[HN Gopher] G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despit...
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G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics
Author : Analemma_
Score : 95 points
Date : 2023-07-18 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| schnable wrote:
| That doesn't sound very much like a plan. What an exhausting
| style of rhetoric.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| My understanding of the algorithm is that Google uses UX metrics
| to stack rank content. I believe this because I focus on creating
| the most relevant & most valuable page of content Google could
| show for the keywords I want to rank for, and skip all of the
| backlinks and technical BS stuff.
|
| This strategy of avoiding backlinks and technical BS & focus 100%
| on content quality has worked really well for me.
|
| If you think about it, Google has all of the data to do this:
|
| - Android
|
| - Chrome
|
| - Google Analytics
|
| All of the big platforms use UX metrics to influence reach -
| LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, even YouTube uses UX
| metrics to influence reach, why not Google search?
|
| It seems like people using AI see some limited amount of success,
| for some limited amount of time before losing their rankings.
|
| If I was Google, I would let people think their AI content is
| working for a little bit, then de-index their website to
| demotivate + scare webmasters away from using AI.
| rchaud wrote:
| As someone who avoided the Twitter firehose like the plague, I've
| noticed the slow, then rapid decline of traditional 'websites'
| over the past decade as they succumbed to SEO keyword
| optimization and driving traffic from social networks. .
|
| Due to the incentives of the players involved, there is no
| solution that would lead to a neater, less blogspam-infested
| internet. The concept of a 'website' as Tim Berners Lee and the
| early netizens understood it, is commpletely outdated.
|
| The second we were able to add an Adsense script or Paypal button
| or Amazon affiliate link, the fundamental motivation for building
| websites changed. The artisanal personal websites of yore aren't
| coming back. People who used to build those have long since moved
| into less crowded, less commercialized territories where their
| work might actually be seen.
|
| If you don't want to get angry when looking up a recipe online,
| buy a recipe book. Everything good on the internet is already
| paywalled anyway.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| You're on this site talking to generally smart people who are
| not paying for the privilege of using this site complaining
| that everything good on the internet is already paywalled.
|
| If you don't know how to find what you're looking for, just
| ask. Paywalls aren't a real thing that have to be obeyed, nor
| is there ever only one spigot for any digital fountain.
| unforeseen9991 wrote:
| I have yet to find a paywall that has stopped me from
| reaching the content within a click or two of one of my
| browser extensions.
| boesboes wrote:
| It's the natural evolution of content marketing & SEO. I work at
| an IT company where we have ~15 ppl building and managing a few
| SaaS apps for the travel industry, and we have 50-60 ppl doing
| marketing as a service for our customers.
|
| They write page after page of content that barely get read. It
| all just exists to make the google bot happy. And that works.
| They bring in more customers & revenue apparently. (honestly, I
| wouldn't be surprised if it's all wasted and the added revenue is
| due to the better website and backoffice, but what do i know.)
|
| So it seems only natural to have AI generate that content for the
| Google bot and stop wasting all this effort. Obviously I can't
| prove nobody reads this content, but seriously.. A landing page
| about hot-tubs and how cool it is to have one in your holiday
| home? Doubt that anyone actually reads that..
|
| EDIT: I guess my point is also: it's already flooded with crap,
| just look at al the blog spam for things like 'how to start
| nginx'
| sshine wrote:
| 1. Good old days, humans talk to humans. 2. Someone
| invents a bot, humans talk to bots. 3. Someone invents
| another bot, bots talk to bots.
|
| This is the story of SEO, banner ads, stock trading, consumer
| pricing.
|
| There are probably many other cases.
|
| The tech help spam: initially an attempt for a bot to talk to a
| human, but with LLMs crawling search results and aggregating
| answers, your answer to "how to start nginx" becomes the output
| of bot-bot interaction: an average of several generated answers
| (some initially and occasionally by humans).
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Those 60 people can have a new job: fact checking the lies that
| the new ais produce
| echelon wrote:
| They can become AI-empowered content creators. Their own
| Miyazakis, Scorseses, and Eilishes. [1]
|
| [1] This isn't sarcasm. I think that's the world we're headed
| to. Hundreds of thousands of little creators serving their
| own unique niches. A world without Disney.
| gwright wrote:
| I think it confuses things immensely to anthropomorphize
| large language models. LLMs don't lie or tell the truth they
| just spit out text that is in alignment with the training
| model. Don't give them agency they don't have.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| This is to fight back against the term "hallucinate" that
| everyone on here is using
| gwright wrote:
| That is an interesting point. I'm not sure why, but
| "hallucinate" doesn't bother me as much as "lie". Maybe
| it is because of all the ancillary baggage that "lie" has
| related to our current culture wars (lies,
| misinformation, disinformation, gaslighting, etc.)
|
| I just asked (another anthropomorphic verb) ChatGPT for a
| better word and it came up with "fabricate".
|
| > The term "fabricate" could be used to describe AI's
| tendency to generate fictitious information. This term
| has less anthropomorphic connotations than "hallucinate"
| and directly refers to the creation or construction of
| something, which could be a suitable representation for
| what an AI system does when it generates false data.
| Other alternatives could be "synthesize" or "generate,"
| depending on the specific context.
| Karellen wrote:
| I always thought that "confabulate" would have been the
| best word to describe what LLMs do:
|
| > Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is
| no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the
| information is false. Although individuals can present
| blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem
| to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively
| normal.
|
| > Can include autobiographical and non-personal
| information, such as historical facts, fairy-tales, or
| other aspects of semantic memory.
|
| > The account can be fantastic or coherent.
|
| > Both the premise and the details of the account can be
| false.
|
| > The account is usually drawn from the patient's memory
| of actual experiences, including past and current
| thoughts.
|
| > The patient is unaware of the accounts' distortions or
| inappropriateness, and is not concerned when errors are
| pointed out.
|
| > There is no hidden motivation behind the account.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Description
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Fabricate" has the same problem as "lie" and
| "hallucinate". All of those terms imply a cognition that
| isn't actually happening.
|
| I think the best way to refer to these things is the more
| accurate "error". The LLM isn't lying, it's in error.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It doesn't. Hallucination in this context means 'an
| unfounded or mistaken impression or notion'.
|
| There's one side of the current zeitgeist that over-
| anthropomorphizes these models. But there's another side
| that seems to be terrified that LLMs could be anything
| resembling intelligent
|
| Both sides are pretty emotion over facts though. A lot of
| their "human-like" behavior is emergent from things that
| don't work the same way in a humans... but we also don't
| understand cognition enough to then say there's _no_
| overlap between what LLMs are doing and what some part of
| our own thought process is like. If anything we have more
| studies that imply the opposite going back decades: https
| ://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09266..
| .
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It doesn't. Hallucination in this context means 'an
| unfounded or mistaken impression or notion'.
|
| Correct. Which, as near as I can tell, isn't the correct
| characterization of what's happening with LLMs.
|
| > But there's another side that seems to be terrified
| that LLMs could be anything resembling intelligent
|
| I certainly have no such fear. I say that only to
| indicate that my biases are not of that sort.
| homami wrote:
| I don't lie either. I just spit out words that is in
| alignment with my mental model for optimizing my future.
| what-wait wrote:
| Quoting someone on the internet, saying: 'They are just
| liquidating their assets.'
|
| Their lies are simple: they rule us.
|
| (-;
| ars wrote:
| Are you aware that what you are saying is not true?
|
| If you are aware then it's a "Lie". If you are not aware
| then it's a "Mistake".
|
| LLM's are not aware, so saying "lie" is not correct.
| hdior wrote:
| [dead]
| gwright wrote:
| Maybe you are a large language model?
| svaha1728 wrote:
| "First you destroy those who create values. Then you
| destroy those who know what the values are...
|
| But real barbarism begins when no one can any longer
| judge or know that what one does is barbaric." -- Ryszard
| Kapuscinski
| [deleted]
| circuit10 wrote:
| It's a reasonable way to describe it. LLMs are designed to
| talk like humans so using human terms to describe them
| works quite well
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes and when you're using "serverless" services there are
| actually servers running somewhere. At this point, it's not
| insightful for someone to mention either on HN.
| verisimi wrote:
| Absolutely. The lie is in providing the false framework, or
| a framework with fakery embedded. If the lie is accepted at
| the framework level, individuals will believe themselves to
| be saying the truth, unaware that they have already
| swallowed the larger falsity.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Why would they? Google sees more content so you now have more
| nodes connected to you, so you appear higher. Whether it's
| true or false doesn't matter to Google.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| This seems similar to, maybe even a restatement of, the
| "how do you detect AI-written content" problem.
|
| If someone could provide a way to programmatically detect
| accurate, high quality content, it would solve the SEO spam
| problem. It would also as a side-effect solve the AI-
| content problem. Or maybe it's the other way around and it
| would solve the AI-content problem and as a side effect the
| SEO spam problem. Well, they'll soon be the exact same
| thing, and either way I'm not sure it's solvable.
| unilynx wrote:
| The detection needs to be almost perfect for it not to be
| worth it for the AI to simply retry until it's passed the
| detection.
| taberiand wrote:
| If an article is posted to a blog, and nobody is there to
| read it, does it even matter if it lies?
|
| What they want is to optimise the ranking Google gives them.
| If Google's ranking filters out falsehoods then lies can be
| optimised away automatically.
| dayvid wrote:
| The reason I can't stand ChatGPT answers is that it's trained
| on overly wordy SEO articles that need at least 500 words
| exogeny wrote:
| Jim Spanfeller is a herb.
| claytongulick wrote:
| Honestly, it's getting hard for me to imagine how Google can get
| much worse anyway.
|
| So AI generated content will now take up the single non-sponsored
| link space to replace the ad-stuffed SEO-gamed clickbait article?
|
| Huh.
| kat_rebelo wrote:
| i have always augmented my more traditional music projects with
| avant-garde and experimental stuff. particularly focusing on
| found sounds, noise, and free improvisation. i record everything,
| but i treat it more as a journal of "free writing" than actual
| music output. the recordings are often formless, noisy, and
| chaotic and frequently contain experiments in polyrhythms or free
| time. over the years i've amassed an enormous amount of audio
| data that i treat more as an intellectual curiosity for myself
| than music i would show to other people.
|
| however, with all of the debates around attribution and ownership
| for human creators in the age of AI art, combined with the
| apparently legally and ethically dubious means by which these
| megacorps obtain their training data, i have began to think about
| what are some avenues that the general public could try to
| protest the actions of these megacorps by discretely poisoning
| the well of their training data.
|
| with the gigabytes and gigabytes of data i have generated of
| mostly incoherent audio, i have considered releasing this music
| for the first time by innocuously labeling it as a music audio
| dataset with the intention of trying to make it appear extremely
| attractive to megacorps scouring the internet for free data. my
| individual contribution probably couldn't amount to much, but if
| a concentrated mass of people did this in their respective
| fields, perhaps this could be a way of at least obstructing these
| corporations from freely capitalizing on the hard work of real
| artists.
| anileated wrote:
| The sad reality is that one way or another free and open
| exchange of information is going to trend down, as people
| realize anything they publish will get repacked and stripped of
| attribution to be sold by some commercial AI they will switch
| to e2ee closed groups, and more active opposition will be
| poisoning datasets which would introduce more noise and
| contribute to the trend.
|
| But I agree with the sentiment--if the blatant disregard for IP
| is not curbed, this sort of thing would have to be done...
| yabones wrote:
| Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get ready
| for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's brilliant. Doubly so because data is starting to take on
| toxic waste properties as well.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Great description. The history truly rhymes.
| ijustwanttovote wrote:
| > Data was the new oil, and now AI is the new plastic. Get
| ready for the rush of cheap mass manufactured plastic content.
|
| Very well said.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| A few days ago I was searching for some information about a CSS
| problem I was having. I saw a promising result on a reputable
| _looking_ webpage. As soon as I started unpacking the example
| code a little modal window popped up saying this was AI powered
| and touted it as some revolutionary assistant.
|
| First things first, using AI to generate CSS advice is probably
| the most false positive laden use-case I can imagine. Especially
| because mistakes in CSS aren't always readily apparent.
|
| But more importantly, there's really nothing stopping folks from
| omitting the fact that the content on the page was AI generated.
| It's the new hotness right now, so I can understand why they say
| so, but I can't help but think they'll start hiding this fact.
| Kiro wrote:
| AI for CSS sounds like a much better thing than the stuff
| mentioned here. I find Copilot and ChatGPT really good at
| writing robust CSS.
| badrabbit wrote:
| My suspicion is there will be a lot of new jobs that revolve
| around verifying random internet content or school work and such,
| not to tell if it is LLM generated but to simply validate the
| facts claimed in the post,essay,video,etc... I don't see why this
| can't be an economy either, a reputation scoring and content
| validity notarizing economy. Business idea! Lol.
| bamfly wrote:
| I think a new rise of trusted publishers is more likely than
| professional information-vetting services/jobs becoming
| widespread. It's sort-of the same thing, I guess, but with the
| due diligence up front rather than trying to sort out what's
| good from the vast sea of information pollution after the fact.
|
| Most really good material is already better found in books
| (even if ebooks) from real publishers than by trawling the Web,
| anyway. Even before the LLM apocalypse, the Web has always been
| rather disappointing at the whole "all the world's knowledge"
| thing. Great for trivia, great for a _few_ aspects or
| presentations of a _few_ topics, kinda shit for the rest. AI
| garbage wrecking the Web doesn 't seem like a complete change
| of the current state of things, but a shift in where exactly
| the "Web is good for this / Web is _not_ good for this " line
| falls.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing.
|
| I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent
| legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we should all be
| working on ways to confound and confuse and generally screw up
| the companies who are sucking up all the personal info.
|
| This kind of runs parallel to that. Google search has been pretty
| bad for some time now, might be worth "burning this thing down to
| save it."
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The problem generally speaking is that any successor search
| engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when
| sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to
| deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling.
| I don't know that making the web less usable in general is
| worth it.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years
| without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a
| lot better.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Are they doing nothing, or is the current state of the spam
| arms race resulting in running just to stay in the same
| place? And would anyone be better once they became the
| primary target?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| They are standing in the middle of it and picking
| everyone's digital pockets while claiming that they can't
| possibly help in the fight because it's too hard to pick
| a side. In an alternate universe they would be a Nazi
| Switzerland.
|
| Google makes money off of SEO spam. They get ad revenue
| from sellers and then give some pocket change to the
| scammers from the sellers. All of the money goes through
| their hands first.
|
| They're evil, they've sold whatever soul they might have
| had to the god of "money at any cost", and the current
| shitshow of their terrible search results is what you get
| when a soulless wreck is left to shamble the earth until
| its heart stops beating.
| imglorp wrote:
| The resolution to burning it down is replacing it with
| something that works.
|
| Quality, human curated, perhaps niche, search is what we should
| be encouraging and paying for with actual money, and not by
| renting our brains out.
| TillE wrote:
| It's gonna be really funny if we've looped all the way back
| to the Yahoo Directory circa 1998.
|
| It's hard to argue against the basic idea of human curation
| as a necessary component. I'm envisioning something like a
| search engine on top of a community-curated, categorized list
| of sites. I'd prefer something that works like Wikipedia,
| rather than a service controlled by a private company.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| If AI can write articles that fool Google, Google can use AI to
| detect it. Heck, maybe there will be an AI model that
| specifically recognizes AI content and can be used to filter it
| out. A lot of electricity spent for nothing, but it's not like
| the human species hasn't been its own worst enemy since it
| appeared.
| danaris wrote:
| I believe efforts of this nature will fall afoul of a very
| similar effect to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[0]: the
| amount of effort required to detect AI-written content is (at
| least) an order of magnitude greater than that required to
| generate them in the first place. And as LLMs get further fine-
| tuned to generate more and more human-like text, it will get
| even harder. Even now, I wouldn't give an "AI Text Detector",
| even one built with all of Google's resources, more than about
| a 60% chance of correctly telling AI-generated text from human-
| generated.
|
| The big problem is false positives--human-written text that
| gets incorrectly flagged as being written by AI. There's going
| to be _so many_ false positives in any scheme like this, it 'll
| barely be worth it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Related: _" it is easier to automate bad behavior than it is
| to police it"_
| dragandj wrote:
| It doesn't even need to recognize every AI article. It can
| simply ban the sites known for putting such crap up without
| tagging it as AI. But then they could have cracked on SEO spam
| this way, but won't. They won't because their business thrives
| on shifting through shitty content to give a slightly less
| shitty results.
| jerf wrote:
| No, this isn't an arms race. AI eventually reaches the point
| where it is indistinguishable from human text. It's pretty
| close to it now. The only thing even providing the illusion
| that we can detect ChatGPT or similar chatbots is that so many
| people use them with their "default voice", which you can learn
| how to detect, but it is trivial to avoid that.
|
| You also have to remember the future of AI is not just LLMs
| getting larger and larger. There will be something after them,
| and something after that. I'd guess we're maybe 2-4 years away
| from an AI that hooks up to an LLM but has "actual" knowledge
| of things so it doesn't confabulate new facts, which would
| remove one of the major signals I'm currently looking for in
| GPT content.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| There are many things LLMs might be able to do, today or in the
| future, but the single task they are _unambiguously_ capable of
| doing is generating text that is statistically
| indistinguishable from their training corpus. The endgame given
| the technology which presently exists is that spam generation
| methods will be more robust and effective than spam filtering
| methods, and I am not convinced that fundamentally better
| filtering methods are inevitable.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| SEO optimized turds have been floating to the top of google
| results for years and google hasn't done anything to
| effectively combat it. Why would this be something that google
| would do something about?
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > maybe there will be an AI model that specifically recognizes
| AI content and can be used to filter it out
|
| Expect lots of false positives and honest businesses being
| affected. How much should the filter threshold be tuned to
| smash more bots instead of real people?
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23798814/the-
| plan-is-to-f..., which points to this.
|
| Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
| reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._ "
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hexo wrote:
| What is G/O, pleaase?
| greenyoda wrote:
| That question is answered in the first sentence of the article:
|
| > _" In early July, managers at G/O media, the digital
| publisher that owns sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel,
| published four stories that had been almost entirely generated
| by AI engines."_
|
| More about them on Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media
| mr-wendel wrote:
| How new is this problem really?
|
| For example, consider the example of Demand Media (e.g.
| https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fal...).
|
| They invested quite a lot in cheap content generation and for a
| while it served them quite well. I struggle to imagine a scenario
| where lowering the cost of polluting would have made this
| strategy more viable.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Once again, Neal Stephenson nailed it. The miasma is here.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| Hopefully this serves as an incentive to Google to improve their
| search results. I find GPT-4 works so much better for finding
| answers (even in cases when it's wrong) than searching Google,
| especially for trivial ones. Add plugin features like code
| interpreter and the usefulness is not even close for most of the
| cases I use it.
|
| It's always worth verifying the answers, but that's also true for
| google results, and with GPT I don't have to dig through
| mountains of trash advertising sites to get to something useful.
|
| Really, I'd just like to see Google as useful as it once was.
| safety1st wrote:
| Probably it won't, at least not at first. Google's customers
| are advertisers. GPT thus far is a subscription-based service,
| it's not competing for Google's customers.
|
| So what if Google has a few less users? Since Google Ads is
| auction-based, it means a few less impressions will be
| available, and the cost of impressions will go up. Advertisers
| will pay a bit more for less but Google's sort of the only game
| in town so it won't make a huge difference.
|
| Now if Bing achieves 30% market share on the back of its great
| GPT integration or something, maybe that gets Google off its
| ass. I think LLMs might be the beginning of the end for Google
| but they're so entrenched it'll take 20 years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I think that nuance is key. An AI-generated story with factual
| errors is obviously bad but I wouldn't mind if reporters were
| able to feed facts they've found, data dump style, to an AI that
| could generate a narrative that is then reviewed.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The kind of straight news story that this works for is the kind
| of story where writing it is the fastest part already.
|
| Getting the actual facts to put in the story normally took far
| longer when I was working in a newsroom.
|
| Longer, harder to write stories, like deeply researched news,
| or long features are not something that AI can do (yet).
| COGlory wrote:
| Remember when Google kept saying AI was dangerous and that's why
| they couldn't release it?
|
| Dangerous to their business model, on multiple fronts.
| damnesian wrote:
| Well, of course. We use Ai as a toy, just like the very first
| movie directors. to shock, sensationalize, and otherwise grab
| eyeballs and elicit a strong response. we're the dumbest apes,
| how could we do anything different than throw poo when presented
| with a novel situation?
| namelosw wrote:
| It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated
| content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow
| make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game
| and nobody can say for sure.
|
| As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about
| YouTube algorithms:
|
| 1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad
| videos, or thousands even.
|
| 2. Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your
| video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised
| people would leave and it would hurt your stats.
|
| 3. Generating large amounts of videos may be profitable because
| it's like collecting peanuts with automation, but that would
| never reach the mainstream audience like Mr. Beast.
|
| This is because the algorithm promotes videos that are frequently
| clicked and fully watched. Generated or not, the content must be
| good enough to be watched through, in order to please the
| algorithm.
|
| You see, there are a lot of bootleg versions of Stackoverflow,
| but many of them are terrible. Some of them get ranked because
| they're still helpful (to the 80% majority of programmers,
| probably not for the HN elites). We can imagine there would
| certainly LLM generated versions of those, but very likely with
| better quality. Generated or not, it's still an arms race to
| generate more helpful and higher quality content to get traffic.
|
| Also, HN people have been complaining about how the quality of
| Google degrade over time. It might be Google's fault, but I
| believe there's another important factor that hurts search
| engines as a whole - There are too many walled gardens nowadays:
| Instagram, Discord, and now Twitter, etc. Value information is
| hiding behind those, which would certainly make search engines
| less helpful over time.
|
| For example, when I play not very popular video games I wish
| there are wikis or guides for that. In the old days, I know I can
| find most of the information in several forums and check the top
| posts. Now I need to go through Discord and scroll through casual
| chats and wonder if I missed something.
|
| With LLMs, people would likely be draining that information from
| walled gardens and compiling them into helpful insights.
|
| Again, there are a lot of dynamics, and it's hard to tell how
| things would turn out. Maybe it would kill Google and possibly
| the old Web, maybe it would make the Web great again.
| packetlost wrote:
| > Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your
| video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised
| people would leave and it would hurt your stats.
|
| This is an interesting take. Google can only "reward" videos
| that people watch for longer because they own the site. That
| is, they can _tell_ when people leave. For a good chunk of
| sites, they still can because of Google 's ad market share, but
| for a really sizeable chunk of sites that isn't the case. For
| like 80% of users, they _also_ still can because they own
| Chrome.
|
| I'm not sure I like the idea of allowing Google to reward sites
| that use their ads or browser monopoly in their search
| algorithm.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Even if I'm not using Chrome, if I search for a term and the
| first link isn't helpful, I would quickly go back to the
| search results and click another link. Google should be able
| to get a signal from that
| tacheiordache wrote:
| Yes, they get the signal. Let me remind you, Google want
| you to see more ads so the sooner you find your information
| the less time you linger around. If they use that signal,
| their best interest is to bury your optimal result further
| down.
| candiodari wrote:
| Unfortunately the worst of the worst clickbait is the ads.
| Google is never going to do anything about those. Hell, worse
| videos probably have better click through rates because
| people will click anything to get out of such a video.
|
| Plus, I've never once seen enshittification reward better
| quality. I highly doubt this will be the first time.
| acomjean wrote:
| I think it makes it worse. There is only so much it can index.
|
| I was searching a municipal website that had a bunch of pdfs.
| Instead of downloading them I'll I figured I'd sure the
| "site:__" to look through them. It didn't work. It seemed to
| index only 3 of those files. sigh.
|
| One of the appeals of using "chat bot" is you get an answer
| without all the ad crap the web delivers. I think thats the
| appeal of stackoverflow and Redit.. Using AI to make the web
| worse is something...
| rchaud wrote:
| Google will index whatever is generated in your sitemap.xml
| file. The "site:" filter isn't going to show them all.
| version_five wrote:
| Remember when websites would have a long list of keywords in the
| background color and tiny font at the bottom?
|
| I keep seeing these "AI will destroy X" articles, I've never seen
| one that wasn't ultimately referring to a minor incremental
| extension of something already prevalent.
|
| Keywords gave way to link farms gave way to shitty outsourced
| "content" and now LLMs will be part of SEO. It's not really
| different from getting a content farm to write you a bunch of
| crap, just cheaper and faster. Search companies will adapt, and
| seo scammers will find some new thing. It's all such a minor part
| of the internet anyway.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It 's not really different from getting a content farm to
| write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster._
|
| Using a gillnet to catch 1,000 fish in an hour is not really
| different from using a rod and reel to catch a few a day. It's
| just cheaper and faster.
|
| But the gillnetting can easily lead to extinction and death of
| an ecosystem whereas recreational fishing rarely does.
|
| Scale matters.
| TillE wrote:
| We already have plenty of non-AI autogenerated spam which is
| apparently good enough to please Google, LLMs just make that
| slightly better.
|
| So the scale already exists, and we're really just talking
| about quality.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| SEO spam has already made a tremendous impact on the
| quality of google results (it used to be that a bad result
| was a good website about the wrong topic, now a bad result
| is a bad website about the right topic, and there are A LOT
| of them).
|
| Being able to generate 100x the spam will certainly hurt
| things even more.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > It's not really different from getting a content farm to
| write you a bunch of crap, just cheaper and faster. Search
| companies will adapt
|
| Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front page
| of a search are crap.
| vuln wrote:
| > Not sure they have adapted. Most of the links on the front
| page of a search is crap.
|
| That's by design. They load the results with crap so you
| click on the ads instead of the result. Ads generate revenue
| for Alphabet, search _results_ less so.
|
| Simple as.
| instagib wrote:
| I still do the tiny font keyword list for my resume. I have
| occasionally left out certain keywords but then hear back from
| recruiters that if I had keyword x or y then I would be perfect
| for the job. Back to a 5 page resume.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| I've heard from recruiters that some software will export
| submitted resumes in plain text in a standard format for
| review, I wonder if the tiny white font tags show up as well
| squarefoot wrote:
| That was pretty much a given, and in the meantime they already
| filled YouTube with crappy collage videos with clickbaity
| titles+captions and voiced by AI. Any plans to build a blacklist
| (+ browser extension?) that along ads and malware sites will also
| allow to nuke that rubbish from search results?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I prefer subscribing to good, valuable sources rather than
| having a filter for recommendations.
| [deleted]
| juujian wrote:
| > You're going to see more AI-written articles whether you like
| it or not
|
| I won't, cause I have largely stopped using Google.
| philipov wrote:
| What are you using instead?
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Bing and its consumers (I use Kagi) will have the same problems
| unless they do something radical, like promote content
| verifiably created by humans above unverified content.
|
| And first they'd have to figure out what that even means, and
| the impact on non-professional writers. Blogspam will get worse
| before it gets better.
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