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ColeSloth ,

I called this shit out like a year ago. It's the end of any viable online searching having much truth to it. All we'll have left is youtube videos from project farm to trust.

Debs ,

It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.

Wiz ,

Maybe web rings of the 90s were not such a bad idea! Let's bring 'em back!

blusterydayve26 ,

Gemini webrings are the future?

Croquette ,

They would poison that shit as well unfortunately. The concept is great though.

rottingleaf ,

Eh, how'd you do that?

Croquette ,

Do what? Webrings?

rottingleaf ,

How do you poison them.

Croquette ,

Create sites that look like legit websites, then slowly ramp-up the bullshit. Same tactic as always.

rottingleaf ,

So? Every part of a web ring is a site the webmaster of which can remove that banner at any moment.

Hugh_Jeggs ,

Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you'd heard about into Google and it'd be the first result?

Nah doesn't work anymore

Saw a trailer for a french film so I searched "french film 2024 boys live in woods seven years"

Google - 2024 BEST FRENCH FILMS/TOP TEN FRENCH FILMS YOU MUST SEE THIS YEAR/ALL TIME BEST FRENCH MOVIES

Absolute fucking gash

I've not been too impressed with Kagi search, but at least the top result there was "Frères 2024"

EatATaco ,

Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you’d heard about into Google and it’d be the first result?

I honestly don't remember this at all. I remember priding myself on my "google-fu" and how to search it to get what i, or other people, needed. Which usually required understanding the precise language that you would need to use, not something vague. But over the years it's gotten harder and harder, and now I get frustrated with how hard it has become to find something useful. I've had to go back to finding places I trust for information and looking through them.

Although, ironically, I can do what you're talking about with ai now.

Hugh_Jeggs ,

I honestly don't remember this at all.

It was absolutely a thing and one of the reasons Google became wildly popular at first

EatATaco ,

When?

Hugh_Jeggs ,

TUESDAY

rottingleaf ,

I'm feeling myself old and I'm 28.

Cause in my early childhood in 2003-2007 we would resort to search engines only when we couldn't find something by better (but more manual and social) means.

Because - mwahahaha - most of the results were machine-generated crap.

So I actually feel very uplift due to people promising the Web to get back to norm in this sense.

BurningnnTree ,

I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Generative AI has really become a poison. It'll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.

blusterydayve26 ,

You’re two years late.

Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.

https://theconversation.com/researchers-warn-we-could-run-out-of-data-to-train-ai-by-2026-what-then-216741

k110111 ,

New models already train on synthetic data. It's already a solved solution.

blusterydayve26 ,

Is it really a solution, though, or is it just GIGO?

For example, GPT-4 is about as biased as the medical literature it was trained on, not less biased than its training input, and thereby more inaccurate than humans:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(23)00225-X/fulltext

k110111 ,

All the latest models are trained on synthetic data generated on got4. Even the newer versions of gpt4. Openai realized it too late and had to edit their license after Claude was launched. Human generated data could only get us so far, recent phi 3 models which managed to perform very very well for their respective size (3b parameters) can only achieve this feat because of synthetic data generated by AI.

I didn't read the paper you mentioned, but recent LLM have progressed a lot in not just benchmarks but also when evaluated by real humans.

Simon ,

Here's my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it'll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it's going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.

The new 'humans only' internet will be the new streaming and eventually it'll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they'll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody's grandma and grampa are still on it.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

I would rather wade with bots than exist on a fully doxxed Internet.

rottingleaf ,

Yup. I have my own prediction - that humanity will finally understand the wisdom of PGP web of trust, and using that for friend-to-friend networks over Internet. After all, you can exchange public keys via scanning QR codes, it's very intuitive now.

That would be cool. No bots. Unfortunately, corps, govs and other such mythical demons really want to be able to automate influencing public opinion. So this won't happen until the potential of the Web for such influence is sucked dry. That is, until nobody in their right mind would use it.

Baylahoo ,

That sounds very reasonable as a prediction. I could see it being a pretty interesting black mirror episode. I would love it to stay as fiction though.

coarse ,

I think we'll just go back to valuing in-person interactions way more than digital ones.

Emmie ,

That’s just for small players. Big corps probably been doing it for years.

istanbullu ,

You don't get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and US gov trolls long before AI.

Rinox ,

The problem is the magnitude, but yeah, even before 2020 Google was becoming shit and being overrun by shitty blogspam trying to sell you stuff with articles clearly written by machines. The only difference is that it was easier to spot and harder to do. But they did it anyway

rottingleaf ,

These things became shit around 2009. Or immediately after becoming sufficiently popular to press out LiveJournal and other such (the original Web 2.0, or maybe Web 1.9 one should call them) platforms.

What does this have to do with search engines - well, when they existed alongside web directories and other alternative, more social and manual ways of finding information, you'd just go to that if search engines would become too direct in promotion and hiding what they don't want you to see. You'd be able to compare one to another and feel that Google works bad in this case. You wouldn't be influenced in the end result.

Now when what Google gives you became the criterion for what you're supposed to associate with such a request, and same for social media, then it was decided.

coarse ,

Search: How to do X

"First, what is X"

"Why would you want to do X"

"Finally, here's how you do X."

Just gotta repeat X as much as possible under as many different contexts to ensure your results end up at the top.

It's really disgusting and I'm saddened by how we constantly reward people like this for making the world a worse place.

TheFriar ,

“New poison has been added to arsenic. Should you stop drinking it? Subscribe to find out.”

moormaan ,

OMG 😂, so good! Your comment I mean, not arsenic.

Silentiea ,
@Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

You don't get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and US gov trolls long before AI.

Ftfy

Silentiea ,
@Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Really just "trolls" in general, but

istanbullu ,

Large chunks of reddit read like US state dep press releases.

Silentiea ,
@Silentiea@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yeah, my point was just that it'd be silly to think it was just us gov doing it and not others.

catch22 ,
@catch22@programming.dev avatar

This is a direct consequence of Google targeting Reddit posts in its search results. Hopefully forum groups like Lemmy don't go get buried under a mountain of garbage as well. As long as advertisers are able to destroy public forums and communities with ads, with ad based revenue sites like Google directing who to target. We will always be creating something great while constantly trying to keep advertisers from turning it into a pile of crap.

NeptuneOrbit ,

The history of TV, in reverse. And then forward again.

At first, it was an impossibly expensive medium rules by a cartel of agencies and advertisers. Eventually, HBO comes along and shows you don't have to just make a bunch of lowest common denominator drivel.

Netflix eventually shows that the internet can be a way cheaper model than cable. Finally, money shows up in the streaming model, remaking advertiser friendly cable in the internet age. All in about 2.5 decades.

coarse ,

The ebb and flow of consumerism.

I hope one day we have enough data to recognize it and stop it.

MonkderDritte ,

Game Google

?

Chozo ,
@Chozo@fedia.io avatar

verb. gamed; gaming; games. transitive + intransitive. 1. : to manipulate, exploit, or cheat in (a system, a situation, etc.)

dynamojoe ,

When googling something, append -site:reddit.com

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

It's gross, but also inevitable. If there's an untapped niche to make money from, somebody's going to try it -- plus if they want to waste their money on generating accounts only to have them be banned, then so be it.

Makes me kinda thankful that this community is smaller and less likely to be targeted by this sort of crap.

SlopppyEngineer ,

Wayne's World vibes

grrgyle ,

What's funny is I think it would be profitable for maybe, like, a year, before everyone starts doing it and then even normal people stop trusting reddit comments.

It's like pissing in a pool to sell people soap. What's the plan once people stop using the pool?

Croquette ,

Buy a new pool and piss in again to sell new soaps.

By the time that the cow is bled dry, someone is stuck holding the bag while some people made out like bandits.

That is the stock market for you. Create no value, just wealth transfer.

grrgyle ,

Create no value, just wealth transfer.

In this case it's creating a kind of anti-value - harm, I guess.

Also I bow to your superior and brazen use of mixed metaphors. You got double what I did. "Bleeding" a cow dry? It adds impact over the usual "milking" even!

Croquette ,

Milking assume that you don't kill the cow, which isn't the case here.

Some people are specialized at being hired at startups to prop up the startup to be sold and make a quick buck.

Then they move on to the next startup, wash rinse and repeat. It tells a lot about the state of innovation.

grrgyle ,

Innovation't 😒

Lucidlethargy ,
@Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works avatar

Just wait, in a near future there will be floods of bots quelling and stoking tempers to control opinions online, and in the real world.

We already get some of this, but the scale is going to become many times worse.

Mastengwe ,

AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

FTFY

Aabbcc ,

Ai is a tool. It can be used for good and it can be used for poison. Just because you see it being used for poison more often doesn't mean you should be against ai. Maybe lay the blame on the people using it for poison

daft61lunacy ,

Logitech decided to include some AI shit in Logi Options+, I uninstalled that crap ASAP.

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

The only reason reddit was valuable was because it was from real people who weren't paid off. Well that's ruined now.

eronth ,

Yeah, I've noticed that a bit lately anyways. Maybe I'm looking up stuff that has less of a community on Reddit, and thus has less discussion, but I have absolutely noticed some comments have a single product name-drop with little clarity for why they liked the product. It starts to feel like they're just ads (generated or otherwise) meant to trick you into thinking Reddit users are liking the product.

AI is going to just make it worse, and cause Reddit to not be a good goto for actual reviews and discussion on pros/cons.

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

Exactly. Usually there's a conversation or a quick consensus on one or two things. But I've been seeing lots of single answers or just ads

Jordan117 ,

There's an excellent chance that even some of the "authentic" discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.

paraphrand ,

The first obvious wave of this stuff, to me, was the video conversion ripoff software and similar. They had people looking around for questions their software was possibly a solution for. Sometimes they would act like users, other times it was more neutral info, but still clear it was self promotion because of what was recommended.

glimse ,

I wanted to figure out what game hosting sites were good and Google pointed me to reddit...every thread was full of boilerplate ads for different sites. The comments were the most obvious, marketing-approved sentences I've ever seen

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

Everything I can find online seems to be advertisements or paid reviews (Also advertisements) when looking for anything anymore. Businesses are terrified of an open honest conversation about what is good and what is not

glimse ,

If you're terrified of honest conversations, your product is probably shit.

Marques Brownlee had a video recently about the question "do bad reviews kill products?" that highlights the issue well

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

Exactly. Every company is terrified of honest conversation since it makes putting out shit harder.

sudo42 ,

I so don't understand how to run a business.

  • Spend $Billions shoving advertising down everyone's throats? Absolutely!

  • Just make a good product and provide good customer support? It will never work!

Nikelui ,
@Nikelui@piefed.social avatar

Option 1 is easy and any idiot can throw money at it to solve the problem. Option 2 requires talented people and real effort.

funn ,

I don't understand how Lemmy/Mastodon will handle similar problems. Spammers crafting fake accounts to give AI generated comments for promotions

FeelThePower ,

The only thing we reasonably have is security through obscurity. We are something bigger than a forum but smaller than Reddit, in terms of active user size. If such a thing were to happen here, mods could handle it more easily probably (like when we had the spammer of the Japanese text back then), but if it were to happen on a larger scale than what we have it would be harder to deal with.

roguetrick ,

Mostly it seems to be handled here with that URL blacklist automod.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I think the real danger here is subtlety. What happens when somebody asks for recommendations on a printer, or complains about their printer being bad, and all of a sudden some long established account recommends a product they've been happy with for years. And it turns out it's just an AI bot shilling for brother.

deweydecibel ,

For one, well established brands have less incentives to engage in this.

Second, in this example, the account in question being a "long established user" would seem to indicate you think these spam companies are going to be playing a long game. They won't. That's too much effort and too expensive. They will do all of this on the cheap, and it will be very obvious.

This is not some sophisticated infiltration operation with cutting edge AI. This is just auto generated spam in a new upgraded form. We will learn to catch it, like we've learned to catch it before.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, it doesn't have to be expensive. And also doesn't have to be particularly cutting edge. Start throwing some credits into an LLM API, haven't randomly read and help people out in different groups. Once it reaches some amount of reputation have it quietly shill for them. Pull out posts that contain keywords. Have the AI consume the posts and figure out if they have to do with what they sound like they do. Have it subtly do product placement. None of this is particularly difficult or groundbreaking. But it could help shape our buying habits.

old_machine_breaking_apart ,

There's one advantage on the fediverse. We don't have the corporations like reddit manipulating our feeds, censoring what they dislike, and promoting shit. This alone makes using the fediverse worth for me.

When it comes to problems involving the users themselves, things aren't that different, and we don't have much to do.

MinFapper ,

We don't have corporations manipulating our feeds

yet. Once we have enough users that it's worth their effort to target, the bullshit will absolutely come.

old_machine_breaking_apart ,

they can perhaps create instances, pay malicious users, try some embrace, extend, extinguish approach or something, but they can't manipulate the code running on the instances we use, so they can't have direct power over it. Or am I missing something? I'm new to the fediverse.

BarbecueCowboy ,

There's very little to prevent them just pretending to be average users and very little preventing someone from just signing up a bunch of separate accounts to a bunch of separate instances.

No great automated way to tell whether someone is here legitimately.

bitfucker ,

Yeah, and that is true for a lot of service. Sybil attack is indeed quite hard to prevent since malicious users can blend with legitimate ones.

bitfucker ,

Federation means if you are federated then sure you get some BS. Otherwise, business as usual. Now, making sure there is no paid user or corporate bot is another matter entirely since it relies on instance moderators.

deweydecibel ,

We don't have the corporations like reddit manipulating our feeds, censoring what they dislike, and promoting shit.

Corporations aren't the only ones with incentives to do that. Reddit was very hands off for a good long while, but don't expect that same neutral mentality from fediverse admins.

BarbecueCowboy ,

mods could handle it more easily probably

I kind of feel like the opposite, for a lot of instances, 'mods' are just a few guys who check in sporadically whereas larger companies can mobilize full teams in times of crisis, it might take them a bit of time to spin things up, but there are existing processes to handle it.

I think spam might be what kills this.

FeelThePower ,

Hmm, good point.

deweydecibel ,

If a community is so small that the mod team can be so inactive, there's no incentive for the company to put any effort into spamming it like you're suggesting.

And if they do end up getting a shit ton of spam in there, and it sits around for a bit until a moderator checks in, so what? They'll just clean it up and keep going.

I'm not sure why people are so worried about this. It's been possible for bad actors to overrun small communities with automated junk for a very long time, across many different platforms, some that predate Reddit. It just gets cleaned up and things keep going.

It's not like if they get some AI produced garbage into your community, it infects it like a virus that cannot be expelled.

deweydecibel ,

The same way it's handled on Reddit: moderators.

Some will get through and sit for a few days but eventually the account will make itself obvious and get removed.

It's not exactly difficult to spot these things. If an account is spending the majority of its existence on a social media site talking about products, even if they add some AI generated bullshit here and there to make it seem like it's a regular person, it's still pretty obvious.

If the account seems to show up pretty regularly in threads to suggest the same things, there's an indicator right there.

Hell, you can effectively bait them by making a post asking for suggestions on things.

They also just tend to have pretty predictable styles of speak, and never fail to post the URL with their suggestion.

Boomkop3 ,

Well, that was the last bit of usefulness I used to get out of google. I've been on yahoo for a while now

n3m37h ,

Yahoo is still alive?

Boomkop3 ,

Yep, it's sort of what google used to be. It took me a bit of setup tho. They really like to default to showing you a ton of news and crap. But after turning that all off I'm left with a super clean ui and useful search results

p0q ,

I see the yahoo ai bot is working well. /s

Boomkop3 ,

Absolutely, I am definitely not human

vegaquake ,

yeah, the internet is doomed to be unusable if AI just keeps getting more insidious like this

yet more companies tie themselves to online platforns, websites, and other models of operation depending on being always connected.

maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch

BarbecueCowboy ,

I do kind of feel like this part of the experiment might just be coming to a close.

There's no "if AI just keeps getting more insidious", the barrier for entry is too small. AI is going to keep doing the things it's already doing, just more efficiently, and it doesn't matter that much how we feel about whether those things are good or bad. I feel like the things it is starting to ruin are probably just going to be ruined.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch

That would destroy all the old good vintage stuff and leave us with machines that immediately fill the vacant space with pure trash.

vegaquake ,

rapture but with technology would be pretty funny

save the good old stuff and burn the rest

CazzoBuco ,

When the internet is eventually oversaturated with smartbots, where will the humans go.

KISSmyOSFeddit ,

To a new social media platform where you have to send in a DNA sample to create an account.

Z3k3 ,

That creates a market for morticians and midwifes creating preauthenticated accounts to sell to bot farms

noodlejetski ,

( ͡°╭͜ʖ╮͡° )

malloc ,

“The Matrix”, obviously.

Konstant ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    paraphrand ,

    The usefulness of Captchas is being destroyed by “AI” too. And ironically they were used to train certain types of Machine Learning.

    Even_Adder ,

    Group chats.

    SlopppyEngineer ,

    Peer-to-peer systems? Systems where you have to do physically be at the location to get data maybe, so cyber cafe like things. Or back to the old system and go to the regular bars, repair cafés or hobby places.

    paraphrand ,

    Synchronous spaces.

    Social VR does not have a lot of the ills of social media. You only have to deal with people much like you would IRL.

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