Be aware of:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SearchKagi/comments/1gvlqhm/disappo...

But it's not necessarily trustworthy content, we had autogenerated listicles and keyword list sites before ChatGPT.

Interesting. I guess that analogously, we might find that X years after some future AI content production ban, we could similarly start ignoring the low background token issue?

Can't wait, in fifty years we will have our data clean again.

Multiple people have coined the idea repeatedly, way before you. The oldest comment on HN I could find was in December 2022 by user spawarotti: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856172

> we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"

We do not see nearly so far though.

Because these days we are standing on the shoulders of giants that have been put into a blender and ground down into a slippery pink paste and levelled out to a statistically typical 7.3mm high layer of goo.

This sounds like an Alan Kay quote. He meant that in regards to useful inventions. AI-generated spam just decreases the quality. We'd need a real alternative to this garbage from Google but all the other search engines are also bad. And their UI is also horrible - not as bad as Google, but also bad. Qwant just tries to copy/paste Google for instance (though interestingly enough, sometimes it has better results than Google - but also fewer in general, even ignornig false positive results).

You may have one point.

The industrial age was built on dinosaur slop, and they were giant.

We have two optimization mechanisms though which reduce noise with respect to their optimization functions: evolution and science. They are implicitly part of "standing on the shoulders of giants", you pick the giant to stand on (or it is picked for you).

Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.

There's a reason this is comedy:

  Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

  [24] “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. [25] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. [26] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. [27] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Capitalism, freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, democracy: at their best these things are ways to bend the wisdom of the crowds (such as it is) to the benefit of all; and their failures are when crowds are not wise.

The "slop" of capitalism is polluted skies, soil and water, are wage slaves and fast fashion that barely lasts one use, and are the reason why workplace health and safety rules are written in blood. The "slop" of freedom of expression includes dishonest marketing, libel, slander, and propaganda. The "slop" of democracy is populists promising everything to everyone with no way to deliver it all. The "slop" of the marketplace of ideas is every idiot demanding their own un-informed rambling be given the same weight as the considered opinions of experts.

None of these things contributed our social, technological, or economic advancement, they are simply things which happened at the same time.

AI has stuff to contribute, but using it to make an endless feed of mediocrity is not it. The flood of low-effort GenAI stuff filling feeds and drowning signal with noise, as others have said: just give us your prompt.

That's because the things we built on weren't slop

You can't build on slop because slop is a slippery slope

Nothing conveys better the idea of a solid foundation to build upon than the word ‘slop’.

the only structure you can build with slop is a burial mound

Because the pyramids, the theory of general relativity and the Linux kernel are all totally comparable to ChatGPT output. /s

Why is anybody still surprised that the AI bubble made it that big?

That would false positive me. I have used double dashes to delimit quote attribution for decades.

Like this:

"You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863

Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.

Oof, I feel like you'll accidentally capture a lot of getopt_long() fans. ;)

Just to be clear this is done automatically by macOS or iOS browsers when configured properly.

I (~100 in the leaderboard, regardless of how you sort) also frequently use ’ (unicode apostrophe) instead of ' :D

The trick is to only search for topics where there are no answers, or only one answer leading to that blog post you wrote 10 years ago and forgot about.

I have dozens of these over the years - many of the people responsible have "Head of ..." or "Chief ..." job titles now.

As mentioned 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811732

ChatGPT was released exactly 3 years ago (on the 30th of November) so December it is in this context.

They are the same. I was looking for something and tried AI. It gave me a list of stuff. When I asked for its sources, it linked me to some SEO/Amazon affiliate slop.

All AI is doing is making it harder to know what is good information and what is slop, because it obscures the source, or people ignore the source links.

I wouldn't say always... Especially because you probably only noticed the bad slop. Usually it is crap though.

I have heard of a forum (I believe it was Physics Forums) which was very popular in the older days of the internet where some of the older posts were actually edited so that they were completely rewritten with new content. I forget what the reasoning behind it was, but it did feel shady and unethical. If I remember correctly, the impetus behind it was that the website probably went under new ownership and the new owners felt that it was okay to take over the accounts of people who hadn't logged on in several years and to completely rewrite the content of their posts.

I believe I learned about it through HN, and it was this blog post: https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

It kind of reminds me of why some people really covet older accounts when they are trying to do a social engineering attack.

Date displayed in Google Search results is often the self-described date from the document itself. Take a look at this "FOIA + before Jan 1, 1990" search: https://www.google.com/search?q=foia&tbs=cdr:1,cd_max:1/1/19...

None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.

Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.

How? They have an index from a previous date and nothing new will be allowed since that date? A whole copy of the internet? I don't think so.... I'm guessing, like others, it's based on the date the user/website/blog lists in the post. Which they can change at any time.

>that they were the future of sharing content online

nobody was saying that

Maybe you don't love your mom enough to do this, but if ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow and it was something she really used and loved, I wouldn't think twice before buying her a rig powerful enough to run a quantized downlodable model on, though I'm not current on which model or software would be the best for her purposes. I get that your relationship with your mother, or your financial situation might be different though.

Shrug. Sure.

Point still stands. It’s not going anywhere. And the literal hate and pure vitriol I’ve seen towards people on social media, even when they say “oh yeah; this is AI”, is unbelievable.

So many online groups have just become toxic shitholes because someone once or twice a week posts something AI generated