Internet is already full of bullshit SEO content. Sometimes written by humans, and quite often by bots. For years now. What’s coming is an arms race between different content generating AIs and search/answer AIs.
One of two things will be true. Either:
- AIs can successfully train on AI-generated content OR
- AIs will need human-generated content to improve
If it’s 2, then we’ll have to develop AI that detects AI-generated content. But if you have the machine that can detect whether content is in the category that helps it improve, then you have an algorithm for generating content that helps it improve.
So either 1 is true, or AI will plateau, or it will be trained only on networks where confirmed humans are the only ones participating.
I have to say that I feel that currently the most consumed contents in the Internet are mostly human-written; and my proof is actually that it is now when the tendency is clearly changing. I have stumbled upon a few AI-generated articles already in the past few months, without looking for them specifically. You could tell because it sometimes focuses on weird details, or even I have seen l some kind of
as an AI, I do not have an opinion on the subject […]
which is so funny when you see it.
So, yeah, it is definitely starting to happen, and in the next few years I wouldn’t be surprised if 30 to 50 % of articles are just AI blorbs built for clicks.
How to avoid this? We can’t. The only way would be to shut down the Internet, forbid computers and go back to a simpler life. And that, for many reasons will not happen unless some world-class destruction event happens.
We actually can prevent it. We will go back to human-curated websites, and the links to those websites will also be maintained by humans.
This is how the early web used to work in the 90s and early 00s. We will see a resurgence of things like portals, directories (like the Mozilla Directory project — DMOZ), webrings, and last but not least actual journalism.
Unless Google manages to find a way to tell AI content from human they will become irrelevant overnight because Search is 90% of their revenue. This will kill other search engines too, but will also remove Google strangle-hold on browsers.
This also means we’ll finally get to use interesting technologies that Google currently suppresses by refusing to implement them, like micro-payments. MP are an alternative to ads that was proposed a long time ago but never allowed browser support.
MP are a way to pay very small sums (a cent or a fraction of a cent) when you visit a webpage, and to make it as painless as possible for both the visitor and the website. It adds up to the same earnings for websites but introduces human oversight (you decide if the page you want to visit is worth that fraction of a cent) and most importantly gets rid of the ad plague.
I find this very much like a dream that will… stay a dream. Who defines human-curated websites or true journalism if I don’t even really know you are an AI bot?
Also, who says people will not like AI content? Because the world will still be full of the same people who buy Apple products and piss on “green bubble” people.
The problem is that this assumes there is a way to tell the difference between AI generated and human generated.
Very soon this may be practically speaking impossible. Then what? You make a human board and some person makes a chatbot that you can’t differentiate from a human.
We are screwed - there may be some ways with verification… but is that practical at scale? Would websites require users to install Spyware that watches your Webcam in order to confirm you’re not a bot?
And what if a bot could just generate a video feed to trick the website?
Only private and strict groups will remain AI-free… and if they get too big they won’t work anymore
That’s going by a different metric though. It’s not claiming 47% of news articles or social media posts are by bots. It’s talking about cyberattacks, not social media posts.
I don’t think there are any solid numbers on human-presenting bot activity on social media. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised though, especially in political forums.
It’s even worse than that:
Can anyone give an actual reason for downvoting this?
I find it odd that it’s multiple times reinforced that its a conspiracy theory, even unprompted. Like its happening, it’s just by what degree would we consider the internet “dead”.
That’s been the meta for awhile. Anyone with a stake in something vehemently tries to discredit anyone’s skepticism by calling them a conspiracy theorist. Manipulating high-traffic social media with bots likely pays well.
They measured the bot activity in 2022 and foud it was over 47% and rising. How anyone could call this a conspiracy theory is wild to me.
Okay but that’s not % of interactions, it’s amount of traffic which a single days data scraper is hundreds of people, no?
Get a new Google. Search engines are the gateway to the internet. It would be nice if the door wasn’t a wall of ads.
I’ve been experimenting with Kagi recently. At first I thought it was good but then I was searching for a model number for some niche Honda motor and Kagi wasn’t any help. Neither was Duckduckgo
Google found it for me, though.
Having said that, I recently switched to Duckduckgo as my main search engine although I’m open to suggestions.
I agree that we need to get off of Google just because like you said - they are the gatekeepers. I don’t trust a large company with that, much less Google
You should try searx, it is a meta search engine that checks some search engines (like google or DDG) and offers you the best results.
Check out the ones near you and save that page should the one you use go down.
I’ve been playing around with kagi and am actually super impressed with the search results for finding info about a product to purchase. Google results were full of your-search-term-best-reviews.com SEO crap but kagi found info that didn’t pop up even several pages into google search. So it might be how popular/commercial the search term is and google is still better at finding obscure niche things.
Ya I really like how they remove all the “listicles” top 10 BS list pages that are all just SEO content farms
I think for general things Kagi is great. I looked up some stuff about WW2 and it brought up great articles. The AI summary thing is really cool, although I think they just use the ChatGPT api.
Ultimately I stopped using after my trial because if I’m going to pay for a search engine I want it to be at least on parity with the free options
SearX
SearX
Ironically, platforms like Twitter & Reddit are doing this already to some extent by paywalling APIs
Honestly, I don’t know think we can. Techbro ghouls with misguided VC funding will make it happen if it’s profitable enough or even if it just seems like it will be profitable.
Probably the easiest way to avoid it is to simply rename it to something less scary sounding. Maybe something like Alive Enhanced Rich Content Internet Theory for Human People! See, not a problem now.
Also maybe we should reread Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It has a storyline about a guy who finds out he is the only actual real person on earth. Everyone else are robots. And he wants to know why.
I recently started getting into audiobooks, and I guess I have a new one to add to my to-listen list.
As long as there’s a profit motive for generating content there isn’t anything that can be done.
The profit motive seems like the key: In the end online activity still has roots in physical hardware that requires resources which need to be provided by someone. And that someone will have an incentive to prune wasteful activity.
I’m worried that the costs of the physical hardware are trivial compared to the amount of money that content farming etc pulls in, so it’s just an expense that scales with the amount of junk content they produce.
Participate in the internet.
That’s how you keep it from being the dead internet (which is defined as an internet in which nobody is participating).
I’ve always wondered if anything on the internet is even real. I mean I don’t even know if everyone else is real. Maybe it’s just me and everything else is a simulation. Maybe this is a prison of some sort and every negative event is just part of the punishment.
This simulation was created to be a utopia for you, 001100 010010. I guess we need to reset again for the 1,239,726 time.
For a permanent solution, it will to an extent require us to give up a level of anonymity. Whether it’s linking a discussion with a real life meetup… like this (NSFW warning)
or some sort of government tracking system.
When nobody knows whether you are a dog posting on the internet, or a robot or a human, mitigations like Captcha and challenge questions only will slow AI down but can’t hold it off forever.
It doesn’t help that on Reddit (where there are/were a lot of interacting users), the top voted discussion is often the same tired memes/puns. That’s a handicap to allow AI to better imitate human users.
Yes, this is the solution. Each user needs to know a certain critical number of other users in person who they can trust (and trust that they won’t lie about bots, like u/spez) in order for there to be a mesh of trust where you can verify if any user is human in a max of 6 hops.
tl;dr: if you have no real-life friends…it’s all bots :P
That sounds like the PGP Web of Trust, which has been in use for a long time and provides cryptographic signatures and encryption, particularly (but not only) for email.
BOT-Albert is my oldest friend.
Don’t be important.
I feel like it already is the reality, and has been for almost 20 years now.
“Web 2.0”, what we now call “social media”, was the death knell.
