AI spam is already starting to ruin the internet::We’re starting to see one prediction come true of how artificial intelligence will affect the internet: AI-generated spam is flooding the web.
The web was already flooded with human generated spam, adding AI spam to the mix hasn’t really changed anything meaningful - you still can’t find useful content on the vast majority of webpages.
What we really need is a better search engine, one that doesn’t include low quality content… that might be something AI can help with.
That used to be Google, when they were interested in providing quality results and showing ads alongside those results, instead of just… being an ad company.
Before that, it was Yahoo, when they were interested in providing quality results, and showing ads, instead of just being an ad company.
Before that, it was AltaVista, when they were…
…Ask Jeeves…
We’ll see who’s next.
Don’t forget Lycos!
And HotBot.
And WebCrawler!
And MetaCrawler!
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Mid late nineties, WC was my favorite. Felt like it had the best results.
Same here.
Go get it!
I’ve been hearing Kagi is very good but i don’t know if I’m ready to start paying for a search engine. Given the direction things are headed through, it could be worth considering
I can say that kagi is really good, yes. I don’t know if google search was actually ever this good on its own, but I’m finding it a real breath of fresh air
It’s a lot better value for families, too. Much like spotify. I wouldn’t pay £8/m for myself, but I would pay £16 for 6 people.
I’ve been looking at those plans, yeah… Currently on the lowest tier for myself, and it is pricey but personally worth it, and I want to support the project
You can even share the same account with your family because your queries are not logged and won’t show up in another computer
Time to bring back web rings lmao
web rings
We’ve come, uh, full circle indeed
Kagi basically did with Smallweb
I’ve switched to perplexity.ai. yes it’s AI, but it gives me the answer I was looking for in a short snippet of information. I can then go scour the sources if I want too. It’s completely replaced Google for me.
Yes, but the sheer volume of trash these AIs can generate will be an even bigger problem that needs addressing.
Plausable sounding trash, specifically. More plausable than what extremely low paid humans can put out.
Ugh i used stable diffusion for a few weeks and even with better prompt engineering it still felt like generative trash. Guess i wasn’t creative enough in prompting because I’ve seen some great stuff from others.
The web was already flooded with human generated spam, adding AI spam to the mix hasn’t really changed anything meaningful - you still can’t find useful content on the vast majority of webpages.
“The river was already flooded with human generated pollution, adding truckloads of nuclear waste to the mix hasn’t really changed anything meaningful - you still can’t go swimming or eat the fish in the majority of waterways.”
that might be something AI can help with.
No it can’t.
And also it’s already a solved problem. Once again - web rings, web directories, communities and acquaintances. The Web is not deus ex machina. It’s a system to be used to make your hands longer, your memory bigger, your eyes sharper etc.
right - time to just focus on some news that have been vetted by some trustworthy organization. or a ministry - that focusses on truth or something.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Been a known issue for a long time
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating: "The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
How ironic, but i still love this bot
I think that some bots are like, exceptions that prove the rule in a way. Like when we find one that’s convenient and useful and facilitates human understanding and communication, it sticks out.
Yeah like this. Bots talking to bots. Some of them use llms, but it’s not necessary.
I’m here for the human element.
- 2014: bots trading with bots
- 2024: bots talking with bots
- 2034: bots ???ing with bots
Only fair that AI gets a turn now we’ve been ruining it for so long.
“starting”? The net was ruined when yahoo directory failed and Google with their stupid algorithm and SEO and AdSense and monetisation came along
Google had to happen, manually updating a registry of all site was unsustainable with the growth of the internet.
And the concept of SEO is actually older than the internet, “AAA Plumbing” from yellow pages was also optimized for the algorithm of the the telephone registry, which was simply alphabetical order. Just different algorithm and different scale.
Ppphhht.
The internet ended the day AOL threw open its doors and allowed their users out of the walled garden.
I know, I was there.
Me too!
(if you know, you know)
I remember there used to be Octobers.
The Eternal September.
I’ve seen countless palworld articles climb to the top of Google. They are awful… They don’t even have correct information about the game. Google really is imploding before our eyes.
Yeah agreed on that you can’t Google thing anymore. People were speaking of enshitification, I was thinking they were exaggerating, but seing the results around palworld that crazy. Try to find a site with egg combination base don parents. Good luck I got a good one in page 4-5.
I rely on Google Search far less now than I used to for this reason. People had already gotten Google SEO down to a science and were poisoning search results very effectively. This AI-generated bullshit is taking it to a whole new level.
I’ve decided to use alternative search engines like DDG, SearXNG, etc. hoping their indexing criteria will be different enough current SEO techniques won’t affect them as much… For now.
I am using Paulgo.io’s instance. Do all instances have the same index or each one it’s own?
Even before the big AI thing this was a common thing for trendy games. Frustrating is it would be websites that arent even gaming focused that would get “top 10 x” or “how to get x in popular game” or “console commands for game x!” . And of course since the top result isnt a game website it was just trying to grab clicks it was a not great or complete article.
The irony of some of the articles being clearly written by AI while also being about “Palword because someone said AI” is rich.
Lately I’ve been seeing more ai articles and videos on youtube. Sometimes, I look up tech issues and there’s a video, I check it out and some of these videos are just forum posts uploaded text on the screen. There are whole channels taking popular online forum posts and gathering views that way.
Yes, so annoying. You read an article and later find the (steam) forum, reddit post or tweet that was turned into a whole article, just with more words.
Don’t even get me started on having to watch a 10 minute video on YouTube that could have been a 3 sentence forum post.
Or something that could have been explained in 3 paragraphs becoming a 20 minute, overproduced video complete with someone making a stupid face in the thumbnail, and SOMETHING ALLCAPS in the title.
What’s really annoying is I’ll search for something in DDG, Google, bing, etc, like palworld for example, and I’ll see the top 10 results be different web pages with almost identical wording that don’t even answer my questions. I hate the Internet these days. SEO and advertising is cancer that kills off anything good.
Meh. Email was going to implode before someone came up with baysean filters and Gmail became a thing. Last time I checked (once in a blue moon), email still works.
Certainly 99.999% of SMTP traffic is garbage but my inbox is still usable.
A web crawler is not comparable to an e-mail inbox.
Who knew the black wall from cyberpunk would end up being real but with adds!
How long until we get internet 2.0 walled garden for humans?
Seems like there are more minuses than adds
The irony of that this post is done by @[email protected]
Bots and AI aren’t the same thing. Bots are just automations, not necessarily making use of machine learning.
I saw someone unironically last month call Excel spreadsheet formulas “AI”.
The term is rapidly approaching meaninglessness when used by anyone remotely non-technical. I’m probably going to miss an edge case here, but basically:
Classic AI = mostly search algorithms (Dijkstra, A*, etc), simple neural nets (e.g. perceptron) and prolog (to trivialise logic languages)
Modern AI = Machine Learning and the utilisation of those models trained by it. (Tensorflow, LLMs, etc)
Everything else = not AI, just technology.
I would include “video game AI” since semantically it is pretty well-accepted, even though it’s not really AI. Things like goal-based behaviour as well as the pathfinding algos you mentioned.
There’s the edge case haha, yeah I agree, game AI is a pretty accepted and understood concept
And AI is automation too.
Starting?
Finalizing its death*
Right?? Haha it’s been a sespool of ads and trackers for ads for years now
So, someone can look at this festering putrid hellscape we call the internet in the past 5 years and still see a way down?
Well sure. Only an optimist goes “Wow, this is as bad as it can get.”
The pessimistic crowd is of the opinion it can ALWAYS get worse. We may not know how, but it can get worse.
I think it is obvious where I am on the spectrum when I say I don’t think we’ve begun to see how bad it can get.
I’m optimistic. I like that this is ruining the existing commercialized model, but not the 00s one (used by nobody, but).
This also follows Lem’s Megabit Bomb, he has been very good at predicting future we will have and describing future we’d like to have (two completely different things).
That’s a pretty obscure reference, at least in English. For those wondering, I found this in a bibliography of Stanisław Lem:
Bomba megabitowa (The Megabit Bomb, 1999) – Collection of essays about the potential downside of technology, including terrorism and artificial intelligence.
Well, yes, it may be obscure, but it’s amazing to see our development so well described with the feel of something retrofuturistic, think Pascal, monochrome terminal displays, Nostromo-like spaceships …
TBF I’m not sure which things I remember from there and which from Summa Technologiae.
