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The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

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Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#61

Before ChatGPT, it was already full of bot-generated garbage; google any celebrity name and crappy sites are recommended with their net worth or relationship status.

This is the worst of it.

All of googles' top suggestions, highlights, and whatever other garbage they put in the top two scroll pages, is just junk. Garbage. It's right perhaps 5% of the time for me.

So not only do I have to hunt through their horrible search results, I have to hunt through junk they add on top of that.

The sad part is, their buffoonery in aliasing words is 90% of the problem. No, I searched for David, not Dave. No, I searched for Debian, not Ubuntu. On and on, unless I use verbatim, I get nothing even remotely useful.

It's like Google is completely disconnected from the real world. I bet they don't even dogfood. They probably have a Google Employee search that actually works, and doesn't alias or something.

I wonder what startling revelations Google would have, if they flew to the middle of Missouri, told people how to use verbatim, and then saw the wondrous expressions of "oh, it works now?" in grandmas.

They blew the AI game, screwing around, messing about, giving up a decade lead on OpenAI. They're destroying their search engine, their brand, with this junky, modern lack of effort. They're making gmail less and less friendly, losing cherished photos of loved ones in Google Drive, their entire Pii based income stream is coming to an end, frankly, Google is done, unless they do something dramatic.

They're on the path to becoming IBM. A washed up has been, ruminating on past glories.

They should be hiring right now. Massive amounts of talent is being set free, they should scoop them up, and reap 5 year research and dev rewards. They have the excess capital... now, something they will lose soon.

But no. Onward, we march into oblivious irrelevance, says they! Yay!

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#62
Susan Blackmore was right.

> To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is.

> [...]

> Computers handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variation and selection is still done by human beings, with their biologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement, communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already there are examples of computer programs recombining old texts to create new essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions, and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data. Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, AltaVista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2010/08/te...

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless Discord starts selling it to ai companies right?

*until If people believe giving all information to one company and having it unindexable and impossible to find on the open internet is a way to keep your data safe, I have an alternative idea. This unindexability means Discord could charge a much higher price when selling this data.

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#64
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 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. Effectively all the players are conspiring to generate revenue from people's free time, attention, and coerce them into consumption, while amusing them to death. Big entities in the space have trouble coming up with successful models other than advertising--not because those models are unsuccessful, but because 20+ years of compounded exponential growth has made them so big that it's no longer worth their while and will not help them achieve their yearly growth targets.

Just a case in point. I joined Google in 2010 and left in 2019. In 2010 annual revenue was ~$30 billion. Last year, it was $300 billion. Google has grown at ~20% YoY very consistently since its inception. To meet that for 2024, they'll have to find $60 billion in new revenue. So they need to find two 2010-Google's worth of revenue in just one year. And of course 2010-Google took twelve years to build. It's just bonkers.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#65
Makes me wonder how the advertisement industry is going to cope with the ever-growing influx of non-human users. What happens when the conversion rates plummet to zero?

Maybe I'm cynic, but a completely walled-off / paid internet doesn't seem too unrealistic. You'll have to pay a subscription to every website you want to visit.

On one side you have the open internet wasteland, filled to the brim with AI bots / generated content, essentially trying to vacuum pennies off human visitors. On the other hand you have the walled internet, where you have to pay for stuff and jump through flaming hoops to prove that you're a human.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#66

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.

Humans are the original bullshit generator. AI is only doing what humans have been doing since forever.

My bull would beg to differ. He and his bovine forefathers have been generating bullshit for much, much longer than humans have.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#67

At the end of the day, ads exist to make money, and until the bots have credit cards that means money from humans. Google etc. will notice it in their bottom line if there's suddenly a lot more "engagement" or traffic in some area but none of that converts to humans spending dollars. Google will start dealing with this problem when it starts appearing in their budget in big enough numbers. The tech layoffs we're hear…

Why wouldn't it result in humans spending dollars? The ads are real and the visitors are real, it doesn't matter if the content is real. In fact people are probably more likely to click on an ad if the page it's on is generic and uninteresting.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#68
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…

I can't see how being used as training data has anything to do with this problem. Being able to differentiate between the AI slop and the accurate information is the issue.

Differentiation becomes harder the better AIs perform, which is currently bound by data availability and quality.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how the old web worked, but something decentralized makes sense to me.

People used to email each links to cool websites! And there were services like Hotline! And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!

Oh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.

Re: The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

time to abandon google and go back to web rings.

I don't know how the old web worked, but something decentralized makes sense to me.

Indexing tools will always be more convenient than the alternative of having to discover links yourself.

People pick convenience above almost everything else unfortunately, a few may prefer the old world but a vast majority of people will use Google and whatever its successor is.

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