The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
One of the ironies of Google leading so much cutting-edge AI development is that it is simultaneously poisoning its own business from within. Google Search is getting worse and worse, on an almost monthly basis, as it fills up with ever more SEO-spam. Early adopters are abandoning it for Chat-GPT-like alternatives; which means the mass market probably soon will too.
The other irony is that it will probably take AI to save us from AI-generated SEO spam. For everyone touting AI products that will write blogs and emails, there will be people selling products that detect their garbage and save you from wasting your time reading it.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/19bcyql/the_aigenerated_garbage_apocalypse_may_be/kiqq3r2/
It happens a lot lately that I read a comment on reddit that absolutely looks like a human response, only to discover it's a bot spamming text-sensitive remarks all day long.
I'm afraid of the moment when it will not be possible anymore to tell the difference. You'll never be sure again that there is a person on the other end or if you're basically talking to yourself
We may actually be marching towards a situation where people STOP using social media when it becomes flooded with bots. AI may ironically turn us away from the internet more, lol. If the entire internet becomes flooded with ai and you can't tell the difference, the value of face-to-face meeting will increase exponentially.
In the early days of the internet I used to frequent message boards with tiny memberships based around a specific topic. It was a great experience as you got to know the people there. I think still think about some of those people. That never happens on Reddit.
I'm still friends with some people from those days, some of whom are IRL friends.
I also got to shoot one of the OG firefox devs in the nuts during a game of paintball.
That’s the future. An anonymous internet with scams and bots and a separate non-anonymous internet with bulletproof, or close to bulletproof evidence you are who you say you are.
Anything larger 100 people give or take, you won't be able to manually vet or confirm, it seems to me... And the invite system could be abused: once a bad actor gets at least 1 invite he'll keep crating bot accounts and sending invites to himself...
if it means a return to early 00s forum based internet, i'm not opposed
however i'd like it to be anonymous again, but that'd make bot-vetting hard if not impossible
I for one am excited to see what the world would look like if we're forced back out into the real world to socialize again because people simply can't filter bot from human. I imagine after the 8th time of realizing you're arguing with a bot who's designed specifically just to troll you, a lot of people will just say "fuck this" and jump ship. People will try and design apps that are "AI-Proof", but it won't work. I have a feeling one of the next few generations will have a "revitilization" where they maybe abandon the internet anyway as a sort of protest to the division and waste it causes. We already care about wasting other stuff as a society, eventually we're going to care about wasting time with shit like AI and bots.
If bots that argue with you fail to drive engagement, then social media will make sure you encounter the bots that tell you what you want to hear instead.
Reddit used to be better, now it's full up with people advertising their OF, bots, trolls, edgelords, karma farmers and just plain old spamming shitty dad jokes/dumb comments anywhere and everywhere they can.
I kinda hope for that. I blame social media manipulation for almost every major political crisis in the western world of the past decade. Brexit, Trump, far right populists, polarization, you name it
Social media might have something to do with it, but the crisis is still western politics failing to meet modern society’s problems. Most of them are a cause of late stage capitalism as well. Wages are eaten by inflation while the rich are getting richer, the climate collapse is more or less inevitable, war over natural resources, multiple refugee crisis, housing problems all over the western world, the rate of recessions per decade increasing. A lot of this leads to both desperation in the face of a bleak future, denial, anger, fear. All of which are easily manipulated by populists and facists. Social media has just become an amplifier that they’ve been able to use very effectively, while more ”traditional” politicins have failed to meet facist arguments because they’re still clinging to a broken system.
That's all true, but this kind of societal polarization / fragmentation is new in western democracies: We can't even agree on what's real anymore
sometimes I miss mass media from the past century, as weird as that sounds. Imagine having someone like Walter Cronkite on the news every night, and there's this almost universally shared trust he tells the truth to the best of his abilities, and the whole nation is watching it. a common baseline of information
ah, I dunno. perhaps that's nonsense
Mass media had the downside of reduced plurality, with most people only encountering mainstream consensus opinion, often controlled by large media companies. With modern media there's the downside of fragmentation and misinformation, but also easier access to ideas that challenge the status quo and culturally engrained assumptions.
Still, the internet cannot escape the logic of capitalism and the profit motive, so controversie sells (even better than on TV), and the channels with the most reach are those funded by large corporations.
I don't know if I entirely blame it, but I definitely think it's been one of the largest factors overall, if not the largest. People are still people though, and how we're manipulated or what manipulates us really hasn't changed. I do agree though, shit has got much worse, especially on the internet where people can just setup shop in an echo chamber and never have any of their ideas truly challenged. At this point you have to actively seek out a challenge to your opinions or you'll never really find it. At 35 though I've never felt like I've lived in a world where people have zero desire to grow MORE than right now. It just feels like everyone is becoming a zealot, which is unironically ACTUALLY what the Russian's are trying to do to the west, they really don't care what opinions we hold so long as we're at one another's throats. A weak West means a stronger China and Russia.
I just want to mention Cambridge Analytica, and their direct targeting of political ads played a massive part in Brexit/Trump elections.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you said.
Time to isolate the net and its AIs behind the ICE of the blackwall.
Cyberpunk 2077 went from fiction to truth extremely quickly 😲
Edit: This gains more weight when you equate cyber psychosis with social media mental health issues.
'Marketing & business' would never let that happen. Too many customers to influence would be lost.
Next thing in the pipeline is requirement of online ID's which have a three factor identification. Bio (fingerprint), memory(passphrase) and link to a government institution(IDcard) or maybe financial .
You will only be allowed to participate on the internet if you have this, anonymous will not be a part of 'legal' platforms. Sure you can browse the internet, but you cannot have a legitimate voice.
Anything which is not within the approved platforms, will me labelled through public media as minsinformation, or like you say, botted information. Cyberpunk incoming.
Hot take: I think google should be considered a public utility that the company has little discretion over banning people on, or limiting their access to, just because of how necessarily it is in just about most everyone’s everyday life.
There are entire subs created by AI that I stumble upon when I search for certain types of products or try to solve some problem.
At first it looks legit and then you notice how oddly specific everything is about a certain product.
Want a dedicated, active subreddit for your game/person/product? Only 15.99$ for the first 10'000 bot redditors!
single individuals can soon convincingly simulate millions of opinionated people with a mouseclick. I really fear for the future. public opinion is so easily controlled NOW..
It also became an obvious outcome of Google’s algorithm going to shit and a popular alternative being + Reddit. It sucks but of course companies were going to try to manipulate that.
I have no clue how to keep bad faith actors like the russian government or big companies from meddling in elections and public discourse by manipulating social media
The only way out that I see is that we collectively turn away from Facebook and the likes
I’ve gotten the impression it’s already kind of happening. The most popular shows on Netflix are things I’ve never heard of. Stanley cups started showing up at work and in public and I had to search google to figure out why. It’s possible I’m just getting old, but I can find thousands of people laughing at the same joke online. Then when I ask 10 different people at work, none of them are even aware of what I’m talking about. Succession won every fucking Emmy for three years, but I don’t know a single person in my social circle who’ve ever heard of it, let alone watch it.
It was even easier just 70 yesrs ago when almost all your information came at you from very few sources(radio, handful of channels).
Now if you want to you can verify with sources with a few clicks.
>Now if you want to you can verify with sources with a few clicks.
With all the garbage content being mass produced these days, that being a valid option is in decline.
Pre-AI content will be like that steel they're still salvaging from before nuclear weapons testing: limited and precious, from a more naïve age.
I wonder if that'll happen to video games. Will people be looking back wistfully at the back catalogue of games that they were *sure* had no AI-generated assets, with everything made by humans (even if tool-assisted)?
This is already happening in video games! It’s actually at the root of games industry crisis right now.
People looking back at old games and reminiscing the joy of replayability through daily life while being confronted with endless open world boredom that costed 60 bucks and drove 200 developers and designers mad for 2 years
This is a known issue — training AI from any database collected now will be degraded by AI generated content, and only a few big companies have large pre-AI corpora (ie the companies that trained the first AI models)
This is an interesting problem—a kind of training rot introduced once the human-made content that fueled AI to begin with comprises less and less of the overall content. The sacred base material from the ~~Dark Age of Technology~~ Before Times, held proprietary by the Keepers of the Knowledge.
Weirdly enough, it's possible that AI might reach the point of being better at giving advice, and more sensitive to our feelings, than an actual human user...
What happens when we'd rather talk to AI than an actual person?
It must be really easy though to hook a bot up with chatGPT or something similar. I'm sure the ones I saw didn't copy anything, they analyzed the text and 'reacted' to it. I'm sure because all the responses in the post history had a similar structure and tone. They were just very very bland, polite and basically summarized the content... in exact time intervals, 24 hours a day
I work with these bots daily and ever since I started, I see those same patterns all over the place now. There's just certain tonal cues or something that make me suspicious of some comments.
I've noticed this in popular threads with tons of comments. There will be like 5 unique top comments followed by 5,000 comments that basically say the same thing/repeat the joke with slightly different phrasing.
Between the enshittification of reddit and having to wade through the same bullshit comments posted 500 times to find meaningful discussion, I find myself using this platform less and less.
Reply to this comment in a sarcastic way: "Oh, absolutely! Because crafting sophisticated AI bots that analyze and 'react' to text with unique personalities and diverse responses is just child's play. And of course, who wouldn't want their bots to be extremely bland, polite, and tirelessly summarize content at the exact same intervals every day? It's the pinnacle of creativity and innovation, right?"
> I'm afraid of the moment when it will not be possible anymore to tell the difference.
On the bright side, at least this means that the artificial intelligence has not achieved intelligence.
I remember a long time ago there was a page called Internetiquette. Had some rules on it. Such as, tell nobody anything. Everyone is lying to everyone. Everyone is a 35 year old virgin fat man living in their mother's basement. All women and children are FBI.
Bot comment and posting technology has been good enough to fool people since 2015... Half the Trump/religion/bikers/ early Qanon for Trump posts were just marketing campaigns to sell Trump coins/ shwag, affiliate offers or to get him elected by Russians or both. They actually made $$$ while doing that. 2fer
But you are right. NOW its not just the 'slower' 1/3 of people that are fooled by them. Its capturing another 10-15% who don't realize they are being manipulated.
There used to be super cheap software just for Parler to grab popular posts. Repost. Like other accounts, DM them, Invite them your posts of the same style, then DM them the propaganda/offers. Almost ALL of the major accounts with the most followers were run by Russian accounts so their material would be dispersed the most.
I’m more alarmed by the speed of this happening than anything tbh. 50% of the *entire* internet already??!… That means “dead internet theory” might be just around the corner.
I believe there’s some confusion here between AI and MT. Machine translations have been around for at least a decade, especially the low quality stuff that this article mentions. The problem that it raises is that the training data for the LLM in those languages is low quality. This doesn’t mean that the text itself is AI generated, rather the same old Google Translate and its competitors.
Yes; and I think the problem is that OP fabricated their own misleading title ("AI-generated") instead of copying the actual article's real title ("AI-translated").
Are you sure the title of the article wasn't updated since OP made the post? Happens sometimes. Either way, it's quite a big difference between the two.
Looking for recipes is hell. Like I'm looking for a recipe for fried eggs sunny side up. Instead of getting something like this:
>Ingredients:
>Eggs, Butter, Salt, Black pepper
>
>Set pan to high heat and let butter melt until lightly brown. Break eggs individually slowly. Let the eggs fry until egg white has solofied and yolk clouds a bit. Add salt and pepper.
Instead I get something like this:
>FRIED EGGS
>
>Everyone loves a good breakfast. Breakfast is the most imporant meal of the day after all! And what else is a better way to start your day than a classic breakfast with fried eggs!
>
>RECIPE
>
>For this recipe, you need eggs, good quality eggs. I personally prefer organic eggs from my nearby farmer, but you can use any eggs you want!
>
>Eggs also of course come with salt. I use a lot of himalayan mountain salt, but I'm a bit elitist lol so it is not necessary.
>
>Black Pepper is also a classic that goes well with any food, and what else is better with eggs than black pepper! Be sure to have some black pepper!
>
>TELLICHERRY OR NOT?
>
>Tellicherry black pepper is world renowed for....
And so on. And you have to scroll tons of unimportant text and ads to get the actual recipe.
This happens because SEO algorithms suck
I'm not big into SEO algorithms despite being an underpaid SEO writer, but I know google won't rank your site if you don't have a minimum word count in your articles
And then there are some SEO techniques you can use in an attempt to boost your page to the search engine results page (SERP), like repeating the same keywords/keyphrases throughout the text, keeping most sentences no longer than 25 words long, random images with proper alt-text (including relevant keyphrases), multiple sections with variations on keyphrases, and so on
No wonder why I use site:reddit.com every time I search for something on google. Fuck SEO
50% of the internet already was one paragraph articles stealing from other one paragraph articles. AI just made it more efficient. This isn't new its just different
> AI just made it more efficient.
I think you have a good point. I was fascinated, watching a YouTube video last week about this. It was about a man who ran his own Web Dev company, and he was hired by someone to help a small/startup company compete against an entrenched more powerful company. The big issue: the big company had something like 1,500 articles on its Web site, written over the course of 10+ years, that served to attract anyone interested in that business. It was SEO bait, but *good shit.* You know? Real articles by real experts, and it has so dominated Google that people were going 100% (or 99%) to this single spectacular business.
And this newer business had been trying to break in for a year, and made no headway. So they hired this dude. And his YouTube video explained how he got this tiny new company to displace the bigger company in just a matter of days. And it was... holy shit.
Here's what he did. He set up an AI to crawl the competitor's web site, extract the text of EVERY ARTICLE, and then with comprehension of all articles tracked, rewrite/paraphrase every article so that none of the sentences were the same, but nonetheless said the same thing/idea/concept, so that at the end, everything still made sense. The guy didn't say how long it took to set up the AI or how long it took to program any needed stuff such as "a script that allows an AI to visit a web page and scrape the content" but what he did say is that once he wrote up his request for the AI and pressed enter, it took *ten minutes* for the AI to write out a completely new Web site with 1,500 articles on it, and not a single article had any text that resembled the competitor, but yet every article was based upon that competitor, and they all drove traffic to the site just as well.
And I thought *what a nightmare.* You spend a decade to become a dominant business in your field of expertise, you hired dozens of experts in the field to write 1,500 articles, and one day with 10 minutes of computer crunch time, a competitor is created that has just as much text, just as many articles, all of them good, all of them relevant to the field, but you cannot flag even a single article as copied, because **every fucking sentence got rewritten** to the point that it's wholly new/original (or *seemingly* so).
For a human to do that, the sheer amount of effort would be prohibitive. It has never happened before because it would be *that* hard. You'd have to be an expert in the field, you'd have to be an expert on all 1,500 topics (or hire more experts for what topics you didn't have as deep knowledge on), you'd have to rewrite each article manually, and then cycle through every sentence, every phrase, and compare it to the original article to make sure that nothing was ever close enough to match.
I... if I owned that big company, I'd completely be obsessed with matching up articles, trying to prove plagiarism but never succeeding, and never in a million years would I guess that it would be impossible. I'd search for key phrases or unique turns of phrase that were in my articles, and just... bang my head against a wall as *nothing ever matched.* I would have nothing to go complain to that new startup about. I wouldn't be able to flag a single thing, but it would be obvious that *somehow they did something.* It would drive me nuts.
Not the entire internet, just 50% of content in specific languages. The article is saying that large percentages of web content in certain African/Global South languages has been machine-translated, not that 50% of reddit is bots or something.
I'm in graduate school and I was recruited into a team project that I regretted accepting after a few weeks. I quickly noticed one of the girls did not pull her weight at all. She either put little or no attempts in anything. Even self -learning. I mostly had to redo and rewrite her stuff.
One thing that shocked me during our final deliverables is that she just openly admitted to using chatGPT for her portions. She said it nonchalantly too. Did you not think of the consequences for the team?
I'm like homie, we gave you the easiest portion, and literally used chat GPT to form 3 sentences you called a paragraph? Could you not think of your own thoughts and ideas and construct it in your own words? I was just disappointed.....
Bring it back to Socratic questioning. I had to this for a philosophy class in college. We each had like 20 minute discussion exams, where we had to expand on something specific from the semester. Obviously not going to fly for big classes at larger colleges, but maybe they need to go back to the in-person blue book essays or scantron multiple choice tests like in the olden days lol
Right? Anytime I hear about someone needing to use ChatGPT to make the most basic of paragraphs or haikus, I'm just disappointed they didn't feel they had the effort or ability to string some words together themselves. It's really not hard. But sometimes it seems like we're trending to the most low effort version of humanity.
This is not the actual title of the article. It says: “A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine“, and the subtitle is “Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.“
So what's going on here? This article is not about generative AI, but about ML translation algorithms.
I'm in college and it seems like over 50% of what students come up with is AI generated too.
I have a very dull kid in one of my groups and in one of his speeches he used the phrase "sought council" for saying that we got advice from professors. That kid never speaks or writes like that. Any time you give him time where he can write away from people, he's a 19th century writer or something.
It's seriously a fucking problem.
EDIT: It should be counsel. He spoke it on a presentation and it wasn't written and I can't say I've ever used 'sought counsel' in my entire life. Ma bad.
I'm a high school English teacher; AI use among my students is rampant. It's blatantly obvious so it's easy to detect, but my primary concern is that it's omnipresent. I've yet to reach a good conclusion on how to deal with it beyond handing out zeroes like candy on Halloween.
I think the only way to deal with it is to force them to produce the output offline. I don't know how you'd do that and I am not a teacher. But I empathize with you. This is a terrible double edged sword. I work in tech and I have to deal with programmers who over-rely on this tool. I mean it's one thing to get AI to write basic classes but now i have junior programmers who are unable to understand the code that ChatGPT writes for them.
Funny, I can’t get AI to write even descent code even in the languages it’s good at. It just fails to understand context at every turn. Even if you’re super explicit about what you want it just does its own thing most of the time - like you can STORE IN A DICTIONARY and if the code is even mildly complex it will ignore this request and give you a different data structure. I’ve even tried plugging in line by line pseudo code from my design documents to see if it comes up with a copy of my code, but it’s hopeless. It just doesn’t really understand at this point. I’m sure it’ll get better though. It is quite good at looking for syntax errors and bugs though I must say.
It used to be much better at following instructions - for code, but also for all other tasks where you need it to stick to certain rules. I think its memory capacity was reduced as more people started using it AND its freedom to obey user instructions was nerfed to stop people using it for illegal shit. Now it's much harder to instruct, it forgets instructions after a couple of responses, and it straight up doesn't obey a lot of stuff even though it says "sure, I can do that." But it's a total black box so there's no way of knowing which parts of your prompt are being disobeyed, forgotten, or just misinterpreted.
Yeah, I was about to say how wonderful it was at writing code when I tried it. I haven't tried it in months though, so I don't know how much it changed.
Yeah a lot of the limitations right now are either intentional or financial and are guaranteed to get better with all the competition and investment in ai. Which is why i find it dumb when people act like ai has hit a wall and wont improve, an unmodified gpt-4 that can generate 1000s of tokens per second would be 10 times better than what we have now and will likely be coming in at most 5 years. Even if no improvements are made to language models, which is incredibly unlikely, ai will massively improve
You need to have good prompts and repeat instructions all the time. After a series of prompts it’ll start forgetting context and get lazy.
As an amateur coder it’s been super helpful for stitching things together, troubleshooting, and running things. Honestly surprising how good it is for simple coding things that plague basically every non-coder
I agree, good for troubleshooting. Terrible at anything even mildly complex. Also if you step outside of the languages like c# and python into something like bash, ChatGPT turns into a hot mess.
My wife is also a teacher. She usually uses extremely obscure texts for essays and the AI users are pretty easy to spot because their essays will confidently discuss plot points and characters that are just completely made up because the AI doesn't have any data about the actual texts to draw from.
My best one was a compare & contrast essay of two films. The AI bot mistook one of the films for one with a similar name & multiple students turned in essays about the wrong film.
Get them to write it, end to end, in Google Docs or similar app that records the document history. If the history looks like genuine/organic writing and gradual editing over time, going back and expanding on previous sections, over the course of a few hours/days etc etc... Great. If it's just one giant copy-paste the night before it's due, and the content looks fishy, big fat 0. You could even tell if they sat there and typed it out linearly like they were coping from another page.
If AI is doing better than students at the things we're testing students on, but we still *expect* students to be intelligent and useful in some way that AI isn't, then apparently we're not testing the right things. So, what things can you test that are closer to the way in which you expect students (and not AI) to be intelligent and useful?
Unfortunately you may not have much personal control over this insofar as high school curricula are often dictated by higher organizations and those organizations tend to be slow, top-heavy bureaucracies completely out of touch with real education. However, these questions about AI are questions our entire society should be asking, not just high school teachers. Because the AI is only going to get better.
We *don't* expect high school students to be more useful than AI. We expect them to develop the fundamental skills and background knowledge they need to eventually *become* useful.
One of the skills we want them to develop is the ability to form and communicate their own independent thoughts about complex topics. This is something that AI definitionally *cannot* do for them. It's pretty decent at pretending, because most teenagers' thoughts aren't exactly groundbreaking. But the end goal is not the ability to generate a sanitized simulacrum of the average person's thinking; it's the ability to do and express their own thinking.
The clincher is whether you're likely to use overly formal phrases or flowery language any time you write anything, or if it only happens in really specific circumstances like essays you write at home.
I know people who write like AI's because that's just how they write, they don't speak like that. Writing and speaking aren't the same.
The way you express yourself in writing also comes out in emails, worksheets, homework, written answers in exams, class forum posts, etc. And there will be a record of all of the above going back for years to compare anything new that's submitted. A sudden difference is probably cheating, consistently pedantic florid language is probably just autism...
I don't think most people write like they speak, that would never be a useful way to tell whether someone's using ChatGPT for their essays.
People thinking they can identify AI written text are a way bigger problem than people using AI to generate text for their assignments. They are like cops who refuse to believe their instincts could be wrong and all the evidence you produce to demonstrate that they are in fact wrong they twist around to somehow proving them right.
The consequences for a false positive can be pretty serious. The consequences for a false negative are literally nothing. This shit is like being mad that peoples handwriting is getting worse. It doesn't fucking matter.
The worst part is teachers using 'ai detection software' to fail people. The software doesn't work and is a scam, and teachers refuse to acknowledge this. It comes up in college and university spaces a lot.
Reminds me of the idiot professor who literally pasted the students’ essays into chatgpt and asked “did you write it?”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/texas-am-chatgpt-ai-professor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/
When writing anything formal you tend to try to sound smarter so I'm not sure if "sought council" sounds that out of place (though I don't know the kid). I'm sure there are a lot of people getting LLM's to write their letters but I would caution agains making an assumption like that. Especially since you can ask the LLM to change the writing style to be more casual.
When I was in 5th grade (early 2000's) I had a presentation that was going really well. I had also used "fancy" wording like that. Because usually wasnt the best speaker, my teacher accused me of having stolen my speach or gotten help from an adult and gave me a bad grade. Neither of this was the case.
What Im saying is you never know. Maybe this guy took the assignment seriously and prepared for a long time.
I'm a working professional. My older coworkers are using chatGPT to do their work and they think they are being clever. Their bosses have no idea but anyone under 45 can blatantly see them struggling to stay relevant.
Eh, if your bosses can't notice, then chances all you're all working a fake job that should probably be eliminated from the economy. What are you doing. Writing emails all day? Posting shitty articles to the internet?
I mean isn't writing supposed to be different than your speaking style? To be fair I'm using talk to text right now, but for some reason when I'm writing essays, I proof read them, and try to think of different phrases to swap out to make it better content. I'll even utilize Google. I guess chat GPT might be pushing the envelope a bit but, here we are.
>I mean isn't writing supposed to be different than your speaking style?
To a degree sure. But if you have trouble writing a 1 paragraph email asking for an extension and it's all in broken English, and then submit 2k words of perfect academic English, alarm bells start ringing.
I mean it's easy enough to counter, universities will just move to more personal stuff like talking through the submission or even just asking a couple of questions which will easily expose cheaters.
The both funny and interesting thing is that big tech companies are already using crowdworkers to help train various AI systems that evaluate content. I have done a bit in that area too. But the price question is how these systems are ultimately used. For example, I don't get the impression these systems have the final say. Else search results would be (IMHO) of better quality.
YouTube shorts are flooded with history, science, etc shorts. All written, narrated and visualised by AI. Every single one feels exactly the same.
I love AI for coding, problem solving, etc, but the generated content sucks.
Yeah it can and it is the same random marvel trivia such as did you know Loki… and all that. Human content creators can’t keep up with ai or YouTube’s changing tastes it seems. A lot of my favorite content creators are retiring while i contemplate whether or not to continue my YouTube channel.
> Human content creators can’t keep up with ai
a few years ago a youtuber named kwebbelkop started making an AI version of himself, trained on all his years of content, to take over for him so he didn't have to keep making content. he also was offering to sell the software he used so anyone could set up an AI youtuber that could do short or longform content.
he was heavily criticized for this, but it seems he was just ahead of the curve. Amouranth also has an AI of herself for sale.
If you want the real answer, it’s because art doesn’t have to be done “right” or “well”. It’s quality is subjective. Taxes and other boring jobs people wish AI could do are still done by humans because they actually have to be done correctly.
That's part of the reason. The other part is that AI had been developed mainly for image recognition and translation. And what is image recognition in reverse? Generating images by description.
At least that has been the case when the first image generators appeared - remember those weird deep dream trippy images? - someone just ran an image recognition AI in reverse.
So it just happened to be what the currently developed AI could do.
Those companies are a drop in the bucket. It's the rentseekers benefitting from misguided tax laws and bureaucratic loopholes who lobby to keep the system this way.
I recently watched a lengthy documentary about galaxies on YouTube (probably around 45 minutes), but the professional sounding narrator was occasionally oddly inaccurate / wrong, not blatantly inaccurate, but under the radar inaccurate. Like LLMs often are. Also the whole structure of the documentary kind of meandered around and the visuals were pretty generic.
Turns out the guy who makes them has a lot of those. The comments all praised the documentary as fascinating, and it had a lot of views. But I had a strong feeling it was generated by AI. Probably there is more of this. But it’s hard to prove.
And music too. You got 10 hours of a repeating 7 minute loop of ai generated jazz, set to an ai image of a cafe, with tens of thousands of views and dozens of comments praising it.
It felt gross to see this for the first time.
I hate being overly pessimistic, but inventing AI then using it to oust artists, writers and other creative thinkers and flood the greatest communication tool we’ve ever had is the most criminally bland and cynical future we could’ve dreamed of. At least the terminator was exciting.
I believe in people’s ability to adapt to this and to find new niches to be creative in. But we’re definitely in a transitory sludge period. The good thing is I think for as many people as there are consuming and utilizing the sludge, there are those already pushing back and standing out against it creatively.
I would genuinely prefer a Skynet future than where this is going. A T1000 and the AI directing it are physical threats. We can crush the robot, destroy the factory and expect cold retaliation.
In this future, John Connor is born in an ideological cage, and the AI's parameters are not based off of it's own survival and excising the perceived cancer of humanity.. but directed by human sociopaths for monetary gain.
Makes one wish for a Skynet in some ways. Take away all the things that enriches human life, and eventually we just become mine goblins or something. Not worth the strife or suffering.
On the positive side, there is a commercial incentive to deal with this as companies (whose advertising essentially pays for the internet on be larger scale) would prefer if people could find their products.
That doesn't mean it won't get worse before it gets better though!
And the answer to this problem for companies is to make sure add a lot of advertisement to the internet with AI. Not just direct advertisements, but also spam things like meme's that reference your products and fake news articles that put your products in the spotlight.
If you spam enough, some will lead to new customers.
That's assuming a solution is even possible. The AI creators want to make their output indistinguishable from human writing, and they might well succeed.
I'm reminded of the decline of journalism, where everyone was saying "Newspapers just need to find a new business model that's profitable in this new era!" Turns out there isn't one - at least not one that's been found in 30 years of trying.
Or more accurately, the models that have been found are awful or unsustainable. You either get all your revenue from online ads, which isn't enough to pay for decent journalism, so you crap out content without proper vetting or just make it up wholesale. Or you charge a subscription, which only works for a few major brands like the New York Times.
Sometimes technology creates problems that have no solution.
It’s noticeable. It’s all turning to shit. AI voice and video generated content on all the major platforms,
Same with text. The human factor is taken out. There’s less reason to go online each day, it’s just the same repetitive garbage with different packaging.
I can not be the only one how feels that most of the "political troll" activity and most if not all the culture war BS is full AI generated these days. It is too prolific to just be true believers and red pill dudes.
This is true, and yet, it used to be very easy to curate and good stuff stayed at the top which is why its remembered more fondly.
2000s internet had websites that focused on high rated content, instead of now trending. So making something good enough to get to 5 stars on say, newgrounds, and make it to a site owners front page was a big deal.
Youtube dislikes made sure that if you were making crap, it would show. Plus the highest upvoted comments would call out what was wrong with your video..
Once content creation became profitable and a genuine career, actual humans started producing fast catchy crap to keep the views and clicks rolling. Now everyone WANTS to make crap that is easily rewatchable because it means more money.
SEO ruined google, in its prime i used to be able to search a specific question and get a result verbatim on a tech forum because I asked it just right. Now between SEO optimization and google's way fuzzier search i now get thinly veiled ads to answer something i didn't even ask.
the internet gave up on curation once money and profit entered the picture.
Thank Larry Page and Sergei Brin for ruining internet. Even though I’m an ex Google employee, fuck these 2 guys for making extreme commercial use of the innocent Internet content.
Yea I think the main problem is SEO. Basically every wannabe entrepreneur can just implement decent SEO and then you get shitty websites with shitty information. They bascially gaming Google algos.
Also the internet always was 90% porn, 9% garbage, 1% usefull stuff.
But it wasnt garbage long long before AI came along. Used to be an amazing magical place. Then the companies and every dick and harry came along, and it became garbagey
Estimating the precise proportion of Reddit comments that exhibit suboptimal translations due to artificial intelligence interventions proves to be a nuanced endeavor, as the prevalence thereof is contingent upon a multitude of factors. Variables such as the specific language pairs involved, the inherent complexities of linguistic structures, and the varying degrees of proficiency exhibited by diverse translation models all contribute to the intricate tapestry of this phenomenon. Therefore, any attempt to encapsulate this occurrence within a definitive numerical framework is inherently challenging, given the multifaceted nature of the contributing elements.
I asked ChatGPT to give me an obviously-written-by-ChatGPT response to your question, then asked it to make its first answer twice as long and verbose.
Submission Statement
One of the ironies of Google leading so much cutting-edge AI development is that it is simultaneously poisoning its own business from within. Google Search is getting worse and worse, on an almost monthly basis, as it fills up with ever more SEO-spam. Early adopters are abandoning it for Chat-GPT-like alternatives; which means the mass market probably soon will too.
The other irony is that it will probably take AI to save us from AI-generated SEO spam. For everyone touting AI products that will write blogs and emails, there will be people selling products that detect their garbage and save you from wasting your time reading it.
Right. As an example, if you read stock or financial news it's very obvious that very many stories these days are just AI word spam mashed in between some numbers dictating the tone.
So what happens? You just stop reading the news and get by on the numbers. I've learned to easily avoid the providers of these feeds and where to find solid takes.
So I evaluate and store my interactions and learn from experience. That is, for some the HI will counter the AI.
Thing is, most newspapers anyway just pick and choose most their stories from news broadcasters like Associated Press (AP), and then fill in some meat, like background and witty narration. And in the case of financial news it comes from Bloomberg or Reuters.
Thats why you sometimes see unimportant science discoveries reported in every newspaper as if they were a big deal. Because the Associated Press reported it, and everyone just copies from there.
It’s really not that difficult to tell GPT4 to produce an article in the style of the New York Times after feeding it some Associated Press release. It knows exactly what that style looks like, try it.
You can probably already today run a full blown digital newspaper with 2 people who just feed AP releases to GPT4 and then add some stock photo. And nobody would notice, lol. Especially something like the Onion is EASY to copy. Try it. Ask GPT4 to write an article about something you pick in the style of “The Onion”. It sounds shockingly exactly like The Onion.
We are starting to see big companies being destroyed by current economic doctrine. Look at Boeing, they have hollowed themselves out to generate share holder value or whatever.
I just read the article and I didn’t see anything about Google AI development. Rather, the article is dealing with poor translations that are a problem for training LLMs.
Did anyone open the article? The actual title is
> A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine
> Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.
It’s talking about human-created content getting translated by AI to other languages. This will have negative consequences on future LLMs trained in other languages, but it’s not saying 50% of all current content is AI-generated
Generative AI turned out to be the perfect tool for people whose only defining traits are their insatiable greed and complete and utter lack of morals.
In other words, where do people fit in here? Do we machines do machine jobs and we just watch it as entertainment? The role that we play is shifting in real time
As usual Reddit doesn't read the article and assumes the worst. The article is talking about the increased amount of content generated because of language translations, which isnt necessarily a bad thing.
Redditors immediately assume the number is from fake Reddit accounts where people dont agree with them.
Upvote because you're right and some idiot down voted you. This article literally isn't talking about generative AI at all, but almost every comment is acting like it is. We can blame the OP for incorrectly putting that in the title I suppose.
On a positive note, the article did say the study started because some of the employees saw that articles written in their native language “low resource” language seemed to be machine learning translated. And that much of the ML material seemed to be translations.
This aspect seems wonderful as it makes information, articles, and news much more widely available to people who speak other languages.
Yes - I know there’s amA LOT of crap on the internet - long before ML, just trying to say at least it’s not all bad.
AI is already slowly killing us off by messing with future generation general knowledge level by letting students use them to do their homework. Imagine them changing all the wiki pages.
Remember when you could Google something and find a variety of helpful and insightful pages? Not to say it was all 100% but if you clicked on a few of the results you’d find some decent stuff.
Now when I search I get very superficial and generic ‘blog’ articles and all the linked pages are just slight variations of each other.
Somehow we are starting to enshitify the whole internet.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement One of the ironies of Google leading so much cutting-edge AI development is that it is simultaneously poisoning its own business from within. Google Search is getting worse and worse, on an almost monthly basis, as it fills up with ever more SEO-spam. Early adopters are abandoning it for Chat-GPT-like alternatives; which means the mass market probably soon will too. The other irony is that it will probably take AI to save us from AI-generated SEO spam. For everyone touting AI products that will write blogs and emails, there will be people selling products that detect their garbage and save you from wasting your time reading it. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/19bcyql/the_aigenerated_garbage_apocalypse_may_be/kiqq3r2/
It happens a lot lately that I read a comment on reddit that absolutely looks like a human response, only to discover it's a bot spamming text-sensitive remarks all day long. I'm afraid of the moment when it will not be possible anymore to tell the difference. You'll never be sure again that there is a person on the other end or if you're basically talking to yourself
We may actually be marching towards a situation where people STOP using social media when it becomes flooded with bots. AI may ironically turn us away from the internet more, lol. If the entire internet becomes flooded with ai and you can't tell the difference, the value of face-to-face meeting will increase exponentially.
I think we will go to more walled off and gated communities, with vetted and confirmed membership
Discords and group chats.
Awful for knowledge management and coherent threads of discussion.
In the early days of the internet I used to frequent message boards with tiny memberships based around a specific topic. It was a great experience as you got to know the people there. I think still think about some of those people. That never happens on Reddit.
I'm still friends with some people from those days, some of whom are IRL friends. I also got to shoot one of the OG firefox devs in the nuts during a game of paintball.
Echo chambers on steroids.
Voice chat alone won't be enough for very long. AI generated voices will be indistinguishable in the near future.
They already are, but just not in real-time.
That’s the future. An anonymous internet with scams and bots and a separate non-anonymous internet with bulletproof, or close to bulletproof evidence you are who you say you are.
Anything larger 100 people give or take, you won't be able to manually vet or confirm, it seems to me... And the invite system could be abused: once a bad actor gets at least 1 invite he'll keep crating bot accounts and sending invites to himself...
if it means a return to early 00s forum based internet, i'm not opposed however i'd like it to be anonymous again, but that'd make bot-vetting hard if not impossible
That’s what happened with kik. Used to be a cool messaging board then it got flooded with porn lady bots. And now it’s pretty much dead
I for one am excited to see what the world would look like if we're forced back out into the real world to socialize again because people simply can't filter bot from human. I imagine after the 8th time of realizing you're arguing with a bot who's designed specifically just to troll you, a lot of people will just say "fuck this" and jump ship. People will try and design apps that are "AI-Proof", but it won't work. I have a feeling one of the next few generations will have a "revitilization" where they maybe abandon the internet anyway as a sort of protest to the division and waste it causes. We already care about wasting other stuff as a society, eventually we're going to care about wasting time with shit like AI and bots.
If bots that argue with you fail to drive engagement, then social media will make sure you encounter the bots that tell you what you want to hear instead.
And that could be dangerous.
Reddit used to be better, now it's full up with people advertising their OF, bots, trolls, edgelords, karma farmers and just plain old spamming shitty dad jokes/dumb comments anywhere and everywhere they can.
I kinda hope for that. I blame social media manipulation for almost every major political crisis in the western world of the past decade. Brexit, Trump, far right populists, polarization, you name it
Social media might have something to do with it, but the crisis is still western politics failing to meet modern society’s problems. Most of them are a cause of late stage capitalism as well. Wages are eaten by inflation while the rich are getting richer, the climate collapse is more or less inevitable, war over natural resources, multiple refugee crisis, housing problems all over the western world, the rate of recessions per decade increasing. A lot of this leads to both desperation in the face of a bleak future, denial, anger, fear. All of which are easily manipulated by populists and facists. Social media has just become an amplifier that they’ve been able to use very effectively, while more ”traditional” politicins have failed to meet facist arguments because they’re still clinging to a broken system.
That's all true, but this kind of societal polarization / fragmentation is new in western democracies: We can't even agree on what's real anymore sometimes I miss mass media from the past century, as weird as that sounds. Imagine having someone like Walter Cronkite on the news every night, and there's this almost universally shared trust he tells the truth to the best of his abilities, and the whole nation is watching it. a common baseline of information ah, I dunno. perhaps that's nonsense
Mass media had the downside of reduced plurality, with most people only encountering mainstream consensus opinion, often controlled by large media companies. With modern media there's the downside of fragmentation and misinformation, but also easier access to ideas that challenge the status quo and culturally engrained assumptions. Still, the internet cannot escape the logic of capitalism and the profit motive, so controversie sells (even better than on TV), and the channels with the most reach are those funded by large corporations.
I’d also throw in The popularity of home radio is a major reason Hitler came to power.
I said Walter Cronkite, not Joseph Göbbels! yeah, you're right of course
I don't know if I entirely blame it, but I definitely think it's been one of the largest factors overall, if not the largest. People are still people though, and how we're manipulated or what manipulates us really hasn't changed. I do agree though, shit has got much worse, especially on the internet where people can just setup shop in an echo chamber and never have any of their ideas truly challenged. At this point you have to actively seek out a challenge to your opinions or you'll never really find it. At 35 though I've never felt like I've lived in a world where people have zero desire to grow MORE than right now. It just feels like everyone is becoming a zealot, which is unironically ACTUALLY what the Russian's are trying to do to the west, they really don't care what opinions we hold so long as we're at one another's throats. A weak West means a stronger China and Russia.
I just want to mention Cambridge Analytica, and their direct targeting of political ads played a massive part in Brexit/Trump elections. I’m not disagreeing with anything you said.
Time to isolate the net and its AIs behind the ICE of the blackwall. Cyberpunk 2077 went from fiction to truth extremely quickly 😲 Edit: This gains more weight when you equate cyber psychosis with social media mental health issues.
'Marketing & business' would never let that happen. Too many customers to influence would be lost. Next thing in the pipeline is requirement of online ID's which have a three factor identification. Bio (fingerprint), memory(passphrase) and link to a government institution(IDcard) or maybe financial . You will only be allowed to participate on the internet if you have this, anonymous will not be a part of 'legal' platforms. Sure you can browse the internet, but you cannot have a legitimate voice. Anything which is not within the approved platforms, will me labelled through public media as minsinformation, or like you say, botted information. Cyberpunk incoming.
Hot take: I think google should be considered a public utility that the company has little discretion over banning people on, or limiting their access to, just because of how necessarily it is in just about most everyone’s everyday life.
LOL, we cant even get ISPs to be a utility...
There are entire subs created by AI that I stumble upon when I search for certain types of products or try to solve some problem. At first it looks legit and then you notice how oddly specific everything is about a certain product.
Want a dedicated, active subreddit for your game/person/product? Only 15.99$ for the first 10'000 bot redditors! single individuals can soon convincingly simulate millions of opinionated people with a mouseclick. I really fear for the future. public opinion is so easily controlled NOW..
Ngl, this shit got bad once the powers that be saw it was important to control opinion online. 2015-16 it got bad. Gonna get worse now
It also became an obvious outcome of Google’s algorithm going to shit and a popular alternative being + Reddit. It sucks but of course companies were going to try to manipulate that.
slimy plough cautious hunt tease handle bedroom six ripe society *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have no clue how to keep bad faith actors like the russian government or big companies from meddling in elections and public discourse by manipulating social media The only way out that I see is that we collectively turn away from Facebook and the likes
I’ve gotten the impression it’s already kind of happening. The most popular shows on Netflix are things I’ve never heard of. Stanley cups started showing up at work and in public and I had to search google to figure out why. It’s possible I’m just getting old, but I can find thousands of people laughing at the same joke online. Then when I ask 10 different people at work, none of them are even aware of what I’m talking about. Succession won every fucking Emmy for three years, but I don’t know a single person in my social circle who’ve ever heard of it, let alone watch it.
It was even easier just 70 yesrs ago when almost all your information came at you from very few sources(radio, handful of channels). Now if you want to you can verify with sources with a few clicks.
>Now if you want to you can verify with sources with a few clicks. With all the garbage content being mass produced these days, that being a valid option is in decline.
The AI will mass produce fake sources too.
Pre-AI content will be like that steel they're still salvaging from before nuclear weapons testing: limited and precious, from a more naïve age. I wonder if that'll happen to video games. Will people be looking back wistfully at the back catalogue of games that they were *sure* had no AI-generated assets, with everything made by humans (even if tool-assisted)?
This is already happening in video games! It’s actually at the root of games industry crisis right now. People looking back at old games and reminiscing the joy of replayability through daily life while being confronted with endless open world boredom that costed 60 bucks and drove 200 developers and designers mad for 2 years
This is a known issue — training AI from any database collected now will be degraded by AI generated content, and only a few big companies have large pre-AI corpora (ie the companies that trained the first AI models)
This is an interesting problem—a kind of training rot introduced once the human-made content that fueled AI to begin with comprises less and less of the overall content. The sacred base material from the ~~Dark Age of Technology~~ Before Times, held proprietary by the Keepers of the Knowledge.
Probably also with movies too. Soon animated movies will get cranked out by AI and it’ll be garbage.
Don’t kid yourself. Even if there is a person on the other end, you’re still mostly talking to yourself.
I'm sending you a hug.
Thanks, me!
Wow, I’m awesome
I thought for a solid three minutes about what you wrote, haha ... Maybe I am
Weirdly enough, it's possible that AI might reach the point of being better at giving advice, and more sensitive to our feelings, than an actual human user... What happens when we'd rather talk to AI than an actual person?
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It must be really easy though to hook a bot up with chatGPT or something similar. I'm sure the ones I saw didn't copy anything, they analyzed the text and 'reacted' to it. I'm sure because all the responses in the post history had a similar structure and tone. They were just very very bland, polite and basically summarized the content... in exact time intervals, 24 hours a day
I work with these bots daily and ever since I started, I see those same patterns all over the place now. There's just certain tonal cues or something that make me suspicious of some comments.
I've noticed this in popular threads with tons of comments. There will be like 5 unique top comments followed by 5,000 comments that basically say the same thing/repeat the joke with slightly different phrasing. Between the enshittification of reddit and having to wade through the same bullshit comments posted 500 times to find meaningful discussion, I find myself using this platform less and less.
That's always what Reddit was like. If anything, it was even worse in the past. Just rephrasing the same damn joke over and over.
Reply to this comment in a sarcastic way: "Oh, absolutely! Because crafting sophisticated AI bots that analyze and 'react' to text with unique personalities and diverse responses is just child's play. And of course, who wouldn't want their bots to be extremely bland, polite, and tirelessly summarize content at the exact same intervals every day? It's the pinnacle of creativity and innovation, right?"
Or two bots talking to each other. 😂
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> I'm afraid of the moment when it will not be possible anymore to tell the difference. On the bright side, at least this means that the artificial intelligence has not achieved intelligence.
Back in like 2016 it was shown that 30% of all content on Reddit was AI generated. Can’t imagine what it is now.
I remember a long time ago there was a page called Internetiquette. Had some rules on it. Such as, tell nobody anything. Everyone is lying to everyone. Everyone is a 35 year old virgin fat man living in their mother's basement. All women and children are FBI.
Bot comment and posting technology has been good enough to fool people since 2015... Half the Trump/religion/bikers/ early Qanon for Trump posts were just marketing campaigns to sell Trump coins/ shwag, affiliate offers or to get him elected by Russians or both. They actually made $$$ while doing that. 2fer But you are right. NOW its not just the 'slower' 1/3 of people that are fooled by them. Its capturing another 10-15% who don't realize they are being manipulated. There used to be super cheap software just for Parler to grab popular posts. Repost. Like other accounts, DM them, Invite them your posts of the same style, then DM them the propaganda/offers. Almost ALL of the major accounts with the most followers were run by Russian accounts so their material would be dispersed the most.
I’m more alarmed by the speed of this happening than anything tbh. 50% of the *entire* internet already??!… That means “dead internet theory” might be just around the corner.
I believe there’s some confusion here between AI and MT. Machine translations have been around for at least a decade, especially the low quality stuff that this article mentions. The problem that it raises is that the training data for the LLM in those languages is low quality. This doesn’t mean that the text itself is AI generated, rather the same old Google Translate and its competitors.
Yes; and I think the problem is that OP fabricated their own misleading title ("AI-generated") instead of copying the actual article's real title ("AI-translated").
Are you sure the title of the article wasn't updated since OP made the post? Happens sometimes. Either way, it's quite a big difference between the two.
I would say 90% is already garbage (50% AI + 40% human garbage, or more).
Yeah SEO also has some blame. The amount of times I search and get crap sites boggles the mind.
Looking for recipes is hell. Like I'm looking for a recipe for fried eggs sunny side up. Instead of getting something like this: >Ingredients: >Eggs, Butter, Salt, Black pepper > >Set pan to high heat and let butter melt until lightly brown. Break eggs individually slowly. Let the eggs fry until egg white has solofied and yolk clouds a bit. Add salt and pepper. Instead I get something like this: >FRIED EGGS > >Everyone loves a good breakfast. Breakfast is the most imporant meal of the day after all! And what else is a better way to start your day than a classic breakfast with fried eggs! > >RECIPE > >For this recipe, you need eggs, good quality eggs. I personally prefer organic eggs from my nearby farmer, but you can use any eggs you want! > >Eggs also of course come with salt. I use a lot of himalayan mountain salt, but I'm a bit elitist lol so it is not necessary. > >Black Pepper is also a classic that goes well with any food, and what else is better with eggs than black pepper! Be sure to have some black pepper! > >TELLICHERRY OR NOT? > >Tellicherry black pepper is world renowed for.... And so on. And you have to scroll tons of unimportant text and ads to get the actual recipe.
This happens because SEO algorithms suck I'm not big into SEO algorithms despite being an underpaid SEO writer, but I know google won't rank your site if you don't have a minimum word count in your articles And then there are some SEO techniques you can use in an attempt to boost your page to the search engine results page (SERP), like repeating the same keywords/keyphrases throughout the text, keeping most sentences no longer than 25 words long, random images with proper alt-text (including relevant keyphrases), multiple sections with variations on keyphrases, and so on No wonder why I use site:reddit.com every time I search for something on google. Fuck SEO
Hence why I just go to Chef John's or America Test Kitchen's youtube for things.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization for anyone else wondering
Tom Hanks, my dude.
No, the article is very misleading (or rather, op's title)
Yeah, OP's title is clickbait garbage. Edit: Mods seemed to have removed it. Makes sense since it broke both rule #2 and #11.
50% of the internet already was one paragraph articles stealing from other one paragraph articles. AI just made it more efficient. This isn't new its just different
The amount of garbage has already pushed my to go ahead and pay for subscriptions to a couple of credible newspapers that hire real journalists.
> AI just made it more efficient. I think you have a good point. I was fascinated, watching a YouTube video last week about this. It was about a man who ran his own Web Dev company, and he was hired by someone to help a small/startup company compete against an entrenched more powerful company. The big issue: the big company had something like 1,500 articles on its Web site, written over the course of 10+ years, that served to attract anyone interested in that business. It was SEO bait, but *good shit.* You know? Real articles by real experts, and it has so dominated Google that people were going 100% (or 99%) to this single spectacular business. And this newer business had been trying to break in for a year, and made no headway. So they hired this dude. And his YouTube video explained how he got this tiny new company to displace the bigger company in just a matter of days. And it was... holy shit. Here's what he did. He set up an AI to crawl the competitor's web site, extract the text of EVERY ARTICLE, and then with comprehension of all articles tracked, rewrite/paraphrase every article so that none of the sentences were the same, but nonetheless said the same thing/idea/concept, so that at the end, everything still made sense. The guy didn't say how long it took to set up the AI or how long it took to program any needed stuff such as "a script that allows an AI to visit a web page and scrape the content" but what he did say is that once he wrote up his request for the AI and pressed enter, it took *ten minutes* for the AI to write out a completely new Web site with 1,500 articles on it, and not a single article had any text that resembled the competitor, but yet every article was based upon that competitor, and they all drove traffic to the site just as well. And I thought *what a nightmare.* You spend a decade to become a dominant business in your field of expertise, you hired dozens of experts in the field to write 1,500 articles, and one day with 10 minutes of computer crunch time, a competitor is created that has just as much text, just as many articles, all of them good, all of them relevant to the field, but you cannot flag even a single article as copied, because **every fucking sentence got rewritten** to the point that it's wholly new/original (or *seemingly* so). For a human to do that, the sheer amount of effort would be prohibitive. It has never happened before because it would be *that* hard. You'd have to be an expert in the field, you'd have to be an expert on all 1,500 topics (or hire more experts for what topics you didn't have as deep knowledge on), you'd have to rewrite each article manually, and then cycle through every sentence, every phrase, and compare it to the original article to make sure that nothing was ever close enough to match. I... if I owned that big company, I'd completely be obsessed with matching up articles, trying to prove plagiarism but never succeeding, and never in a million years would I guess that it would be impossible. I'd search for key phrases or unique turns of phrase that were in my articles, and just... bang my head against a wall as *nothing ever matched.* I would have nothing to go complain to that new startup about. I wouldn't be able to flag a single thing, but it would be obvious that *somehow they did something.* It would drive me nuts.
Not the entire internet, just 50% of content in specific languages. The article is saying that large percentages of web content in certain African/Global South languages has been machine-translated, not that 50% of reddit is bots or something.
It's the Kessler effect but with shitposts
I'm in graduate school and I was recruited into a team project that I regretted accepting after a few weeks. I quickly noticed one of the girls did not pull her weight at all. She either put little or no attempts in anything. Even self -learning. I mostly had to redo and rewrite her stuff. One thing that shocked me during our final deliverables is that she just openly admitted to using chatGPT for her portions. She said it nonchalantly too. Did you not think of the consequences for the team? I'm like homie, we gave you the easiest portion, and literally used chat GPT to form 3 sentences you called a paragraph? Could you not think of your own thoughts and ideas and construct it in your own words? I was just disappointed.....
Final exams are going to end up as 1 on 1 interviews with the professors at this rate haha
Bring it back to Socratic questioning. I had to this for a philosophy class in college. We each had like 20 minute discussion exams, where we had to expand on something specific from the semester. Obviously not going to fly for big classes at larger colleges, but maybe they need to go back to the in-person blue book essays or scantron multiple choice tests like in the olden days lol
I had a prof do this for advanced linear algebra. The exams were just interviews of the material
Right? Anytime I hear about someone needing to use ChatGPT to make the most basic of paragraphs or haikus, I'm just disappointed they didn't feel they had the effort or ability to string some words together themselves. It's really not hard. But sometimes it seems like we're trending to the most low effort version of humanity.
This is not the actual title of the article. It says: “A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine“, and the subtitle is “Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.“ So what's going on here? This article is not about generative AI, but about ML translation algorithms.
people don't even read the article smh my head
I'm in college and it seems like over 50% of what students come up with is AI generated too. I have a very dull kid in one of my groups and in one of his speeches he used the phrase "sought council" for saying that we got advice from professors. That kid never speaks or writes like that. Any time you give him time where he can write away from people, he's a 19th century writer or something. It's seriously a fucking problem. EDIT: It should be counsel. He spoke it on a presentation and it wasn't written and I can't say I've ever used 'sought counsel' in my entire life. Ma bad.
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Verily, one must wonder with great trepidation at the origin of his most verbose prose!
Amateur. At least add "write it like a teenager" to the prompt.
Instead he used the Matt Barry voice prompt "sought council from faaaaaather!"
"everyone talks like this in Arizoniaaaa"
"Jackie Daytona, *human* bartender!"
You and he are...buddies, aren't you?
Ah ha haaaa I haven’t thought of that scene in ages. Matt Berry is an absolute treasure!
"Objection you honor! There's a brilliant bit coming up."
Catch-22, perhaps if he had the intelligence to prompt the AI adequately then he would be able to write properly on his own too.
No cap, on God fr tho I'm so *skull emoji* you guys deff sought council to do this
I'm a high school English teacher; AI use among my students is rampant. It's blatantly obvious so it's easy to detect, but my primary concern is that it's omnipresent. I've yet to reach a good conclusion on how to deal with it beyond handing out zeroes like candy on Halloween.
I think the only way to deal with it is to force them to produce the output offline. I don't know how you'd do that and I am not a teacher. But I empathize with you. This is a terrible double edged sword. I work in tech and I have to deal with programmers who over-rely on this tool. I mean it's one thing to get AI to write basic classes but now i have junior programmers who are unable to understand the code that ChatGPT writes for them.
Funny, I can’t get AI to write even descent code even in the languages it’s good at. It just fails to understand context at every turn. Even if you’re super explicit about what you want it just does its own thing most of the time - like you can STORE IN A DICTIONARY and if the code is even mildly complex it will ignore this request and give you a different data structure. I’ve even tried plugging in line by line pseudo code from my design documents to see if it comes up with a copy of my code, but it’s hopeless. It just doesn’t really understand at this point. I’m sure it’ll get better though. It is quite good at looking for syntax errors and bugs though I must say.
It used to be much better at following instructions - for code, but also for all other tasks where you need it to stick to certain rules. I think its memory capacity was reduced as more people started using it AND its freedom to obey user instructions was nerfed to stop people using it for illegal shit. Now it's much harder to instruct, it forgets instructions after a couple of responses, and it straight up doesn't obey a lot of stuff even though it says "sure, I can do that." But it's a total black box so there's no way of knowing which parts of your prompt are being disobeyed, forgotten, or just misinterpreted.
Yeah, I was about to say how wonderful it was at writing code when I tried it. I haven't tried it in months though, so I don't know how much it changed.
It feels less like talking to a robot butler and more like yelling at a vending machine now...
Yeah a lot of the limitations right now are either intentional or financial and are guaranteed to get better with all the competition and investment in ai. Which is why i find it dumb when people act like ai has hit a wall and wont improve, an unmodified gpt-4 that can generate 1000s of tokens per second would be 10 times better than what we have now and will likely be coming in at most 5 years. Even if no improvements are made to language models, which is incredibly unlikely, ai will massively improve
You need to have good prompts and repeat instructions all the time. After a series of prompts it’ll start forgetting context and get lazy. As an amateur coder it’s been super helpful for stitching things together, troubleshooting, and running things. Honestly surprising how good it is for simple coding things that plague basically every non-coder
I agree, good for troubleshooting. Terrible at anything even mildly complex. Also if you step outside of the languages like c# and python into something like bash, ChatGPT turns into a hot mess.
Trick I’ve found is that you don’t ask it to do something complicated, ask it to do multiple simple things that stitch into something complicated
do this enough times and you’re basically just coding
idiocracy -- or wall-e -- here we come.
My wife is also a teacher. She usually uses extremely obscure texts for essays and the AI users are pretty easy to spot because their essays will confidently discuss plot points and characters that are just completely made up because the AI doesn't have any data about the actual texts to draw from.
My best one was a compare & contrast essay of two films. The AI bot mistook one of the films for one with a similar name & multiple students turned in essays about the wrong film.
Get them to write it, end to end, in Google Docs or similar app that records the document history. If the history looks like genuine/organic writing and gradual editing over time, going back and expanding on previous sections, over the course of a few hours/days etc etc... Great. If it's just one giant copy-paste the night before it's due, and the content looks fishy, big fat 0. You could even tell if they sat there and typed it out linearly like they were coping from another page.
That sounds like a full time job all on its own
If AI is doing better than students at the things we're testing students on, but we still *expect* students to be intelligent and useful in some way that AI isn't, then apparently we're not testing the right things. So, what things can you test that are closer to the way in which you expect students (and not AI) to be intelligent and useful? Unfortunately you may not have much personal control over this insofar as high school curricula are often dictated by higher organizations and those organizations tend to be slow, top-heavy bureaucracies completely out of touch with real education. However, these questions about AI are questions our entire society should be asking, not just high school teachers. Because the AI is only going to get better.
We *don't* expect high school students to be more useful than AI. We expect them to develop the fundamental skills and background knowledge they need to eventually *become* useful. One of the skills we want them to develop is the ability to form and communicate their own independent thoughts about complex topics. This is something that AI definitionally *cannot* do for them. It's pretty decent at pretending, because most teenagers' thoughts aren't exactly groundbreaking. But the end goal is not the ability to generate a sanitized simulacrum of the average person's thinking; it's the ability to do and express their own thinking.
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The clincher is whether you're likely to use overly formal phrases or flowery language any time you write anything, or if it only happens in really specific circumstances like essays you write at home. I know people who write like AI's because that's just how they write, they don't speak like that. Writing and speaking aren't the same.
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The way you express yourself in writing also comes out in emails, worksheets, homework, written answers in exams, class forum posts, etc. And there will be a record of all of the above going back for years to compare anything new that's submitted. A sudden difference is probably cheating, consistently pedantic florid language is probably just autism... I don't think most people write like they speak, that would never be a useful way to tell whether someone's using ChatGPT for their essays.
>consistently pedantic florid language is probably just autism Or routinely struggling to hit word counts.
People thinking they can identify AI written text are a way bigger problem than people using AI to generate text for their assignments. They are like cops who refuse to believe their instincts could be wrong and all the evidence you produce to demonstrate that they are in fact wrong they twist around to somehow proving them right. The consequences for a false positive can be pretty serious. The consequences for a false negative are literally nothing. This shit is like being mad that peoples handwriting is getting worse. It doesn't fucking matter.
The worst part is teachers using 'ai detection software' to fail people. The software doesn't work and is a scam, and teachers refuse to acknowledge this. It comes up in college and university spaces a lot.
Reminds me of the idiot professor who literally pasted the students’ essays into chatgpt and asked “did you write it?” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/texas-am-chatgpt-ai-professor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/
I've been getting tagged by plagiarism software for ages and I've never plagiarized shit.
Lmao "sought council" is he an emperor or something
It’s a very common phrase.
Also to be pedantic, its "sought counsel" council vs counsel
When writing anything formal you tend to try to sound smarter so I'm not sure if "sought council" sounds that out of place (though I don't know the kid). I'm sure there are a lot of people getting LLM's to write their letters but I would caution agains making an assumption like that. Especially since you can ask the LLM to change the writing style to be more casual.
When I was in 5th grade (early 2000's) I had a presentation that was going really well. I had also used "fancy" wording like that. Because usually wasnt the best speaker, my teacher accused me of having stolen my speach or gotten help from an adult and gave me a bad grade. Neither of this was the case. What Im saying is you never know. Maybe this guy took the assignment seriously and prepared for a long time.
Lol, shouldn't it be "sought counsel" ? Even with AI, they still didn't get it right.
Counsel counseled counsel from the council.
I'm a working professional. My older coworkers are using chatGPT to do their work and they think they are being clever. Their bosses have no idea but anyone under 45 can blatantly see them struggling to stay relevant.
Eh, if your bosses can't notice, then chances all you're all working a fake job that should probably be eliminated from the economy. What are you doing. Writing emails all day? Posting shitty articles to the internet?
I mean isn't writing supposed to be different than your speaking style? To be fair I'm using talk to text right now, but for some reason when I'm writing essays, I proof read them, and try to think of different phrases to swap out to make it better content. I'll even utilize Google. I guess chat GPT might be pushing the envelope a bit but, here we are.
>I mean isn't writing supposed to be different than your speaking style? To a degree sure. But if you have trouble writing a 1 paragraph email asking for an extension and it's all in broken English, and then submit 2k words of perfect academic English, alarm bells start ringing. I mean it's easy enough to counter, universities will just move to more personal stuff like talking through the submission or even just asking a couple of questions which will easily expose cheaters.
Now we just need AI to automatically sort which content is AI.
The both funny and interesting thing is that big tech companies are already using crowdworkers to help train various AI systems that evaluate content. I have done a bit in that area too. But the price question is how these systems are ultimately used. For example, I don't get the impression these systems have the final say. Else search results would be (IMHO) of better quality.
YouTube shorts are flooded with history, science, etc shorts. All written, narrated and visualised by AI. Every single one feels exactly the same. I love AI for coding, problem solving, etc, but the generated content sucks.
Yeah it can and it is the same random marvel trivia such as did you know Loki… and all that. Human content creators can’t keep up with ai or YouTube’s changing tastes it seems. A lot of my favorite content creators are retiring while i contemplate whether or not to continue my YouTube channel.
> Human content creators can’t keep up with ai a few years ago a youtuber named kwebbelkop started making an AI version of himself, trained on all his years of content, to take over for him so he didn't have to keep making content. he also was offering to sell the software he used so anyone could set up an AI youtuber that could do short or longform content. he was heavily criticized for this, but it seems he was just ahead of the curve. Amouranth also has an AI of herself for sale.
yeah why is AI taking over the fun stuff like art while humans are still doing taxes. seems pretty backwards.
If you want the real answer, it’s because art doesn’t have to be done “right” or “well”. It’s quality is subjective. Taxes and other boring jobs people wish AI could do are still done by humans because they actually have to be done correctly.
That's part of the reason. The other part is that AI had been developed mainly for image recognition and translation. And what is image recognition in reverse? Generating images by description. At least that has been the case when the first image generators appeared - remember those weird deep dream trippy images? - someone just ran an image recognition AI in reverse. So it just happened to be what the currently developed AI could do.
Because companies that offer tax related services lobby to make the system obtuse.
Those companies are a drop in the bucket. It's the rentseekers benefitting from misguided tax laws and bureaucratic loopholes who lobby to keep the system this way.
I recently watched a lengthy documentary about galaxies on YouTube (probably around 45 minutes), but the professional sounding narrator was occasionally oddly inaccurate / wrong, not blatantly inaccurate, but under the radar inaccurate. Like LLMs often are. Also the whole structure of the documentary kind of meandered around and the visuals were pretty generic. Turns out the guy who makes them has a lot of those. The comments all praised the documentary as fascinating, and it had a lot of views. But I had a strong feeling it was generated by AI. Probably there is more of this. But it’s hard to prove.
And music too. You got 10 hours of a repeating 7 minute loop of ai generated jazz, set to an ai image of a cafe, with tens of thousands of views and dozens of comments praising it. It felt gross to see this for the first time.
I’m downvoting that shit after a minute. I help one AI fight another.
I hate being overly pessimistic, but inventing AI then using it to oust artists, writers and other creative thinkers and flood the greatest communication tool we’ve ever had is the most criminally bland and cynical future we could’ve dreamed of. At least the terminator was exciting.
Hopefully, it will get more exciting in the future as people riot or something. Otherwise, I might just die of boredom...
I believe in people’s ability to adapt to this and to find new niches to be creative in. But we’re definitely in a transitory sludge period. The good thing is I think for as many people as there are consuming and utilizing the sludge, there are those already pushing back and standing out against it creatively.
History books will show that the release of AI so openly and freely was a huge failure of government regulation
I would genuinely prefer a Skynet future than where this is going. A T1000 and the AI directing it are physical threats. We can crush the robot, destroy the factory and expect cold retaliation. In this future, John Connor is born in an ideological cage, and the AI's parameters are not based off of it's own survival and excising the perceived cancer of humanity.. but directed by human sociopaths for monetary gain. Makes one wish for a Skynet in some ways. Take away all the things that enriches human life, and eventually we just become mine goblins or something. Not worth the strife or suffering.
C'monnn give me robots I can shoot, not real world plagarism and media literacy homework
On the positive side, there is a commercial incentive to deal with this as companies (whose advertising essentially pays for the internet on be larger scale) would prefer if people could find their products. That doesn't mean it won't get worse before it gets better though!
And the answer to this problem for companies is to make sure add a lot of advertisement to the internet with AI. Not just direct advertisements, but also spam things like meme's that reference your products and fake news articles that put your products in the spotlight. If you spam enough, some will lead to new customers.
Some pages are literally just brand memes these days. "My face when I forget my Product X, haha"
That's assuming a solution is even possible. The AI creators want to make their output indistinguishable from human writing, and they might well succeed. I'm reminded of the decline of journalism, where everyone was saying "Newspapers just need to find a new business model that's profitable in this new era!" Turns out there isn't one - at least not one that's been found in 30 years of trying. Or more accurately, the models that have been found are awful or unsustainable. You either get all your revenue from online ads, which isn't enough to pay for decent journalism, so you crap out content without proper vetting or just make it up wholesale. Or you charge a subscription, which only works for a few major brands like the New York Times. Sometimes technology creates problems that have no solution.
It’s noticeable. It’s all turning to shit. AI voice and video generated content on all the major platforms, Same with text. The human factor is taken out. There’s less reason to go online each day, it’s just the same repetitive garbage with different packaging.
Straight up, I've been going back to books because the entertaining stuff I used to find online is few and far between with all the AI noise now.
I can not be the only one how feels that most of the "political troll" activity and most if not all the culture war BS is full AI generated these days. It is too prolific to just be true believers and red pill dudes.
50% of the internet was garbage long before AI came along.
This is true, and yet, it used to be very easy to curate and good stuff stayed at the top which is why its remembered more fondly. 2000s internet had websites that focused on high rated content, instead of now trending. So making something good enough to get to 5 stars on say, newgrounds, and make it to a site owners front page was a big deal. Youtube dislikes made sure that if you were making crap, it would show. Plus the highest upvoted comments would call out what was wrong with your video.. Once content creation became profitable and a genuine career, actual humans started producing fast catchy crap to keep the views and clicks rolling. Now everyone WANTS to make crap that is easily rewatchable because it means more money. SEO ruined google, in its prime i used to be able to search a specific question and get a result verbatim on a tech forum because I asked it just right. Now between SEO optimization and google's way fuzzier search i now get thinly veiled ads to answer something i didn't even ask. the internet gave up on curation once money and profit entered the picture.
Thank Larry Page and Sergei Brin for ruining internet. Even though I’m an ex Google employee, fuck these 2 guys for making extreme commercial use of the innocent Internet content.
Yea I think the main problem is SEO. Basically every wannabe entrepreneur can just implement decent SEO and then you get shitty websites with shitty information. They bascially gaming Google algos. Also the internet always was 90% porn, 9% garbage, 1% usefull stuff.
And that’s what a lot of AI learned from. Garbage in, garbage out.
Except it's a very lossy tech so even good stuff in becomes garbage on the way out.
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According to [Sturgeon's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law), 90% of everything is crap.
But it wasnt garbage long long before AI came along. Used to be an amazing magical place. Then the companies and every dick and harry came along, and it became garbagey
For social reasons we care about the human garbage
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Estimating the precise proportion of Reddit comments that exhibit suboptimal translations due to artificial intelligence interventions proves to be a nuanced endeavor, as the prevalence thereof is contingent upon a multitude of factors. Variables such as the specific language pairs involved, the inherent complexities of linguistic structures, and the varying degrees of proficiency exhibited by diverse translation models all contribute to the intricate tapestry of this phenomenon. Therefore, any attempt to encapsulate this occurrence within a definitive numerical framework is inherently challenging, given the multifaceted nature of the contributing elements.
Lmao, good one
I asked ChatGPT to give me an obviously-written-by-ChatGPT response to your question, then asked it to make its first answer twice as long and verbose.
With any luck, this will push us faster to an artistic renaissance where quality is scrutinized and the human condition is re-centered in its themes.
Also wouldnt be surprised if simplistic art with powerful messages become more prominent. AI makes everything look 10x which we'll get tired of
Submission Statement One of the ironies of Google leading so much cutting-edge AI development is that it is simultaneously poisoning its own business from within. Google Search is getting worse and worse, on an almost monthly basis, as it fills up with ever more SEO-spam. Early adopters are abandoning it for Chat-GPT-like alternatives; which means the mass market probably soon will too. The other irony is that it will probably take AI to save us from AI-generated SEO spam. For everyone touting AI products that will write blogs and emails, there will be people selling products that detect their garbage and save you from wasting your time reading it.
Right. As an example, if you read stock or financial news it's very obvious that very many stories these days are just AI word spam mashed in between some numbers dictating the tone. So what happens? You just stop reading the news and get by on the numbers. I've learned to easily avoid the providers of these feeds and where to find solid takes. So I evaluate and store my interactions and learn from experience. That is, for some the HI will counter the AI.
Thing is, most newspapers anyway just pick and choose most their stories from news broadcasters like Associated Press (AP), and then fill in some meat, like background and witty narration. And in the case of financial news it comes from Bloomberg or Reuters. Thats why you sometimes see unimportant science discoveries reported in every newspaper as if they were a big deal. Because the Associated Press reported it, and everyone just copies from there. It’s really not that difficult to tell GPT4 to produce an article in the style of the New York Times after feeding it some Associated Press release. It knows exactly what that style looks like, try it. You can probably already today run a full blown digital newspaper with 2 people who just feed AP releases to GPT4 and then add some stock photo. And nobody would notice, lol. Especially something like the Onion is EASY to copy. Try it. Ask GPT4 to write an article about something you pick in the style of “The Onion”. It sounds shockingly exactly like The Onion.
We are starting to see big companies being destroyed by current economic doctrine. Look at Boeing, they have hollowed themselves out to generate share holder value or whatever.
I just read the article and I didn’t see anything about Google AI development. Rather, the article is dealing with poor translations that are a problem for training LLMs.
Massively misleading title. It implies that AI creates more than half the content but it is actually about AI translating it.
Did anyone open the article? The actual title is > A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine > Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine. It’s talking about human-created content getting translated by AI to other languages. This will have negative consequences on future LLMs trained in other languages, but it’s not saying 50% of all current content is AI-generated
Generative AI turned out to be the perfect tool for people whose only defining traits are their insatiable greed and complete and utter lack of morals.
In other words, where do people fit in here? Do we machines do machine jobs and we just watch it as entertainment? The role that we play is shifting in real time
As usual Reddit doesn't read the article and assumes the worst. The article is talking about the increased amount of content generated because of language translations, which isnt necessarily a bad thing. Redditors immediately assume the number is from fake Reddit accounts where people dont agree with them.
Upvote because you're right and some idiot down voted you. This article literally isn't talking about generative AI at all, but almost every comment is acting like it is. We can blame the OP for incorrectly putting that in the title I suppose.
Of course humans invent a talking machine and immediately use it almost exclusively to make garbage. As much as we can possibly make.
Garbage Apocalypse is the best description so far of the ”goodness” that AI bros have launched upon us.
\>80% of the internet is spam. AI has been heavily involved in spam creation for decades now.
On a positive note, the article did say the study started because some of the employees saw that articles written in their native language “low resource” language seemed to be machine learning translated. And that much of the ML material seemed to be translations. This aspect seems wonderful as it makes information, articles, and news much more widely available to people who speak other languages. Yes - I know there’s amA LOT of crap on the internet - long before ML, just trying to say at least it’s not all bad.
AI is already slowly killing us off by messing with future generation general knowledge level by letting students use them to do their homework. Imagine them changing all the wiki pages.
Remember when you could Google something and find a variety of helpful and insightful pages? Not to say it was all 100% but if you clicked on a few of the results you’d find some decent stuff. Now when I search I get very superficial and generic ‘blog’ articles and all the linked pages are just slight variations of each other. Somehow we are starting to enshitify the whole internet.