a few percentage points more likely than anyone should feel comfortable with.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#530

Post by squeaky-clean »

marstall wrote: post #222
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…

> It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. Though there are many brands built on trust, whose domain name is very difficult to spoof, that are an exception to this. Hate on nytimes.com, but you have reasonable confidence the content on that site is written, fact-checked and edited by staff at the New York Times Company.

Last month NYT hired an "editorial director of artificial intelligence initiatives" in order to guide how the company should and should not use generative AI.

They will probably still have human review and higher publishing standards than generic blog spam. But in just a few months or sooner you can no longer safely assume a NYT article was not written by AI.

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