With content from humans, there has to be sufficient motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in your daily life.
Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe" from that, since only people who care about cookies would bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly have to mistrust all sources of all information, which is a new thing.
Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds relevant for a lot of people.
For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet is going to be the echo chamber of that content being used to train new AI models.
The bullshit asymmetry principle puts forth that algorithmic 'bullshit' content is even worse as quantity is a quality all in itself when you're debunking the bullshit. In general the reader will not know if the producer of the bullshit is a real human or a bot. This makes the search engines job even harder as not only do you have the standard human bullshit you have to get rid of, you have an oceans torrent of AI generated bullshit that you have to waste energy on getting rid of.
HN has a common theme of saying that "Dead internet theory is wrong", I personally just think they've not waited long enough and it's becoming more true every day.
It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10 curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the commons. Even if 99.999% of it is complete nonsensical garbage, if they produce fast enough the remaining 0.001% of actually good content can still result in massive profits
> A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care.
It's less about if the businesses care and more about if the consumers care. Businesses will respond to whatever consumers are willing to tolerate.
Honestly, it'll probably be a battle around requirements to label AI-generated content so that consumers can make an informed choice about what to trust. But, given the global nature of the internet, that's probably not possible. You probably end up with private/commercial reputation rating firms, and consumers can decide who they want to trust.
If people decide they don't care about the veracity of information or don't want to put in the extra work to ensure they are consuming "true" information they you'll end up with businesses built on auto-generated garbage.
Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented scale allowing small groups of people to do things without necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides ones with financial interests in the products themselves and the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost comedic.
Yes - AI moves this to another level of scale but Google’s need to sell ad placements created the environment for that to work. When they can’t even be troubled to de-rank blatant StackExchange/GitHub/Wikipedia scrapers it created a big opportunity for these low-quality content farms limited only by their ability to generate content on every topic.
I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the web is going to be less and less trustworthy.
For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.
It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality.
Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.
Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred when large groups of undirected people got together and chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome burning.
There is a happier middleground where multiple gates exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.
Video is just a better format than text for many recipes, at least for novice cooks. The results often depend on technique as much as ingredients, and it's hard to convey technique through text.
I have never encountered GPs problem where the recipe itself (the thing I was searching for) rather than the surrounding SEO fluff was AI generated trash. If this problem widely proliferates, especially into other domains, curation is going to become absolutely vital.
There's a lot of junk writing that may or may not be authored by humans about health and fitness. Search Google for "how to do more pull-ups" and you'll find thousands of long, meandering, trash articles of generic common sense with stock images and lots of ads on spammy domains.
