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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#591

Post by vagab0nd »

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…

> At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Then the chaff is as good as the wheat.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#592

Post by evexec »

mint2 wrote: post #93

The post google uses for the feature snippet for the search “best place to fly drones in sf” appears to be misleading inane useless dogshit. What I’m not sure is whether it’s ai generated, bad quality traditional bot generated, or human content spam generated. But whatever it is, it fooled google. It hurts to read, each numbered point is similar to this: “S.F. city parks are a great and amazing place to fly. Sf parks…

[dead]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#593

Post by valval »

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…

Poor use of LLMs is incredibly easy to spot, and works as today’s sign of a worthless post/comment/take.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#594

Post by sanroot99 »

boznz wrote: post #263
cauliflower99 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Or maybe it would be a combination of pre-AI content plus some extra barriers to entry for newer content that would increase the likelihood the content was generated by real people?

Extra barriers! LOL. Everything I have every submitted written by me (a human) to HN, reddit and others in the past 12 months gets rejected as self-promotion or some other BS even though it is totally original technical content. I am totally over the hurdles to get anything I do noticed, and as I don't have social media it seems the future is to publish it anywhere and rely on others or AI to scrape it into a publish…

So true, barrier to entry is already too High.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#595

Post by sanroot99 »

Swizec wrote: post #424
kbrkbr wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an interesting thought. Maybe the problem is not the ai generated useless noise, but that it is so easy and cheap to publish it. One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. Handchiseled stone tablets. Offering information costs something.

> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books Honestly I’ve switched to books and papers a few years ago and it has been fantastic. 2 hours of reading a half decent book or paper outweighs a week of reading the best blogposts, twitter threads, or YouTube videos.

I generally go to cited papers in Wikipedia articles

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#596

Post by sanroot99 »

plagiarist wrote: post #111
titzer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental dynamic that ruins every technology is (over-)commercialization. No matter what anyone says, it is clear that in this era, advertising has royally screwed up all the incentives on the internet and particularly the web. Whereas in the "online retailer" days, there was transparency about transactions and business models, in the behind-the-scenes ad/attention economy, it's murky and distorted. Effectivel…

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…

What are current search strategy one employees to find such articles. Nowadays I find it increasingly hard to find such articles.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#597

Post by nunez »

causal wrote: post #110
nunez wrote: post #100

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.

Absolutely love Kagi for everything except shopping and maps.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#598

Post by nunez »

worldsayshi wrote: post #580
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 think micro-payments could work in many different ways and with much different results depending on which model becomes prevalent. But the issue is mostly that it has to both "work" once there's enough users and it has to have a mechanism for adoption even before it is "big enough". Example of alternative for micro-payment model: You pay $20 to an intermediary each month. You upvote web pages/domains. Pages you vis…

This has been tried (Apple News, Substack, Tapatalk). People just don't want to pay is the problem. They're fine with the ads.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#599

Post by nunez »

novemp wrote: post #172
causal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Too bad Kagi is also investing in LLMs.

They are, but you don't have to use those features. I think you can disable the summarizer as well.

To wit, the few queries I've thrown at !fast were pretty inaccurate.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#600

Post by andrewla »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #587
andrewla wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that physically impossible? You can grab the neckflap and take off the mask.

Sure, and it’s physically possible for me to hunt you down and make sure you actually used your private key to sign a document.

I mean, this is seriously moving the goalpost, but let's play along.

I tear off the Scooby-Doo mask, and the person is now exposed as being a different person.

You hunt me down (somehow? magically? nothing in PK infrastructure allows this, but let's say you do it) and I say "yes, that's my PK, and yes, I signed that" but how can you then verify I didn't take it from chatGPT and sign it?

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