[HN Gopher] Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby pe...
___________________________________________________________________
Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI
generated
Author : jsheard
Score : 301 points
Date : 2024-10-07 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| gs17 wrote:
| Most egregious is the one copying the title from Snopes' "Video
| Genuinely Shows White 'Baby Peacock'?" (with the question mark
| cut off). A page all about how the picture _isn 't_ a real baby
| peacock.
|
| But also, if you search the more accurate term, "peachick", you
| seem to get 100% real images, although half the pages call them
| "baby peacocks".
| jsheard wrote:
| And the first result is from Adobe Stock, who you might assume
| would have higher standards than Pinterest and TikTok, but here
| we are.
| h2odragon wrote:
| actual baby peacocks are almost indistinguishable from guinea
| hatchlings and there's a strong resemblance to baby chickens or
| turkeys.
| morkalork wrote:
| You know that, but what about some kid looking on google
| images?
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I'm an adult and I didn't know that
| viewtransform wrote:
| search "baby peacock before:2023" => doesn't have AI generated
| images
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Until Google breaks search syntax/tags again...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| The Internet equivalent of pre-war steel:
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
| ravetcofx wrote:
| And it's hard to fully trust any post 2021 text as well. It's
| pushing me to seek information from pre 2021 books for
| information.
| waymon wrote:
| Wonder who will coin said term. Before AI. Pure clean
| internet 1991-2022
| pndy wrote:
| You sure about that "pure clean" part?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Pre-AI internet.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Low background jpegs!
| nunez wrote:
| works for reddit also!
| notamy wrote:
| If, like me, you don't have a Twitter account and want to see
| more than just the single post:
| https://xcancel.com/notengoprisa/status/1842550658102079556
| stebalien wrote:
| And if you want to automatically get redirected to xcancel:
| https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/
| josefritzishere wrote:
| AI is the ultimate enshittification.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| everything terrible about SEO, but now exponentially cheaper
| and faster to excrete.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| You got downvoted because the people here can't handle the
| truth.
| giarc wrote:
| I'm a part time maker and purchase a lot of designs off of Etsy
| to make into physical goods. I have to weed through so many AI
| images when purchasing designs off of Etsy now. I wish they
| required users to indicate if AI was used to produce the image so
| I could then filter them out.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Same now when trying to find 3d models to print. It's just a
| whole bunch of hueforge ai spam.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| Sellers are actually supposed to mark items as AI
| generated/assisted, where applicable:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/09/etsy-new-seller-policy-202...
|
| Whether they actually do this (and whether there's any
| incentive to do so), is obviously not a given
| wingworks wrote:
| It's currently optional for sellers, Etsy says "This info
| won't change what buyers see for now, but will be used to
| improve the shopping experience in the future."
| ErikAugust wrote:
| Someone needs to invent a "for humans, by humans" web. Possibly a
| future luxury.
| rwmj wrote:
| The good news is that some AI company will invent this, to
| provide a source for their LLM.
| randomcatuser wrote:
| this reminds me of the matrix
| Retr0id wrote:
| It's so hard to do this because the better you make it, the
| more valuable it is for someone to a) scrape it all b) try to
| insert fake content
| readyplayernull wrote:
| A new sales point for Web3.
| t_mann wrote:
| How so?
| timeon wrote:
| Actual Web3 at this point should be going offline.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Hear me out: is that Wikipedia? I am sure people are submitting
| all sorts of AI-generated information, but it's probably
| getting rejected? (If someone better informed than me has any
| data one way or the other, I'm super curious)
| unsigner wrote:
| Quite contrary, people are gleefully machine translating
| Wikipedia to make more Wikipedia (in different languages).
| And arguing for it.
| sbrother wrote:
| I feel like this is what we are trying to do at Reddit, but
| needless to say it's going to get harder and harder.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I sense Reddit is a lost cause. Even before the latest wave
| of generative AI you could tell things were heavily
| manipulated.
|
| I dare say that I haven't noticed _that much_ of a change in
| things and that could either be because LLMs are just that
| good at Reddit content, or that because Reddit was already so
| botted and manipulated it didn't really change much.
| rwmj wrote:
| Reddit started to decline dramatically once they started to
| charge for API access last year. Mods on a politics
| subreddit I was talking to said all the free tools they
| used to keep on top of things stopped working, so they
| could no longer filter out the trolls and bots.
|
| I sure hope the money that Reddit made makes up for the
| readers who are fleeing.
| devmor wrote:
| LLMs are reinforced through adversarial training - you would
| essentially be playing a keep-up game with AI generated garbage
| that would get exponentially more difficult to pull ahead in.
| pndy wrote:
| There was this image that was circling some 20 years ago around
| and later, with the Internet becoming a cable tv-like service
| where you'd be a subscriber to particular big companies sites
| and additional "free-range" pages
|
| So the pessimist in me can see the Internet being affected by
| the free-vs-premium formula: "basic" Internet with ads,
| tracking, AI fillers, limited access to +18 content, in the
| worst form comes with these pre-defined sites and "premium"
| that's free of these _limitations_ but it also in time tries to
| squeeze more money from users - like "premium but with ads"
| prometheon1 wrote:
| Someone is trying to: https://brainmade.org/
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Or, consider using Wikimedia Commons, where images are
| painstakingly categorized, documented, and freely licensed:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pavo_cristatus_(...
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I've had a mild amount of success asking some nature
| photographers if they would be willing to make a few of their
| photos freely licensed so that they can be used on Wikipedia
| articles.
|
| Wikimedia is a fantastic resource.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Creative Commons offers a portal if you wish to cast a wider
| net (music, video, 3D models)
|
| It also includes Google Images and Flickr.
|
| https://search.creativecommons.org/
|
| I found the peachicks on Commons by searching "peacock" and
| then following categories up the tree. If people use the
| wrong search engine with naive search terms, I don't know
| what to tell ya.
|
| This is a parallel example of why reference librarians are
| still worth consulting, because they will guide you to the
| library's resources and databases, and demonstrate how to use
| search queries.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I stopped using Google search...why even bother now. Results are
| just some crappy page with ads. Aastroturfed wikpedia page is
| also suspect. Chatgpt can answer questions in seconds. Just not
| sure if correct, but most of the time more than good enough. I
| feel like Google is destroying their credibility by day. Just go
| to zoo to see peacocks and take pictures. At least it will be an
| real experience not some virtual manipulation
| fwip wrote:
| The described problem is AI-slop in Google, and your solution
| is to drink directly from the spigot of ChatGPT?
| t_mann wrote:
| I suppose the logic could be: if you're going to consume AI
| generated content anyway, why not use a setup where you have
| control over the system prompt and other parameters? Not sure
| if ChatGPT qualifies there, though.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| My solution is to use the computer as little as possible. Go
| see the world to know what a peacock looks lie. Last time
| I've seen Peacocks was in Lisbon in St. George's castle, 4
| years ago. The kind of questions I ask ChatGPT, are mostly
| code questions. Or for it to help me with planning something.
| I ask it questions, and it can provide some sort of logic
| behind the answer which I can then reason about. Sure it can
| mislead me, but it's more like an ongoing conversation I'm
| having with it. So its more like an opinion I'm getting, and
| I discount it. I'm generally a skeptical person. So I'm well
| aware of the manipulations that are happening online. Google
| is just a weaponized player in misinformation warefare at
| this point. It purposely will go out of its way to build
| consensus, for conflicts. Bunch of technocratic Billionaire
| overlords would get you to support genocide if it would
| benefit them. So I just don't trust google at this point for
| anything news related. And the rest of their content seems to
| be just a giant trap of spam pages.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Google is going to have to solve for this somehow if they want to
| remain relevant, right? If searching for an image and generating
| the image yield the same result, what's the point of image search
| any more?
| cflewis wrote:
| Watermarking I think is supposed to be the goal, but I don't
| think anyone can think that the web is in anything but managed
| decline. The AI feeding itself AI will just end it all. I think
| Platformer describes it best:
| https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-picha...
|
| The question is what comes next, and I don't think anyone has
| an answer to that.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Well, and once this kills the web then Google's AI no longer
| has a data source its AI can tap to answer questions about
| anything that happens afterward, so it kind of needs the web
| to at least limp along.
| Havoc wrote:
| Their image search is presumably not profitable anyway so not
| sure they care
| broast wrote:
| Maybe they will generate the images themselves and show a mix
| of both.
| TheGlav wrote:
| What do you mean "solve"? This is solving the problem. If
| people see things they consider good enough, that's all they
| care about.
|
| Source: every other piece of news or social media on the
| planet.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > what's the point of image search any more?
|
| The same could be said for regular search. Pretty much anything
| I search for yields a page of ads followed by pages of content
| farmers followed by pages of "almost sounds like experts but is
| still just a content farmer."
|
| Financing the Internet with advertising has really made it
| difficult to find good quality content. The incentives are
| completely misaligned, unless you are a 'content creator' or
| Google.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| They're more likely to solve it so that you can't tell the baby
| peacocks are AI-generated
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I assume this is one example of why big tech lobbies for
| stricter AI controls. They aren't afraid of AI takeover; they
| are afraid of AI destroying their businesses.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| The problem is - how does Google get paid for providing this
| service. In a way, the better the service they offer, the less
| money they make. It really sucks.
|
| Would you pay money to Google or some other company in exchange
| for a genuinely good search service that prioritizes well
| written content, and avoids AI (or human) generated crapticles?
| nelup20 wrote:
| One of the replies mentions this uBlock Origin AI blocklist
| (haven't tried it myself):
| https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
| speedgoose wrote:
| I think we should have an allow list approach at this point.
| Maybe a web directory of trustful websites.
| itsafarqueue wrote:
| Yeeha!
| latentsea wrote:
| We're about to go back to the directory style websites of the
| 90s!
| zamadatix wrote:
| Well, on the "bright" side, all but 2 of the striked ones are
| either explicitly AI generated art (the 3 Adobe Stock ones, 2
| from freepik, and the 1 from Instagram) or about noting the
| images aren't real (the 2 Snopes and the 1 in the bottom left
| calling out the feet).
|
| On the sad side the TikTok and YouTube ones that likely led to
| all of this aren't labeled and are present, not to mention the
| complete lack of "I want the AI things automatically filtered,
| I'm not interested in trends I'm searching for actual things
| right now" button. Without something like that it will become
| harder to use Google to find new content.
|
| I mean people obviously like the content, it's cute enough to get
| shared around so much to make itself popular in these images and
| to trigger the post on X about it. Nothing wrong with that... but
| if it's not easily filterable for what the user is actually
| trying to find then Google has somewhat failed at its goal.
| wenbin wrote:
| In the near future, a significant portion of YouTube videos and
| podcasts will likely be AI-generated (e.g., through tools like
| Notebook LM).
|
| However, I'm uncertain whether audiences will truly enjoy this
| AI-generated content. Personally, I prefer content created by
| humans--it feels more authentic and engaging to me.
|
| It's crucial for AI tools to include robust detection mechanisms,
| such as reliable watermarks, to help other platforms identify AI-
| generated content. Unfortunately, current detection tools for AI-
| generated audio are still lacking -
| https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1241446778/deepfake-audio-det...
|
| [Edit] We just put together a list of notebooklm generated
| "podcasts": https://github.com/ListenNotes/notebooklm-generated-
| fake-pod...
|
| Consider whether you'd enjoy listening to AI-generated podcasts.
| I believe people might be okay with shows they create themselves,
| but are less likely to appreciate 'podcasts' ai-generated by
| others.
| Havoc wrote:
| Question is how long till you can't tell the difference
| sekh60 wrote:
| My FAANG working spouse thinks that AIs and Robocallers
| should be mandated to identify themselves. She thinks a
| audible "Beep-boop" at the end of a sentence for calls and
| video would be appropriate.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I support that idea. Along with properly implemented
| authentication so you can't just spoof your way to
| someone's phone, and painfully stiff fines for violators.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Barring that, every human could and sentences with a couple
| racial slurs to verify that they are not on AI
| jhbadger wrote:
| It's almost impossible now. NotebookLM really impressed me. I
| knew voice synthesis has gotten better than Stephen Hawking's
| "voice" but I really wasn't expecting having two realistic
| voices with emotions that even banter with each other. There
| is a bit of banality to them - they like to call something a
| "a game changer" practically every "podcast" and the insights
| into the material is pretty shallow, but they are probably
| better than the average podcaster already.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's impressive at first until you realise they're
| practically ad libbing a script. They're filled with all
| the same annoying American cliches ("you know me, I like
| x", your aforementioned "a game changer", plenty of "wow").
| It would be impossible to listen to two in a row without
| realising how repetitive it is.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Fun fact, Stephen Hawkins could've used a much "better"
| synthetic voice but decided to stick with that one as
| people associated it with him.
| wenbin wrote:
| At Listen Notes, we recently removed over 500 fake podcasts
| generated by Notebook LM in just the past weekend.
|
| It's disappointing to see scammers and black-hat SEOs already
| leveraging Notebook LM to mass-produce fake podcasts and
| distribute them across various platforms.
| hooverd wrote:
| Personally I'm opposed to the unlimited slop machine.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >Personally, I prefer content created by humans--it feels more
| authentic and engaging to me.
|
| I'd like to think that too, but I wonder how long - if at all -
| this will be true. I "want" to like human generated content
| more, but I suspect AI may be able to optimize for human
| engagement more, especially for simple dopamine inducing
| content (like tiktok videos). After all, we're less complicated
| than we like to think.
|
| >It's crucial for AI tools to include robust detection
| mechanisms, such as reliable watermarks, to help other
| platforms identify AI-generated content.
|
| This will never work, unfortunately. There's no way to exclude
| rogue actors, and there's plenty of profit in AIs pretending to
| be human. If anything, we will have to watermark/sign human
| generated content.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > In the near future, a significant portion of YouTube videos
| and podcasts will likely be AI-generated
|
| It's not helpful that you're making a binary distinction here.
|
| As an example, as much as 10 years ago, I would find Youtube
| videos where the narration was entirely TTS. The creators
| didn't want to use their own voice, and so they wrote the
| script, and fed it into a TTS system. As you can expect from
| the state of the art at the time, it sounded terrible. Yet
| people enjoyed the videos and they had high view counts.
|
| Are we calling this AI-generated?
|
| We now have better TTS (without generative AI). Way better. I
| presume those types of videos are now better for me to watch.
| You may still be able to tell it's not a human because the tone
| doesn't have much variance. You'd probably have to listen for a
| minute or longer to discern that, though.
|
| Are we calling this AI-generated?
|
| Now with generative AI, we have voices that perhaps you won't
| be able to identify as AI. But it's all good as long as a human
| wrote the script, right?
|
| Are we calling this AI-generated?
|
| Finally, take the same video. The creator writes the script,
| but feels he's not a good writer (or English is not his native
| tongue, and he likely has lots of grammatical errors). So he
| passes his script to GPT and asks it to rewrite it - and not
| just fix grammatical errors but have it improve it, with some
| end goal in mind ("This will be the script for a popular
| video...") He then reviews that the essence he was trying to
| capture was conveyed, and goes ahead with the voice generation.
|
| Is this AI-generated?
|
| To me, all of these are fine, and not in any way inferior to
| one with a completely human workflow. As long as the creator is
| a human, and he feels it is conveying what he needed to convey.
|
| I would love to take a first draft of a blog post, send it to
| GPT, and have it write it for me. The reason I don't is that so
| far, whatever it produces doesn't have my "voice". It may
| capture what I meant to say, but the writing style is
| completely different from mine. If I could get GPT/Claude to
| mimic my style more, I'd absolutely run with it. Almost no one
| likes endless editing - especially writers!
| Rugu16 wrote:
| Facebook is flooded with this! Fake photo of poor people asking
| for help and you see thousands of like and people commenting how
| they can help
| djhworld wrote:
| A good chunk of those replying will be bots
| zero-g wrote:
| What's the idea? Why do they use bots to reply?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| To make it look like it is has actual engagement
| sixothree wrote:
| If this is the beginning, where are we going to be in 2035? I
| just can't imagine it without being so wildly speculative.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It's not even the right terminology. I think you should probably
| use "peafowl". The search "peafowl chicks" seems to return all
| real images.
| theginger wrote:
| I think this is kind of key to the issue, the good content is
| there if you know how to find it. But if you don't know the
| right terminology then you are going to search for baby peacock
| and get bad results.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Kind of like how the Internet worked pre-Google.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Well, that makes me wonder if the search isn't flawed
| primarily because it is an image search. I try to stress to
| my children how important it is to prefer reading material
| over "watching material". And while these are stills
| (photographs seems inappropriate), the fact that because they
| are images the search can't possible help you to self-
| correct. Google has no opportunity to show you the correct
| terminology within the results, and you do not learn enough
| to then go out and find the images you were hoping for.
|
| I know there are exceptions. There are answers I've wanted
| that can be found within the first few minutes of the first
| video on Youtube, which I've gone days without discovering
| because I'm video-averse. But I suspect that the habit is, on
| average, more benefit than detriment.
| dakiol wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me if in a few years Google, for certain
| keywords:
|
| - autogenerates URLs (tha look legit)
|
| - autogenerates content for such URLs (that look kinda legit)
|
| All of this would be possible if one is using Chrome (otherwise
| the fake URLs wouldn't lead to anywhere). Of course, full of ads.
|
| Think about it, some people are not really looking for some web
| site that talks about "baby peacocks". They are looking for baby
| peacocks: content, images, video. If Google can autogenerate
| good-enough content, then these kind of users would be satisfied
| (may not even notice the difference).
|
| Maybe Google ditches the URL and all: type keywords, and get
| content (with ads)!
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You're giving them ideas.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Like a search engine?
| dakiol wrote:
| Like a "generate engine".
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| > would be possible if one is using Chrome (otherwise the fake
| URLs wouldn't lead to anywhere).
|
| Didn't they do something like that with AMP. I recall that if
| you were using chrome and visited an AMP site from Google the
| address bar would say site.com even though the content was
| being served from google.com.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| at least an ai://baby-peacocks/images would be honest
| mg wrote:
| Well, nearly all of the Google Images results for "Woman" show a
| woman with makeup and additionally the photos were altered via
| Photoshop.
|
| We have been creating our own reality even before AI.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| Is this a joke? Right, women wear makeup, might as well AI
| generate every image we look for.
| jachee wrote:
| Creating a version of reality is _significantly_ different from
| conjuring abject falsehoods. There is an objective reality for
| what (e.g.) a baby peacock should look like, and this AI slop
| is inherently misleading about that.
| noemit wrote:
| the incel to HN pipeline is now complete
| John_Cena wrote:
| that's not appropriate here
| duxup wrote:
| I was searching google images for "cat professor" recently.
|
| Same, as far as I could tell all AI garbage with weird saturation
| and colors and uncanny valley .... they look weird / didn't work
| for me.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| ... Did you want a picture of a real cat professor?
| duxup wrote:
| I was hoping for a picture of a real cat. There's a different
| look that real photos have. The AI photos all look like
| computer polished weirdness.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| So generate your own.
| duxup wrote:
| I do not have the required animal.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Almost all of the "product X vs Y" results are AI ramblings now.
| This growth of the dead Internet is making me want to sign up for
| Kagi. We're going to need a certification for human generated
| content at some point.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my
| youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist
| again.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license
| agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to
| get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is
| involved but some sane display technology instead.
| quantified wrote:
| Without most of what makes the internet useful, sadly.
| soganess wrote:
| I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like
| the regular internet would go away... when you want
| useful, go there.
|
| I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system.
| Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about
| whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only
| allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That
| was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was
| only available to individuals or businesses no larger
| than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation
| on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and
| tagged, of all the sites available.
|
| But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for
| the old internet talking.
| coldpie wrote:
| Start here: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| theamk wrote:
| No way. What you are describing is Gemini, but even more
| niche - a place which is explicitly walled-off from the
| "big net", which only nostalgic people with right technical
| skills and a desire to jump some hoops can get to.
|
| This is not going to work - as time progresses, there will
| be less and less nostalgic people who are willing to put up
| with that complexity. And "non-commercial" part will ensure
| that there _never_ be an option to say: "I am tired of
| fixing my homeserver once again, I am going to put up my
| site to (github|sourceforge|$1 hosting) and forget about
| it".
|
| Compare to early web. First thing that came to my mind was
| Bowden's Hobby Circuits site [0]. It's designed for
| advanced beginners - simple projects, nice explanations.
| And there are no hoops to jump through - I've personally
| sent the links to it to many people via forums, private
| emails, and so on. It apparently went down in 2023, but
| while it was still up, I remember regularly finding it from
| google searches and via links from other pages.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220429084959/http://www.b
| owden...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the
| Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in
| time.
|
| I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are
| aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts
| me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
| pchristensen wrote:
| It may be a minority, but you're not alone.
| silisili wrote:
| I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL
| was just ahead of its time.
|
| Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the
| walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords,
| search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile
| app.
|
| Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the
| bots ruined it all.
| coldpie wrote:
| > until AI and the bots ruined it all
|
| Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all.
| They get paid for getting page views, so the business
| model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of
| creation. This is the end result of what Google and
| Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.
|
| But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very
| nice yachts, so it's all fine.
| dcchambers wrote:
| With every passing day I basically think this is going to
| be the future of the internet. Many disparate
| private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet
| becomes overloaded with AI slop.
|
| It's largely already happening in places like Discord.
|
| I think the first company that can capture what Discord
| has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is
| going to do really well.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| i think the problem with revamping Q-Link/AOL into the
| be-all end-all for everyone (thats human) youre gonna
| hafta pump the prime with AI chatbots to give the
| appearance of lots of people to draw you in, kinda like
| how reddit admins pumped the prime by making tons of
| posts early on. just a little light treason.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of
| against me.
|
| It's great to read these words. People are starting to get
| it. The Internet is not for you, it's _against_ you.
| leptons wrote:
| "The internet" isn't for or against anything, it's just a
| vast computer network. It's the humans with an agenda
| that exploit the internet (specifically the web) that are
| against you.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You're correct of course leptons, but do please give
| credence to important shorthand. As I've put it before,
| the Internet is the battleground. Ground is not
| necessarily "neutral". It favours certain forces and
| tactics. See the "Nine Situations" [0] We used to occupy
| type-5 (open ground) which was also mostly type-2
| (dispersive). We are now on "serious" and "difficult"
| ground. Therefore the environment itself is hostile. Most
| of what people commonly think of as "The Internet" -
| that's not your friend any more.
|
| [0] https://suntzusaid.com/book/11
| coldpie wrote:
| It still exists. Currently it looks like Patreons and their
| associated communities, long-running web forums, small
| chatrooms on platforms like Discord or Facebook or
| Instagram, and so on. Small communities, with relatively
| high barriers to entry.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's not the same Internet.
|
| Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on
| are all centralized.
|
| With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with
| decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused
| discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by
| whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and
| running).
|
| Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs
| instead of funneled through a handful of blessed
| providers like Gmail.
|
| Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers
| that were individually operated by people, not
| corporations.
|
| Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some
| files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or
| using imgur.
|
| Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.
|
| Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central
| corpo authority.
|
| One could construct an argument that supports either way
| being better than the other, but the the Internet of
| today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a
| century ago.
|
| (Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means
| is that they've placed some data in some corpo database
| that they can never actually own or control.)
| coldpie wrote:
| That's a pretty narrow view. My Internet in the 90s and
| early 2000s was on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Network,
| Yahoo! Mail and phpBB web forums hosted by random people
| with pictures hosted on PhotoBucket. Plenty centralized.
|
| The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the
| time. The difference is the size of the community, and
| the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to
| discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they
| wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just
| getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new
| barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I have no reason to doubt your experience.
|
| But AOL IM and MSN were centralized walled gardens that
| came rather late to the game, and neither PhotoBucket nor
| phpBB existed at all in the 20th century that is the
| context here.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central
| corpo authority.
|
| Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion.
| It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get
| to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were
| also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since
| you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
|
| I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the
| priority was having fun and not improving your rank on
| the leaderboard.
|
| Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own
| moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that
| banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a
| bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
|
| Then there were custom sprays - something no company
| would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained
| and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many
| games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and
| typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
| rakoo wrote:
| All of this still exists today though. It hasn't
| disappeared, it has only been drowned.
|
| If you want to find it again, change your search engine.
| Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS
| feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there.
| Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts
| (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC
| servers still exist, forums still exist, independent
| emails still exist.
|
| Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to
| fall for, start doing and living what you want
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Shout out to lemmy as well. Still missing some users to
| seriously challenge reddit, but also lacks all the spam
| and astroturfing.
| zem wrote:
| the problem with that is not the payment, it's that you
| will only be sharing it with people similarly willing to
| pay for a walled garden. I'm guessing most of what we're
| nostalgic for was created by people who wouldn't be up for
| that
| timeon wrote:
| > I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience
| the Internet of the twentieth century.
|
| I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience of
| pre-Internet era.
|
| Internet is lead of our time.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Would you pay a nominal amount (like 5 cents or 25 cents)
| to consume one piece of good, ad-free content, assuming
| that there was no login, no account, no friction, etc? You
| click, you read, and 5 cents is magically transferred from
| you to the writer?
|
| I would. But I've asked a lot of people who say "no, I
| don't want to pay when I can read it for free. I don't mind
| the ads that much."
| tivert wrote:
| > I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience
| the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique
| point in time.
|
| Sadly, they won't know what they were missing. It'll be the
| new normal
|
| Some asshole tech apologist is probably getting ready to
| post that section from Plato where Socrates complains about
| writing any minute now.
|
| Of course, that asshole is oblivious to the fact that most
| if not all of us probably just don't understand what
| Socrates was missing, so he's just showing his ignorance
| and stupidity.
|
| > I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives
| are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that
| puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising
| 'net.
|
| The problem is that, even if you try to do that, the
| incentives are probably _still_ aligned against you, just
| maybe less blatantly.
|
| Just look at how many formerly ad-free _paid_ services are
| adding ads, and how hardware _users literally own_ acts
| against their interests by pushing ads in their faces (e.g.
| smart TVs).
|
| The guy who runs the walled garden will always be tempted
| to get some extra cash by adding ad revenue to your
| subscription feed, or cut costs by replacing human curated
| stuff with AI slop (maybe cleaned up a bit).
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I only just put it together but Peter Watt's Rifters series
| is some epic earth grimdark hard-sci-fi, the first taking
| place as practically horror, confined deep under water.
|
| But my point is, the latter books have this has _amazing_
| post-internet, just a ravaged chaotic Wildlands filled with
| rabid programs & wild viruses. Packets staggering half
| intact across the virtualscape, hit by digital storms. Our
| internet isn't quite so amazing, but I see the relationship
| more subtly with where we have gone, with so so so many
| generated sites happy to regurgitate information poorly at
| you or to sell you a slant quietly. Bereft of real sites,
| real traffic. Watts is a master writer. _Maelstrom_.
|
| First book _Starfish_ is free.
| https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation and free link!
|
| Another book on my reading list!
| sobkas wrote:
| > It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my
| youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist
| again.
|
| User facing ability to whitelist and blacklist websites in
| search results, ability to set weights for websites you want
| to see higher in search results.
|
| Spamlists for search results, so even if you don't have
| knowledge/experience to do it yourself, you can still protect
| them from spam.
|
| It's recreation of e-mail situation, not because it's good,
| but because www is getting even worse than e-mail.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Most product reviews are simply pumping amazon comments into AI
| to generate a review. with a final "pros/cons" section that is
| basically the same summary amazon AI generates.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > This growth of the dead internet
|
| It is quite surreal to witness. It is certainly fueled by the
| commercialization of internet due to ads and centralization to
| user hostile platforms.
|
| The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost
| most of its users in the last 15 years...
| chongli wrote:
| _The old internet seems to be doing much better. But it lost
| most of its users in the last 15 years.._
|
| What do you mean by this? How do you find the old internet?
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| Something Awful is a good example. Other forums behind
| paywalls or ones that are invite only.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Even non-paywalled forums are pretty good compared to the
| "open" internet.
| jsheard wrote:
| Even Google is trying to get into the X vs Y game, with pretty
| funny results if you ask for a nonsensical comparison.
|
| https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/1843040235325964549
|
| ...or a sensical comparison where it just completely misses the
| point.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/FotFZ3F.jpeg
| sobellian wrote:
| Couldn't reproduce - in fact, the second hit is a threads
| version of the same post - but I get no AI suggestions for
| this query. Humorous Google queries (or AI queries more
| generally) are definitely a trope, so I can never really tell
| if they actually happened or if it's all for karma.
| amputect wrote:
| Google also routinely removes AI suggestions for searches
| that produce embarrassing results (you don't get them for
| searches about keeping cheese on your pizza anymore, for
| example), so it's even harder to validate once a result
| goes viral.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Look at the bright side: "do a barrel roll" is still a
| fully-supported Easter egg.
| neaden wrote:
| I still get the second one when I search "Difference
| between sauce and dressing" on Google. The Oven vs Ottoman
| empire one I don't get an AI overview.
|
| Edit: Similar to the second one I just did Panda Bear vs
| Australia which informed me "Australians value
| authenticity, sincerity, and modesty. Giant pandas are
| solitary and peaceful, but will fight back if escape is
| impossible. "
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Searching with "Reddit" at the end of every query helps but I
| suppose it's only a matter of time when most content on Reddit
| is also AI-generated.
| jsheard wrote:
| It's also not much use to anyone who doesn't use Google ever
| since Reddit started blocking all crawlers besides Googlebot.
| Old cached results might still show up in Bing/DDG/Kagi but
| they can't index any of the newer stuff.
| alberto_balsam wrote:
| What makes you say this? I just tried a few Reddit searches
| about events from the last few days and they work as
| expected (tested in Kagi)
| jsheard wrote:
| https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-
| tha...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt
|
| Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you
| can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is
| getting recent Reddit results then they must be either
| ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also
| paying Reddit for access like Google.
|
| Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I
| just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on
| both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.
| rwmj wrote:
| Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large
| political subreddit and they said after Reddit started
| charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on
| top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality
| of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.
| tivert wrote:
| > Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a
| large political subreddit and they said after Reddit
| started charging for API access, all the tools they used to
| keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the
| quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and
| dramatically.
|
| The whole point of the API access change was to charge AI
| model-makers. I'd be ironic if the API change made
| destroyed their product and made their data unsellable.
| kredd wrote:
| If you know anyone who works in marketing/PR, ask them how
| they use Reddit. That has been gamified as much as SEO since
| about 2020. I'm assuming, anything except "why is there a
| fire in this street?" kind of posts are just ads at this
| point.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The "top n" subreddits are surely gamified but smaller,
| highly-focused subreddits seem ok.
| kredd wrote:
| Fair. Exceptions definitely exist, but unless it's
| location based subreddit, I, personally, wouldn't trust
| it. There are fun methods that I've been told about. Like
| marketing companies maintain multiple very real life
| looking accounts, participating in discussions for
| months/years with no product affiliations, and very
| casually throwing in plugs which eventually generate
| revenues. Or giving a list of 10 items, and inserting
| their product in between, as a sale is better than no
| sale. Or marketing a competing product in a very obvious
| way, then replying from another account telling how it's
| an ad to eventually lead sales to themselves.
|
| I have no idea how intensive these are, as I most of
| these over bar drinks when I was traveling. Could've just
| been someone making stuff up as well. But my marketing
| friends have confirmed that they use Reddit very heavily,
| as it's a great sales funnel if you play it right.
| timeon wrote:
| Most of the Reddit content is now[0] fake.
|
| [0] Gradually for several years already.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The niche subreddit's I follow seem to be ok. I stay away
| from the big ones. All the default ones are garbage from
| what I can see.
| mFixman wrote:
| Ironically, ChatGPT and similar LLM chatbots are great for
| those kinds of searches.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| You would have to be soft in the head to rely on any LLM for
| researching information on a medication you're actively
| taking.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Kagi's results for "baby peacock" are showing almost the same
| set (Mostly AI) as Google's.
| louthy wrote:
| Search "peachick", it works fine. I assume Google would be
| the same.
|
| I guess using the correct terminology matters.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I guess using the correct terminology matters.
|
| If people were actually searching up "peachick" that'd
| probably be SEO spammed to hell, too.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Kagi's images are an entirely different set for me.
| p3rls wrote:
| It's surprising how many times you see this pattern on HN
|
| "Google sucks!"(50 upvotes)
|
| "That's why I use Kagi!"(45 upvotes)
|
| "Actually Kagi has the exact same problem and you have to pay
| for it."(2 upvotes)
| quasse wrote:
| Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily
| drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real
| trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image
| and text search).
|
| As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another
| worrying area is anything medical related.
|
| I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this
| week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have
| become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated
| spam trying to attract your click.
|
| I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a
| semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the
| citations manually to trying and find information.
| frereubu wrote:
| The UK NHS website is usually pretty good for this so
| sticking "NHS" in the search terms might help, although I
| imagine they may not cover non-UK brand names.
| pavon wrote:
| That matches my experience. Kagi doesn't surface much content
| beyond what Google/Bing do. What it does better out of the
| box is guessing which content is low-quality and displaying
| so that it takes up less space, allowing you to see a few
| more pages worth of search results on the first page. And
| then it lets you permanently filter out sites you consider to
| be low quality so you don't see them at all. That would have
| been awesome 10 years ago when search spam was dominated by a
| few dozen sites per subject that mastered SEO (say
| expertsexchange), but it is less useful now that there are
| millions of AI content mills drowning out the real content.
|
| For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that I
| have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search
| results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this,
| and find myself using them for the majority of my searches,
| and only use normal search for subjects where the information
| must be from the last few years. It does penalize "evergreen"
| pages where sites continuously make minor changes to pages to
| bump their SEO, which sucks for some old articles at
| contemporary sites, but for the most part gives much better
| results.
|
| [1] For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&source=ln
| t&tbs=cdr%3A1%2C...
| tivert wrote:
| > For content that isn't time sensitive the best trick that
| I have found is to exclude the last 10-15 years from search
| results. I've setup a Firefox keyword searches[1] for this,
| and find myself using them for the majority of my
| searches...
|
| OMG. I'm _so_ happy how much AI is improving our lives
| _right now_. It really is the future, and that future is
| bright.
|
| Thanks guys!
| freediver wrote:
| I use Kagi personally every day and my results are definitely
| not full of AI garbage so would like to better understand
| your context.
|
| Have you reported any of those issues to Kagi
| (support/discord/user forum)? We are pretty good at dealing
| with search quality issues.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| > I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding
| a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the
| citations manually to trying and find information.
|
| I've been doing this for years now. The normienet as I call
| it is nigh worthless, and I don't even bother trying to find
| information on it.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > We're going to need a certification for human generated
| content at some point
|
| I wrote some ideas up about this many years ago:
| https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Any source of content can be controlled or manipulated in non-
| obvious ways. And we already have strong algorithms for
| manipulating human attention (resulting in the growth of non-
| falsifiable conspiracy theories, for one). There is no clear
| approach leading out of information dystopia.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > We're going to need a certification for human generated
| content at some point.
|
| People keep saying this and I keep warning them to be careful
| what they wish for. The most likely outcome is that
| "certification of human generated content" arrives in the form
| of remote attestation where you can't get on the internet
| unless you're on a device with a cryptographically sealed boot
| chain that prevents any untrusted code from running and also
| has your camera on to make sure you're a human. It won't be
| required by law, but no real websites will let you sign in
| without it, and any sites that don't use it will be overrun
| with junk.
|
| I hate this future but it's looking increasingly inevitable.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Your unauthorized access has been reported to the Fair Use
| Bureau.
| Animats wrote:
| That's how the Internet works in China.
| drusepth wrote:
| I'm glad that Kagi (and others) exist as an alternative for
| people who don't want generative AI in their searches.
|
| Personally, I'm excited about more generative AI being added to
| my search results, and I'll probably switch to whichever search
| engine ends up with the best version of it.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| This peacock thing was the last straw for me. I installed
| Kagi just moments ago.
|
| And of course the first image for "baby peacock" is the same
| white chick thing... obviously because this story is making
| the rounds --_--
| oktoberpaard wrote:
| Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they're not talking
| about AI features of the search engine itself (Kagi has those
| too), but about nonsensical AI generated content on the web
| that exist solely for the purpose of getting you clicking on
| some ads. Kagi tries to make those sites stand out less on
| the search results.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| AI tools on the search page: sure, cool. I use perplexity a
| lot, actually. I'm in favor of this.
|
| Search results that are full of content mills serving pre-
| genned content: no thanks. It's in the same category as those
| fake stackoverflow scrape sites.
| i80and wrote:
| Unfortunately, as much as I do like Kagi overall, it goes out
| of its way to inject AI slop into the results with its sketchy
| summarization feature
| ninininino wrote:
| human-verified content is going to be the next billion dollar
| company.
| timeon wrote:
| Revival of the curators.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Perhaps you're thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation.
|
| There is plenty of space there for more volunteer editors to
| verify content, and likewise, WMF operates its own cloud
| platform where developers are automating tools that do
| maintenance and transformation on the human-contributed
| content.
|
| Then, there is Wikidata, a machine-readable Wiki. Many other
| projects draw data from here, so that it can be localized and
| presented appropriately. Yet, its UI and SPARQL language are
| accessible to ordinary users, so have fun verifying the
| content there, too!
| dan-robertson wrote:
| My memory is that these were pretty terrible long before the
| generative ai boom.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| We need certification for human generated content for
| yesterday.
|
| Not only that, we desperately need cryptographic prof that
| content X was produced by person Y.
| bagels wrote:
| How can that ever work in a world filled with people that are
| eager to lie to you?
| FabHK wrote:
| digital signatures?
| arp242 wrote:
| But I can generate something with AI and then sign it
| myself and say "I wrote it, pinky promise".
|
| Since most people don't write anything on the internet, I
| can pay people $5 to use their signature and operate a
| "sign farm".
|
| Look at the effort these people go though to send their
| spam.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Sure, but we're working with a real person's reputation.
| If they are willing to gamble with AI, that's their
| problem.
|
| I'm hoping for a "this human being validated this
| message". I think that alone could solve multiple
| problems.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It won't end until the motivation ends. Referrals , and ad
| revenue.
| BeetleB wrote:
| product X vs Y are not really any worse now than pre-GPT (i.e.
| they were absolute crap long before GPT came on to the scene).
| treflop wrote:
| Before AI, product comparison sites were ramblings of interns
| paid by people who found out you could make money from SEO-
| optimized blogs.
|
| And long before the Internet, people slapped random concoctions
| together and sold them as medicine, advertising them as cure-
| alls.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I'm not sure human-generated content is any better on the
| whole. BS-laden drivel has been pervasive for some time now,
| even before AI started taking over.
|
| I'm talking about those 300-word, ad-ridden crap articles that
| are SEO'd right to the top, and if you're lucky you might get
| the 3-word answer you were looking for: "<300 words of shit>...
| and in conclusion, <1-step answer>.". Anyway, humans have been
| getting paid pennies to write those for a while.
|
| AI just turns the throughput on that up to 11, where there's
| just no end in sight. I think this is like the primary failure
| mode of AI at this point. It's not going to kill us - we're
| going to use it to kill the internet. OTOH, maybe then we just
| go outside and play.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Whether something is human generated is (mostly) beside the
| point. The problem is that spam is incentivized today. Any
| solution must directly attack the financial incentive to spam.
| Therefore what's needed for a start is for search engines to
| heavily downweight ads, trackers, and affiliate links
| (obviously search engines run by ad companies will not do
| this). Shilling (e.g. on reddit) should be handled as criminal
| fraud.
| oniony wrote:
| I noticed recently when searching for images of cities that
| they're nearly all over-the-top unrealistic HDR images, beyond
| what you used to find in an travel agent's catalogue.
| robsh wrote:
| DDG/Bing had only one Ai image for my search of baby peafowl.
| Unfortunately the one AI image was from stock.adobe.com
| alkonaut wrote:
| Make a search engine that doesn't have AI result except when I
| specifically ask for it, or you soon won't have a search engine
| business.
|
| A really quick fix is to search with "-ai" and that Google
| doesn't do this implicitly for images is really strange.
| headsupernova wrote:
| How do you expect them to implement that?
| zendaven wrote:
| The hard part is identifying what's AI generated and what's
| not.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Drives me nuts. The internet is dead.
|
| I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to
| tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare
| trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content
| farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every
| paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls
| with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a
| second rapid-fire modal popup asking me to join the newsletter to
| "become a friend"
|
| For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find
| legitimate information anymore.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah, I've had this experience as well. I'll have to go 4 or 5
| pages deep in the results to get to a forum thread someone
| wrote in 2005 referencing a product that doesn't exist anymore
| plus a bunch of advice that's mostly still applicable.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go
| find legitimate information anymore.
|
| This is frightening and, I fear, true.
|
| But I'd also add one odd little counterpoint: some of the most
| useful discussions and learning experiences I've had in the
| last four years have happened in _private_ Facebook groups. As
| soon as the incentive to build a following using growth-hacking
| and AI -- which private groups mitigate to a greater extent --
| is taken away, you get back to the helpful stuff.
|
| The FreeCAD group on Facebook is great, for example. And there
| are private photography groups, 3D printing groups, music
| groups etc., where people have an incentive to be authentic.
|
| Public Facebook feeds are drowning in AI slop. But people who
| manage their own groups are keeping the spirit alive. It's
| almost at the point where I think Facebook will ultimately
| morph into a paid groups platform.
| thiht wrote:
| For this kind of search, YouTube and TikTok (yes, TikTok) are
| your best bet. Videos are not (completely) flooded by AI (yet)
| and you can find pretty much anything about manual work.
|
| I prefer text content to videos by a long shot, but genuine,
| human text content is almost dead. Reddit might be one of the
| rare exceptions for now. There are also random, still active,
| old school forums for lots of things but they tend to become
| extremely hard to find.
| whalesalad wrote:
| You are right that youtube is better but so much of that
| content is also biased towards sponsors. At least the good
| instructional content with high production value tends to be
| very heavy on sponsorships. The indie stuff can be great, but
| you are gonna have a 720p shaky camera with terrible lighting
| and lots of umms and backstories about why I am redoing my
| vintage farmhouse (a-la the recipe meme where every recipe
| page has a 32 paragraph preamble before the actual recipe)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| For what it's worth, the last time I had a home improvement
| project I needed youtube help with, the one-and-a-half
| minute mumble-tronic video shot on a Nokia brick-phone was
| the most helpful one.
|
| Would I have preferred a nice 1080p, shot in good lighting
| on a flat white table? Yes. But those also tend to be 30
| minutes along, and as you said, with a sponsorship for
| HurfDurfVPN in the middle.
| Retr0id wrote:
| AI-generated youtube videos are here too, although they're
| fairly easy to spot for now. The general formula seems to be
| a bunch of stock images / AI-generated images / stock footage
| relevant to the video title, with a LLM-generated script read
| out by an elevenlabs-style voice.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| Gaining information from a video (often just someone talking
| into their phone) feels like sucking a milkshake through a
| coffee stirrer compared to reading a forum post written by a
| human. Worse, you can't see how deep that milkshake is at a
| glance, so you may end up with just a sip from a melted
| puddle vs. the big volume of content you wanted.
| neaden wrote:
| IME for home improvement Youtube is the best resource, though I
| can understand if you were hoping for text and pictures.
| coldpie wrote:
| Also your local library probably has a bunch of home
| improvement books. They're probably from the 80s, but trim
| painting techniques don't change that much.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| What you can do in the library is sample a wide variety of
| the books in the topic you want, and soon you'll identify
| an author, or publisher, as your favorite, and then you can
| go purchase more in their series, and consider donating
| them back to the library when you're done with the project!
| eesmith wrote:
| Get a general purpose home maintenance book.
|
| For example,
| https://archive.org/details/stanleyhomerepai0000fine/page/14...
| links to the chapter "Painting Trim the Right Way" from the
| book Stanley Home Repairs, 2014.
|
| Could also look at used book stores. Home repair hasn't changed
| much.
|
| Edit: Could even fire up Wine and try the CD-ROM "Black &
| Decker Everyday Home Repairs" (published by Broderbund) at
| https://archive.org/details/BlackDeckerEverydayHomeRepairsBr...
| . https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3424503-everyday-home-
| re... says;
|
| > Like its predecessor in book format, the CD-ROM version
| offers easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions on more than
| 100 common household problems, from how to fix a leaky faucet
| to repairing hardwood floors. What's more, the CD-ROM version
| incorporates animation and narration to help make the repair
| project even easier to understand and complete. Instructions
| can be viewed one step at a time or all at once, and, if
| desired, can be printed out and taken directly to the repair
| site. Included with each repair project is the projected time
| needed to complete the work, estimated cost, and a list of
| materials and tools needed.
|
| That sounds pretty nifty, actually!
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think this and validated sources are the best direction.
|
| A trip to the bookstore to buy "x for dummies" can save
| dozens of hours of web searching.
|
| The current iteration of the internet and AI is lacking
| depth, detail, and expertise.
|
| You can find 1 million shallow answers on reddit, or echoed
| in AI, but anything more than the most cursory introduction
| is buried.
|
| Not only is shallow information easier to generate, it is
| what most users want, and therefore most engines and services
| cater to it.
|
| To find better content,you need to go to specialty outlets
| that don't cater to the lowest common denominator.
| plinnie wrote:
| It sounds a bit unfair to use content from a site without
| crediting the source in an obvious way. I'm sure this shameless
| content hijacking can't continue as in the end there will not be
| any source to query. Robots.txt should allow meta-tags like block
| 'all AI' bots (or these AI companies should pay their sources).
| lexicality wrote:
| I've started thinking more and more about a short throwaway
| conversation in Anathem about how the internet in their world is
| absolutely ruined by AI and the only solution they have left is a
| user driven reputation system for entities and how one of the
| characters just earned a lot of "reputons" for recording an
| event.
|
| Mostly I think about how something like that is going to be
| signed into law by some state and it'll require everything you do
| to be linked to your government issued ID card so they can
| "prove" you're not spreading AI misinformation and all the
| horrendous unintended side effects that will spread from there.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| _" Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority
| of what's on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be
| filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have
| been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of
| the Reconstitution."_
|
| ...
|
| _" Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry
| repute auction. Don't even bother trying to parse that. The
| acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn't been a true
| asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve
| the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most
| cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase
| transition to occur in the reputon glass - never mind - and
| another day after that to make sure you aren't just being
| spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation."_
|
| Fantastic book. I read it twice so far, highly recommended. So
| many little off-handed conceptual gems everywhere.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Luckily, Altman already has Worldcoin revved up and ready to
| go! Isn't that convenient?!
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| I wonder: do all the HNers who are excited about their GenAI
| product or wrapper or startup understand, at a fundamental level,
| that they are an intrinsic part of this deterioration?
|
| Or is this one of those fundamental attribution error things:
|
| - MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to save
| time
|
| - THEIR product is just a poorly-though-out slop generator
|
| Does it occur to people to instead be part of something real and
| visceral, and not just blame social media's ad-driven impression
| model, not pretend they are only part of a trend for which they
| can't be totally blamed?
| elliotec wrote:
| They want money, they're riding the hype wave, not advancing
| anything and I'm sure most or all know it.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Sure but doesn't every technological development have these
| tradeoffs?
|
| You could say what you say about anyone at any time. Where do
| _you_ draw the line? I guarantee you 'll be guilty of the exact
| same thing. I don't want to generalize, but IMO this sentiment
| of yours, I hear most loudly from software engineers far
| removed from ordinary non-technical end users: is making
| beautiful new LISPs and CNIs and Python package auditing tools
| the only valid work with seemingly no tradeoffs?
| griftwood wrote:
| Every technical advancement has tradeoffs. Not every
| technical advancement has billions of dollars sloshing around
| doing absolutely nothing except making the web worse and
| further ruining the environment. What a shockingly bad-faith
| way to interpret GP's argument, wow.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The comment is an interesting but very cookie cutter sort
| of vamp and drama. The comment trades in a bunch of
| generalization, much like yours, and you know,
| generalization doesn't feel good when it directly attacks
| you.
|
| I don't sincerely believe that people who are working on
| Kubernetes features or observability tools are bad people.
| Do high drama personalities who engage in a mode of
| discourse of "wow" and "shockingly" say valid things too?
| Yeah. But it's as simple as, log in your own eye before you
| worry about the thorns in others. Exceptionally ironic
| because the poster is vamping about "Attribution errors."
| Another POV is, shysters project.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| The problem with this line of reasoning is that things can
| get steadily worse and you'll never be allowed to say or do
| anything about it.
|
| No, everything is not the same as everything else.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > I hear most loudly from software engineers far removed from
| ordinary non-technical end users
|
| I am _absolutely not_ far removed from non-technical end
| users. They are my client base, ultimately. As a freelancer I
| focus on building real things that make things better for
| people whose faces and voices I get to know. GenAI will be
| _useless_ to them, because it is _antithetical_ to what they
| do.
|
| And that focus is only getting keener; I want nothing to do
| with the AI-generated web.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > They are my client base, ultimately... I focus on
| building real things that make things better for people...
| faces and voices I get to know.
|
| So what I'm hearing is, "I agree very strongly with the
| people who pay me." Or to put it in your words:
|
| "MY product is a powerful tool for creators who wish to
| save time."
|
| "THEIR product is just a poorly-thought-out slop generator"
| darajava wrote:
| Are you saying AI isn't useful? My product is painstakingly
| crafted and uses AI but in my opinion it uses it tastefully and
| with great utility. Also 95%+ of my development efforts are not
| on improving the AI even though I use a .ai TLD. I think it's
| crazy for a modern company/product _not_ to use AI, and the
| grifters building clear wrappers for GPT and other insanely
| low-quality efforts are already pretty much dead.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > Are you saying AI isn't useful? My product is painstakingly
| crafted and uses AI but in my opinion it uses it tastefully
| and with great utility.
|
| Sure. And THEIR products are just thoughtless slop
| generators.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Was it ever any different with social media, surveillance
| advertising, SEO, NFTs, etc?
| carabiner wrote:
| Did they care over the past 10 years where they decimated
| social lives, city night life, and humanity?
| https://sherwood.news/world/still-searching-for-that-connect...
| dang wrote:
| Unfortunately your comment is doing the same thing, just at a
| different level--something like this:
|
| - _I_ am a thoughtful technologist, building real things for
| real people, concerned about others and the social impact of my
| work;
|
| - _they_ are greedy and ignorant, destroying society for short-
| term personal gain, no matter what the consequences.
|
| It's human nature to put badness on an abstract _them_ , but we
| don't get anywhere that way. It's good for getting agreement
| (e.g. upvotes), because we all put ourselves in that sweet _I_
| bucket and participate in the down-with- _them_ feeling. But it
| only leads to more of what everyone decries.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| There's a sort of "technological fundamental attribution error"
| that comes into play a lot with new technologies. Every past
| technology has, whatever its benefits to humanity, become
| substantially tarnished by abuse and malicious use. But this
| one won't be! Promise!
|
| That said, I don't really think this is a tide any individual
| market actor can reasonably stem. It's going to require some
| pretty fundamental changes in the way we use the internet.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| You have only had google image search for what, 20-years? Why
| do you think it is a fundamental part of humanity's growth
| story?
|
| You talk about being a part of something "real and visceral"
| but you're complaining about the demise of being able to sit at
| your desk and see pictures of wildlife. Maybe it's okay that
| google image search dies and makes people go out and find the
| wildlife they want to see.
|
| The internet, even in its best format (e.g. ad-free, free
| access information for all; and communication with all of
| humanity) has a ton of real downsides. It's not clear to me
| that AI should be strangled in its infancy to save the internet
| (which does _not_ exist in that "best" format).
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Maybe it 's okay that google image search dies and makes
| people go out and find the wildlife they want to see._
|
| I don't think that is what will happen if google images dies.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you use the applicable phrase "peacock chick" or "peacock
| hatchling" then the results are better. Garbage in and all that.
| macinjosh wrote:
| "peacock chick" has many more real images than AI
| bparsons wrote:
| I am reminded of the decline of MySpace. It was just thousands of
| bots posing as users, posting ads on people's pages for e-books,
| pharmaceuticals etc. The bots remained talking to each other long
| after the last humans left.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| It seems like the image results for "baby peacock" are returning
| articles talking about AI-generated photos of baby peacocks due
| to some recent trend involving an AI-generated baby peacock
| image.
|
| Have people tried searching for other animals? Maybe this isn't a
| case of Google being inundated with AI-generated photos, but just
| something to do with the results for this particular phrase.
| belval wrote:
| I have a hard time explaining why, perhaps because I did not know
| what a baby peacock looks like, but this somehow really drove
| home the "dark side of AI" for me.
|
| I have gotten used to trusting search results somewhat. Sure
| there would be oddball results and nearly non-sensical ones, but
| they would be scarce through a sea of relevant images. Now with
| this, I would be blind to the things I don't know and as someone
| who grew up it with Google "just being there", it truly scares
| me.
| steelframe wrote:
| I'm at a juncture in my career where I'm asking what could really
| motivate me to do anything that I really feel is worth doing in
| tech. In my earlier years I remember using both CompuServe and
| Prodigy. I'm not sure if it just hindsight colored by nostalgia,
| but I yern for the feeling I had as a young teenager when I could
| explore a quirky and curated world of information.
|
| I'm starting to think that all this AI stuff has finally pushed
| the ads-based Internet past its tipping point.
|
| I feel I could be motivated to work on a walled garden with
| moderation paid for by subscription fees. What would it be worth
| to you to have an entirely new online experience free of all the
| enshittification of the past 15 years?
|
| Personally, I pay for Kagi just to have a small taste of what
| that could be like. But what if not just the search engine, but
| also all the sites be funded entirely by a subscription fee paid
| to the service profider? What if privacy could be a foremost
| feature of that world? What if advertising and astroturfing were
| strictly forbidden, and human authors would have to be vetted by
| other humans to be allowed a place in this world? "This content
| is Certified ads- and AI-Free(tm)."
|
| I really don't know how well something like that would turn out
| in 2024, but I feel I wouldn't be alone in wanting to give it a
| try.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| We could also have a public library but for the Internet. A
| list of sites and articles curated and maintained by librarians
| and experts and paid for by local taxes.
| Metricon wrote:
| There are a number of ways this might get solved, but I would
| speculate that it will generally be solved by adding image
| metadata that is signed by a certificate authority similar to the
| way SSL certificates are assigned to domains.
|
| I think eventually all digital cameras and image scanners will
| securely hash and sign images just as forensic cameras do to
| certify that an image was "captured" instead of generated.
|
| Of course this leaves a grey area for image editing applications
| such as Photoshop, so there may also need to be some other level
| of certificate base signing introduced there as well.
| worik wrote:
| Is this showing the world your search bubble?
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| A lot of comments amount to: "Internet is dead". AI is crap for
| sure but far from making Internet dead or useless. Consider: -
| emails, - bills and payments, - banking, - searching for and
| buying stuff (assuming you already know what you want that is), -
| calls/chats - whatsapp, messenger, etc. - youtube (for learning),
| - social stuff - however bad.
|
| AI? This shall pass too. Internet will find its way.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| If you Google meat Cove it's presented as a "human settlement" in
| Nova Scotia
|
| I predict the word meat fucked with the AI
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Try google images of "white couple". You would be surprised with
| irrelevant results.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I tried it and it was 95% relevant images. Not sure what you
| mean.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| 30% are mixed, 20% non-white in mine results.
| vunderba wrote:
| After Google continued to make it progressively more difficult to
| use their Image search to navigate/download to the actual image I
| wrote an image search tool that could be hot keyed from your OS
| to search the google image repository and copy to clipboard in a
| fast manner using a custom Google Search Engine id.
|
| About a year back I found that 90% of the results I was getting
| were AI generated, so I added a flag "No AI" which basically acts
| as a quick and dirty filter by limiting results to pre-2022. It's
| not perfect but it works as a stopgap measure.
|
| https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show
| carabiner wrote:
| OpenAI must be destroyed!
| inerte wrote:
| Ever since Sora I've been thinking about the overall death of the
| internet "content". It all came back stronger with Meta Movie
| Gen.
|
| I know there are no girls on the internet, but this AI crap is on
| another level. Even if find a trustworthy creator, I might be
| seeing a fake video of them. Say I like MKBHD reviews, I will
| need to pay attention if I am really watching his video on his
| official channel.
|
| My guard will have to be up so much, all the time, I actually
| don't think it will even be healthy to "consume content" anymore.
| Why live a life where almost everything I see can be a lie? Makes
| me not want to use any of this anymore.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| > My guard will have to be up so much, all the time, I actually
| don't think it will even be healthy to "consume content"
| anymore. Why live a life where almost everything I see can be a
| lie? Makes me not want to use any of this anymore.
|
| While I generally agree with your whole comment, I feel like
| this part has been true for years on social media well before
| AI generated content hit the scene.
| inerte wrote:
| True, and we can go back to any type of media who always have
| a bias, but overall it just feels different. On one hand,
| humans writing and humans communicating, even if they have an
| agenda, is one thing. On the other hand, machines writing and
| machines communicating is a different level.
|
| Maybe I am overall in a bad mood regarding all this, but this
| recent article https://time.com/7026050/chatgpt-quit-
| teaching-ai-essay/ also struck a chord. Do I really wanna
| spend my time reading/watching machines talking to each
| other? How long until browsing Reddit or HN will be
| worthless?
|
| Do I wanna get old with lower cognitive abilities and become
| this? https://slate.com/advice/2024/10/grandparents-
| misinformation...
| k__ wrote:
| The internet needs strong provenance to ensure content is created
| by trusted parties.
|
| It has to be done in a decentralised way to ensure no enterprise
| controls who is trusted and who isn't.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Uh?, this seems totally normal, a few clear AI images here and
| there but all those seem legi...
|
| And then I remembered that I was on duckduckgo.
| latentsea wrote:
| This phenomenon is also heavily starting to affect NSFW images
| too. It is awful.
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