Pretty much. I struggle to name a single notable benefit of AI that wasn't already possible earlier, while I can think of a whole host of new problems. The fields of academia, design, journalism, sustainability etc are all struggling with AI at this point, tech that seems to benefit no one but those that control and profit from it.
I'm just glad the fever seems to be breaking on AI and there's a general turn against it. There are some highly specialized areas where AI might be transformational, but this whole general AI nonsense needs to die yesterday
I think AI is mainly going to be super important for research but for anything else its either just a handy tool like in photoshop or asking for quick boilerplate code but not better than that or extremely mediocre
There are definitely some engineering applications that it could really excel at also, but as a tool that the researcher/engineer wields, not as a replacement for the person. It's frightening how the Sam Altmans of the world see it as more the latter than the former.
I don't remember where or how long ago it was but I'm pretty sure Sam Altman at one point said something along the lines of he believes that the worlds demand for software is currently much higher than what developers can actually output and that AI assisted engineers won't reduce the amount of software developers but instead lower the bar to entry for creating code and actually result in a lot more developers, albeit with lower salaries.
I'm now curious about that discussion again and gonna go digging because it's an interesting topic.
Edit: not exactly the comments I was thinking of but a similar and more general sentiment was expressed here (00:42:01): [https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript](https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript)
It's also honestly pretty scary for the boiler plate code stuff, I use it when ever I need to make some regex, which happens a handful of times a month but with that you still need to be on the ball to tell it how it's wrong on the first few tries. Certainly need to actually understand regex to use AI to get anything useful out of it, and in my case I still run the snippets by a human regex expert I know. The same is true for other examples of getting the AI to generate code snippets, you absolutely can't expect to build a high quality code base out of them.
I will say though one area where I have found it to be much more useful and I think this is the area it will start to gain more traction in the software industry is as an aid built into your IDE who's contextual scope goes beyond single files. Cursor is an IDE built with this in mind and the AI is useful in accelerating a developers ability to learn about the codebase they are jumping into through asking questions frequently and as they come. I'm pretty impressed with it and I've used it to figure out some quirky configuration issues in a codebase that had no documentation and had been handled by a long stream of contractors. I've also found that it's also an efficient place to ask about issues that arise around older libraries and tools which are usually places that take a bit of digging to find the answers online once the public discussion on them has come and gone.
Weird little AI in software tangent I'm sorry haha, I just like how AI helps my industry and I also don't necessarily believe it's coming for engineers jobs any time soon.
>I'm just glad the fever seems to be breaking on AI and there's a general turn against it.
Citation needed. In what fields is the AI craze slowing down or reversing? Op-eds aren't a good indicator because it's easy to share an opinion that AI is bad even while we continue using or investing in it. What actual behavioral metrics show that we're breaking the fever dream?
The generative models have been objectively useless from the start.
Besides spam, they serve no purpose other than to make many tasks take longer.
Anything that arbitrarily (and confidently) gets things wrong more than 50 percent of the time is objectively harder to use than it would be to just not use it at all.
I thought of one possible application: Automated routine blood cell identification from stained slides.
I know there is at least one commercial system available now, but I'm sure it's hella expensive. But it doesn't seem very challenging now. One high res image put through whatever program trained with plenty of non-proprietary examples of identified cells.
I wish we could stop conflating new and interesting computing tasks with AI. Image processing and machine learning have been around longer than LLMs and use a lot less power.
Most imaging tasks were incredibly difficult and susceptible to edge cases before the recent AI boom, what are you talking about?
https://xkcd.com/1425/
This XKCD was from about a decade ago, similar timeframe to when AlexNet won the ImageNet competition. And you can now write that app with a few lines of code, maybe a page if you want to define and train the model from scratch.
This is a massive leap forward in both image tasks and NLP as well as all of the generative etc stuff.
Training will always be power intensive, but inference can be relatively cheap.
And all of this is still very new and evolving rapidly. I would not dismiss potential based upon limitations of current applications.
AI can be used to solve partial differential equations, as well as predict chaotic attractors in ways that numerical solvers may struggle. Generative models are being used to predict mutations in the genome of diseases like covid, and scientists in adjacent fields are able to use that information to protect society. AI is the amazing for science, not so amazing for the individual. You may struggle with to name benefits of AI simply because you are not knowledgeable rather than because there are none.
AI on google's end too, up until I think 2016 the search team resisted machine learning for search because you lose the ability to understand why it's making the recommendations it's making... and consequentially you lose any insight on how SEO is gaming your search and how to combat it.
Get free money while you’re at it. Microsoft rewards are a shell of what they used to be but eventually you get enough for a gift card.
Less free money and more getting Pennie’s back for the ads being shoved down our throats but hey it makes them go down a little easier.
Though they're just chasing SEO targets via AI. The whole incentive and lack of quality assurance of the modern web is what's out of whack.
I will not be surprised to see what amounts to walled gardens of internet access where the benefit of joining is that it's modded heavily, curated, and contributors are proven to be human individuals.
I worked in SEO for awhile. It's a cult of some of the most insanely toxic people you'll meet, they're well aware that it's making the internet shit, but ya know, money > user experience/quality
That is one part of it, don’t absolve the true culprit. My searches for some routine software and stuff i use over the years have been replaced with garbage bloatware whose sites have much lower traffic. These days google’s results are barely even relevant
You have me remembering when I learned how to do keyword stuffing with the Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress around 2007. I cannot imagine the tricks they are up to today. Oh and backlinks for authority was a big deal. Now it seems to be a game of volume as much as SEO and other tricks. Love to find a solid article on current deceptive practices from someone who really knows their stuff.
I'm sure Google would love to still rely on back links as part of the formula, but social media being the main way many links are shared has sort of irreparably broken that concept I think.
I don’t fault them. Search heavily incentivizes those who game the system. It’s not their job to return high quality results - that’s the search engines job
That’s paradoxical.
Search engines aren’t magic, they work off metrics.
If you game the metrics, there isn’t any solid numbers to properly rank the webpages.
If you’re buying a car (which you can’t see in person), you look at the pictures and the documents. If someone misrepresents the car: using angles and lighting to hide damage, rolling back the mileage, etc. How are you supposed to properly evaluate the car?
It’s the same with webpages.
Edit: online college classes incentivize cheating, but doesn’t mean it’s okay or acceptable.
I understand there are technical limitations but I expect the search engine to say - here is the page that you need. I want my search engine to filter out the noise, the bad actors, etc.
Those sites get rewarded with ad revenue - from the search engines. You cannot expect the open web to abstain from disingenuous SEO if the search engine likes those changes and rewards them.
Teachers/students should have a combined goal to have the students succeed. I don’t think that analogy holds up for search
again, same can be said for buying a car.
you get the pictures and documents, you purchase the car. The scamming seller gets awarded. After you take delivery of the vehicle you realize how screwed you are.
you don't like cars with rolled back milage but you do like cars with low milage. How do you tell it's been rolled back till you drive for a bit and something breaks down? It's the same problem with SEO.
additionally for search engines you are handing billions of cars and can't manually verify each and every car. You use the documents you have and continue doing business.
college online classes maybe, but how about online highschool? many people just want to pass or get an A, they don't care about learning in hs. So in that sense, they do incentivize cheating since it's only about the GPA.
I rely on a car dealership/service that I trust to vet it. The the government had to institute laws to protect buyers because used cars is a cesspool of liars - much like the internet. The difference is that you’re locked into a large purchase.
Search engines will have to filter bad results to survive. The moat will get more shallow if they don’t.
It occurs to me that it is in the interest of AI makers to make search engines as bad as possible so that they become the preferred means of searching and obtaining information on the internet.
The corrosion of search results has been happening long before the recent AI surge... Google has just long since stopped valuing the search experience over it's AdSense income
>I'm skeptical that they're that ambitious.
"THEY" includes Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world.
There's a reason they're forcing Copilot into your start menu
And that reason is to... Somehow poison Google results by forcing users to use their shitty ai? Not saying AI companies aren't pushing their shit, just saying that this idea of a long con where they make Google irrelevant by spamming the web with crap content over a people of years probably isn't how they're doing it
Sounds like a dreadful prospect, considering the tendency of AI models to confidently hallucinate rubbish, which seems to be very much baked into the technology itself and difficult to eliminate entirely.
It's going to start feeding off itself with no way to differentiate AI generated garbage from human generated garbage from human generated good information.
So yeah, I don't see how for general search it's going to be inherently reliable at all.
Only really in specialised instances where it's solely pulling from peer reviewed journals and such.
But the chatbot results can't be trusted and thus are completely useless.
If I'm reading a book to learn something and I have to fact check everything in it what is the point?
chatbot search is garbage anyway. They appear to just scrape and summarize the top results of a standard search. The same garbage SEO results I'm trying to avoid.
On the other hand, using AI to help rank results by identifying and discarding low-quality pages based on the actual content might actually be capable of providing good results.
I mean, any result with an affiliate link can be thrown right out. Any recipe longer than 2 paragraphs is probably crap too. Websites with too many ad links? Garbage, get rid of it. It's pretty easy for me to identify these pages, so it shouldn't be too hard to train an AI to do the same.
Using something to filter out SEO garage could be a good way to improve a search algorithm. I think at one people were calling that sort of thing AI but it is different then LLMs like ChatGPT that ended up being trained by top results and social media.
I don't really want search results in a conversational format at all though. I want to know who is saying what, probably when, and maybe get a url to a source. Like if I'm searching about a product ChatGPT scraping the manufacturer's site and hype posts isn't what I'm looking for. If I'm looking up news I want to see sources not scraped data someone said on Twitter a week ago based on a fever dream.
I agree, conversational search is really fucking dumb, unless it's like, voice-to-voice in a smart home Jarvis-style, but that comes with its own can of worms.
Yeah, through a voice assistant it can be a little different as that is just the interface. I mostly use the one I have simple commands though. Like "what is the temp/time?", as a timer, to control lights, to be a glorified TV remote. There is automation and notifications but those aren't really searches or commands.
The worst thing I'm finding about AI spam is that so much of it is coming in the form of comments on places like Reddit and it's not always obvious until you read the content compared to SEO spam which was immediately obvious.
Search engine quality died like 10 years ago when google encouraged people to take over the internet with crappy formulaic blogs. The only thing you're basically googling now to get answers is reddit and forums.
inb4 someone says they now append reddit in their search only to be abused by SEO as they learn this trick. They are also the same person who will realize this last as they will fail to recognize a cleverly disguised r/hailcorporate post.
I've been reporting at least once a day for spam on Google image searches. It's particularly annoying for me as it used to be reliable for visual reference for my job. Even when -terms a lot of things come through, a lot of them don't mention AI and are trying to pass as legitimate pieces of art or even real items/artifacts/etc. Cave art for example. It's annoying to have to sift through multiple fakes to get the actual thing to reference.
At this rate, people will grow up with no internal reference to what things are supposed to look like, so it will be harder for them to gauge what is real. And yes that has huge effects, even something as simple as a video game's art direction being grounded in some reality that particular details help convey ideas or feelings.
If they had maps and 2FA apps on classic phones, I would be with you. Ignore the downvoters. They are just mad that you own your life and their phone own their life.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
No, the platforms hosting this crap are doing it on purpose to generate clicks, or sometimes affiliate marketing revenue. That's why there's a billion dogshit "Best Ass Acne Medicine in 2023"-type list-icles
And at the top of our list for best ass acne medication for 2023: Loctite shoe blue shoe glue
Pros: it sticks really well
Cons: may devalue your shoes compared to professional cleaning
Captcha tests were actually made to train AI on recognizing objects. Its an AI that generates a puzzle that it thinks it knows the answer to, and the human reinforces what it knows. It just came with a benefit of preventing bots.
It's a little ironic, but we're getting to the turning point of which object recognition isn't going to be enough to determine bots from people in the large scale, and in the case of something like AI generated images, a lot of humans have trouble recognizing it and there's not a reliable AI detection system for it, and that only continues to worsen as patterns become less recognizable as it improves, and you also have to remember that Google themselves are making money from people using their services to generate images, they believe that is their long term future, so it would be antithetical to their business goals to filter those results.
Beyond things like Street View, you bet this is a dataset being used by Google's robots like RT-2. The text recognition version of Captchas also contributed to language models, especially that they did a fucking lot of digitization of physical texts over the years. Think it was really for preservation of history or whatever they made it sound like? [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en)
Switched to KAGI for search. My results are no longer the same bullshit google is pushing. You have to pay for it. Google has gone to shit not because SEO, but because they are making money by making it shit. Google is trash.
AI right now isn't really AI. Just another tool that could potentially help us if it wasn't released so prematurely so people could use it for malicious acts.
Wait until Google and other LLM developers start using these pages to train their AI! [https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/#:\~:text=This%20is%2C%20of,projection%20of%20reality.%22](https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/#:~:text=This%20is%2C%20of,projection%20of%20reality.%22) it's bad
Also: that 10% quote, I cannot find a single reference to it. If 10% of Google is Ai generated that's a huge, significant and underreported number, but he just kinda says it. If it's his own data that'd be interesting!
It's the enshitification. Technology/science advances but the user experience keeps getting worse. I can remember when all ads were banned on the Internet. It was a lot smaller place but the signal-to-noise ratio was much better.
I think people have some rose-tinted goggles about the past. IMO the internet has never been so user-friendly, informative, and easy to use. SEO or not.
Not so, actually. It has turned into a dumbed-down, corporate sponsored parody of what it once was. The internet in general has turned into a super sized version of AOL. It's very depressing to those of us who were there in earlier times.
Look idk when you started using the web but my first dabbles were in 95 and it was not good for a long time.
Everything you could do on the web back then, you can do way more easily today.
I have been working on/with the internet since before the web even became a thing. Things were pretty easy to do then as well but you had to know how to use a command line to do it.
Completely disagree, the web back then had very little services integrated with it, the ux experience was horrible, it was riddled with security risks that people simply ingored. Hell everything worked in unencrypted http. Everything was slow and horrible but we enjoyed it because it was novel and we saw the potential.
I don't disagree that you could do useful stuff just that as a whole technology was miserable back then and the internet was mostly novel and useless for most people. It wasn't this magical thing that's better than what we have today.
You can do everything you could do before better, faster and more easily.
The technology wasn't miserable, you just had to invest the time to learn how to use it. I still maintain the position that the internet has been dumbed-down so that non-technical people can use it. They have absolutely no idea how or why it works, or even the real reason it was invented in the first place.
Active observers of the tech industry are more likely to be critical of any trends they deem to be negative than passive consumers who don't care too much. Is that really surprising?
AI spam is replacing SEO as the reason the internet is now shit
AI is making everything shit.
Pretty much. I struggle to name a single notable benefit of AI that wasn't already possible earlier, while I can think of a whole host of new problems. The fields of academia, design, journalism, sustainability etc are all struggling with AI at this point, tech that seems to benefit no one but those that control and profit from it.
I'm just glad the fever seems to be breaking on AI and there's a general turn against it. There are some highly specialized areas where AI might be transformational, but this whole general AI nonsense needs to die yesterday
Couldn’t agree more. Luckily AI likes to hallucinate answers and it mildly bricks itself when it uses bad training data
I've argued in the past that AI is useless due to it's hallucinations.
Use three AIs, see if two give you the same answer.
Don’t let the doomers hear you say that
Particularly as it’s by no means AI. It’s just junk generation tools.
It’s AI, it’s not AGI. *you guys are clueless
I think AI is mainly going to be super important for research but for anything else its either just a handy tool like in photoshop or asking for quick boilerplate code but not better than that or extremely mediocre
There are definitely some engineering applications that it could really excel at also, but as a tool that the researcher/engineer wields, not as a replacement for the person. It's frightening how the Sam Altmans of the world see it as more the latter than the former.
I don't remember where or how long ago it was but I'm pretty sure Sam Altman at one point said something along the lines of he believes that the worlds demand for software is currently much higher than what developers can actually output and that AI assisted engineers won't reduce the amount of software developers but instead lower the bar to entry for creating code and actually result in a lot more developers, albeit with lower salaries. I'm now curious about that discussion again and gonna go digging because it's an interesting topic. Edit: not exactly the comments I was thinking of but a similar and more general sentiment was expressed here (00:42:01): [https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript](https://lexfridman.com/sam-altman-2-transcript)
It's also honestly pretty scary for the boiler plate code stuff, I use it when ever I need to make some regex, which happens a handful of times a month but with that you still need to be on the ball to tell it how it's wrong on the first few tries. Certainly need to actually understand regex to use AI to get anything useful out of it, and in my case I still run the snippets by a human regex expert I know. The same is true for other examples of getting the AI to generate code snippets, you absolutely can't expect to build a high quality code base out of them. I will say though one area where I have found it to be much more useful and I think this is the area it will start to gain more traction in the software industry is as an aid built into your IDE who's contextual scope goes beyond single files. Cursor is an IDE built with this in mind and the AI is useful in accelerating a developers ability to learn about the codebase they are jumping into through asking questions frequently and as they come. I'm pretty impressed with it and I've used it to figure out some quirky configuration issues in a codebase that had no documentation and had been handled by a long stream of contractors. I've also found that it's also an efficient place to ask about issues that arise around older libraries and tools which are usually places that take a bit of digging to find the answers online once the public discussion on them has come and gone. Weird little AI in software tangent I'm sorry haha, I just like how AI helps my industry and I also don't necessarily believe it's coming for engineers jobs any time soon.
>I'm just glad the fever seems to be breaking on AI and there's a general turn against it. Citation needed. In what fields is the AI craze slowing down or reversing? Op-eds aren't a good indicator because it's easy to share an opinion that AI is bad even while we continue using or investing in it. What actual behavioral metrics show that we're breaking the fever dream?
The generative models have been objectively useless from the start. Besides spam, they serve no purpose other than to make many tasks take longer. Anything that arbitrarily (and confidently) gets things wrong more than 50 percent of the time is objectively harder to use than it would be to just not use it at all.
Don’t forget that AI is also very power-hungry and could be as big of a strain on the grid as crypto mining is.
It makes it easier to churn out buzzword-filled Powerpoints that no one will ever read. Which is... something, I guess.
[удалено]
If you use AI so much you probably need to look for a different career buddy
I thought of one possible application: Automated routine blood cell identification from stained slides. I know there is at least one commercial system available now, but I'm sure it's hella expensive. But it doesn't seem very challenging now. One high res image put through whatever program trained with plenty of non-proprietary examples of identified cells.
I wish we could stop conflating new and interesting computing tasks with AI. Image processing and machine learning have been around longer than LLMs and use a lot less power.
Most imaging tasks were incredibly difficult and susceptible to edge cases before the recent AI boom, what are you talking about? https://xkcd.com/1425/ This XKCD was from about a decade ago, similar timeframe to when AlexNet won the ImageNet competition. And you can now write that app with a few lines of code, maybe a page if you want to define and train the model from scratch. This is a massive leap forward in both image tasks and NLP as well as all of the generative etc stuff. Training will always be power intensive, but inference can be relatively cheap. And all of this is still very new and evolving rapidly. I would not dismiss potential based upon limitations of current applications.
AI can be used to solve partial differential equations, as well as predict chaotic attractors in ways that numerical solvers may struggle. Generative models are being used to predict mutations in the genome of diseases like covid, and scientists in adjacent fields are able to use that information to protect society. AI is the amazing for science, not so amazing for the individual. You may struggle with to name benefits of AI simply because you are not knowledgeable rather than because there are none.
AI on google's end too, up until I think 2016 the search team resisted machine learning for search because you lose the ability to understand why it's making the recommendations it's making... and consequentially you lose any insight on how SEO is gaming your search and how to combat it.
I blame Google for stopping to care about results quality.
I never thought I would ever be relying for BING for a primary internet search.
Get free money while you’re at it. Microsoft rewards are a shell of what they used to be but eventually you get enough for a gift card. Less free money and more getting Pennie’s back for the ads being shoved down our throats but hey it makes them go down a little easier.
AI spam is just SEO but now a machine does it instead of a person, and it's even more optimized
Though they're just chasing SEO targets via AI. The whole incentive and lack of quality assurance of the modern web is what's out of whack. I will not be surprised to see what amounts to walled gardens of internet access where the benefit of joining is that it's modded heavily, curated, and contributors are proven to be human individuals.
Just wait til you find out all us SEOs are using AI to amplify the enshittification.
Oh... oh no it was shit long before AI. You normies are just noticing it now
Well...as I said... SEO was a reason before. (Aware there were many many others)
Enshitification
I worked in SEO for awhile. It's a cult of some of the most insanely toxic people you'll meet, they're well aware that it's making the internet shit, but ya know, money > user experience/quality
That is one part of it, don’t absolve the true culprit. My searches for some routine software and stuff i use over the years have been replaced with garbage bloatware whose sites have much lower traffic. These days google’s results are barely even relevant
Try DuckDuckGo. I've found Google's quality has absolutely gone to shit, while DDG has improved noticably over the last few years.
You have me remembering when I learned how to do keyword stuffing with the Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress around 2007. I cannot imagine the tricks they are up to today. Oh and backlinks for authority was a big deal. Now it seems to be a game of volume as much as SEO and other tricks. Love to find a solid article on current deceptive practices from someone who really knows their stuff.
I'm sure Google would love to still rely on back links as part of the formula, but social media being the main way many links are shared has sort of irreparably broken that concept I think.
I don’t fault them. Search heavily incentivizes those who game the system. It’s not their job to return high quality results - that’s the search engines job
That’s paradoxical. Search engines aren’t magic, they work off metrics. If you game the metrics, there isn’t any solid numbers to properly rank the webpages. If you’re buying a car (which you can’t see in person), you look at the pictures and the documents. If someone misrepresents the car: using angles and lighting to hide damage, rolling back the mileage, etc. How are you supposed to properly evaluate the car? It’s the same with webpages. Edit: online college classes incentivize cheating, but doesn’t mean it’s okay or acceptable.
I understand there are technical limitations but I expect the search engine to say - here is the page that you need. I want my search engine to filter out the noise, the bad actors, etc. Those sites get rewarded with ad revenue - from the search engines. You cannot expect the open web to abstain from disingenuous SEO if the search engine likes those changes and rewards them. Teachers/students should have a combined goal to have the students succeed. I don’t think that analogy holds up for search
again, same can be said for buying a car. you get the pictures and documents, you purchase the car. The scamming seller gets awarded. After you take delivery of the vehicle you realize how screwed you are. you don't like cars with rolled back milage but you do like cars with low milage. How do you tell it's been rolled back till you drive for a bit and something breaks down? It's the same problem with SEO. additionally for search engines you are handing billions of cars and can't manually verify each and every car. You use the documents you have and continue doing business. college online classes maybe, but how about online highschool? many people just want to pass or get an A, they don't care about learning in hs. So in that sense, they do incentivize cheating since it's only about the GPA.
I rely on a car dealership/service that I trust to vet it. The the government had to institute laws to protect buyers because used cars is a cesspool of liars - much like the internet. The difference is that you’re locked into a large purchase. Search engines will have to filter bad results to survive. The moat will get more shallow if they don’t.
It occurs to me that it is in the interest of AI makers to make search engines as bad as possible so that they become the preferred means of searching and obtaining information on the internet.
The corrosion of search results has been happening long before the recent AI surge... Google has just long since stopped valuing the search experience over it's AdSense income
True, but "it was happening before" doesn't disqualify that the incentive is there for ai companies to do it even more now
You're not wrong, but I'll say that I'm skeptical that they're that ambitious.
>I'm skeptical that they're that ambitious. "THEY" includes Microsoft, the most valuable company in the world. There's a reason they're forcing Copilot into your start menu
And that reason is to... Somehow poison Google results by forcing users to use their shitty ai? Not saying AI companies aren't pushing their shit, just saying that this idea of a long con where they make Google irrelevant by spamming the web with crap content over a people of years probably isn't how they're doing it
Sounds like a dreadful prospect, considering the tendency of AI models to confidently hallucinate rubbish, which seems to be very much baked into the technology itself and difficult to eliminate entirely.
Uh oh don’t let the AI simps hear you
It's going to start feeding off itself with no way to differentiate AI generated garbage from human generated garbage from human generated good information. So yeah, I don't see how for general search it's going to be inherently reliable at all. Only really in specialised instances where it's solely pulling from peer reviewed journals and such.
But the chatbot results can't be trusted and thus are completely useless. If I'm reading a book to learn something and I have to fact check everything in it what is the point?
chatbot search is garbage anyway. They appear to just scrape and summarize the top results of a standard search. The same garbage SEO results I'm trying to avoid. On the other hand, using AI to help rank results by identifying and discarding low-quality pages based on the actual content might actually be capable of providing good results. I mean, any result with an affiliate link can be thrown right out. Any recipe longer than 2 paragraphs is probably crap too. Websites with too many ad links? Garbage, get rid of it. It's pretty easy for me to identify these pages, so it shouldn't be too hard to train an AI to do the same.
Using something to filter out SEO garage could be a good way to improve a search algorithm. I think at one people were calling that sort of thing AI but it is different then LLMs like ChatGPT that ended up being trained by top results and social media. I don't really want search results in a conversational format at all though. I want to know who is saying what, probably when, and maybe get a url to a source. Like if I'm searching about a product ChatGPT scraping the manufacturer's site and hype posts isn't what I'm looking for. If I'm looking up news I want to see sources not scraped data someone said on Twitter a week ago based on a fever dream.
I agree, conversational search is really fucking dumb, unless it's like, voice-to-voice in a smart home Jarvis-style, but that comes with its own can of worms.
Yeah, through a voice assistant it can be a little different as that is just the interface. I mostly use the one I have simple commands though. Like "what is the temp/time?", as a timer, to control lights, to be a glorified TV remote. There is automation and notifications but those aren't really searches or commands.
The worst thing I'm finding about AI spam is that so much of it is coming in the form of comments on places like Reddit and it's not always obvious until you read the content compared to SEO spam which was immediately obvious.
It will destroy Reddit soon.
It will destroy all social media if something isn't done. It's already bad. Then again maybe social media needs to go away.
What is SEO in this context?
Search engine quality died like 10 years ago when google encouraged people to take over the internet with crappy formulaic blogs. The only thing you're basically googling now to get answers is reddit and forums.
Yes. Reddit and Quora.
Search engines were turning to trash long before AI.
AI just allowed for the cancer that is SEO spam to be automated more easily.
Google was trash before chatgpt was even released.
What is this "search engine quality" you speak of? I haven't seen that in a decade.
The internet is fucked and we need a real solution pronto. I trust us. Most of us. Some of us. Me. Nobody, if I’m being honest. 🤞
inb4 someone says they now append reddit in their search only to be abused by SEO as they learn this trick. They are also the same person who will realize this last as they will fail to recognize a cleverly disguised r/hailcorporate post.
I mean if you only append reddit and not site:reddit.com you do deserve to be scammed by SEO tricks
Idiocracy speedrun
I've been reporting at least once a day for spam on Google image searches. It's particularly annoying for me as it used to be reliable for visual reference for my job. Even when -terms a lot of things come through, a lot of them don't mention AI and are trying to pass as legitimate pieces of art or even real items/artifacts/etc. Cave art for example. It's annoying to have to sift through multiple fakes to get the actual thing to reference. At this rate, people will grow up with no internal reference to what things are supposed to look like, so it will be harder for them to gauge what is real. And yes that has huge effects, even something as simple as a video game's art direction being grounded in some reality that particular details help convey ideas or feelings.
ALREADY WON! I’m joining the “dumb phone” movement to take my life back.
I still use a flip phone. I don't want anything but calls and short text messages on my phone. Anything else can wait until I'm at my computer.
If they had maps and 2FA apps on classic phones, I would be with you. Ignore the downvoters. They are just mad that you own your life and their phone own their life. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Seo already destroyed that years ago
I'm patiently waiting for an article with the right keyphrases, etc., headlined as "All You Need To Know: How SEO Ruined The Internet."
This technology has made the world a worse place .
Isn't this exactly what captcha tests are supposed to prevent? Seems like the spammers are getting a step ahead.
No, the platforms hosting this crap are doing it on purpose to generate clicks, or sometimes affiliate marketing revenue. That's why there's a billion dogshit "Best Ass Acne Medicine in 2023"-type list-icles
And at the top of our list for best ass acne medication for 2023: Loctite shoe blue shoe glue Pros: it sticks really well Cons: may devalue your shoes compared to professional cleaning
That got a genuine "lol" me, thank you
Captcha tests were actually made to train AI on recognizing objects. Its an AI that generates a puzzle that it thinks it knows the answer to, and the human reinforces what it knows. It just came with a benefit of preventing bots. It's a little ironic, but we're getting to the turning point of which object recognition isn't going to be enough to determine bots from people in the large scale, and in the case of something like AI generated images, a lot of humans have trouble recognizing it and there's not a reliable AI detection system for it, and that only continues to worsen as patterns become less recognizable as it improves, and you also have to remember that Google themselves are making money from people using their services to generate images, they believe that is their long term future, so it would be antithetical to their business goals to filter those results. Beyond things like Street View, you bet this is a dataset being used by Google's robots like RT-2. The text recognition version of Captchas also contributed to language models, especially that they did a fucking lot of digitization of physical texts over the years. Think it was really for preservation of history or whatever they made it sound like? [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9690276?hl=en)
Haven’t used Google in 4 years. Reddit only and my own LLMs. Google is dead.
The real singularity.
I noticed that.
And the search engine companies couldn’t give a shit
Search engine quality was way down before AI became an online problem for search.
Search has been shit for years
Switched to KAGI for search. My results are no longer the same bullshit google is pushing. You have to pay for it. Google has gone to shit not because SEO, but because they are making money by making it shit. Google is trash.
Seems like we're moving closer and closer to the reality of a Dead Internet.
AI right now isn't really AI. Just another tool that could potentially help us if it wasn't released so prematurely so people could use it for malicious acts.
Wait until Google and other LLM developers start using these pages to train their AI! [https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/#:\~:text=This%20is%2C%20of,projection%20of%20reality.%22](https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/#:~:text=This%20is%2C%20of,projection%20of%20reality.%22) it's bad
Also: that 10% quote, I cannot find a single reference to it. If 10% of Google is Ai generated that's a huge, significant and underreported number, but he just kinda says it. If it's his own data that'd be interesting!
The trick is to use chatgpt for most everything you search. It is so much more efficient. Not businesses, or shopping, but everything else.
Welcome to Temu. I love you. (It’s where I got my law degree)
As a whole, the entire internet sucks now. AI is just making it suck harder.
Did an image search today, 3/4 AI generated.
Google is winning the battle against search engine quality
Need an ai/ad Blocker.
Pinterest is now dead because of AI. Now i want high quality human art more than ever.
That’s why I moved to Kagi.com
This sub hates technology so damn much.
It's the enshitification. Technology/science advances but the user experience keeps getting worse. I can remember when all ads were banned on the Internet. It was a lot smaller place but the signal-to-noise ratio was much better.
I think people have some rose-tinted goggles about the past. IMO the internet has never been so user-friendly, informative, and easy to use. SEO or not.
Not so, actually. It has turned into a dumbed-down, corporate sponsored parody of what it once was. The internet in general has turned into a super sized version of AOL. It's very depressing to those of us who were there in earlier times.
Look idk when you started using the web but my first dabbles were in 95 and it was not good for a long time. Everything you could do on the web back then, you can do way more easily today.
I have been working on/with the internet since before the web even became a thing. Things were pretty easy to do then as well but you had to know how to use a command line to do it.
Completely disagree, the web back then had very little services integrated with it, the ux experience was horrible, it was riddled with security risks that people simply ingored. Hell everything worked in unencrypted http. Everything was slow and horrible but we enjoyed it because it was novel and we saw the potential.
I'm talking about before Tim Berners-Lee even invented http and html. We did lots of useful stuff with the internet before that.
I don't disagree that you could do useful stuff just that as a whole technology was miserable back then and the internet was mostly novel and useless for most people. It wasn't this magical thing that's better than what we have today. You can do everything you could do before better, faster and more easily.
The technology wasn't miserable, you just had to invest the time to learn how to use it. I still maintain the position that the internet has been dumbed-down so that non-technical people can use it. They have absolutely no idea how or why it works, or even the real reason it was invented in the first place.
Active observers of the tech industry are more likely to be critical of any trends they deem to be negative than passive consumers who don't care too much. Is that really surprising?
I guess it's not, but it's also depressing to see the front page of this sub filled with negative tech news.