Startup entrepreneurs in the mood for a Hail Mary play take note. How do you have a web search engine in a world where there no longer exists any algorithm for telling spam apart from real content? "Go back to the original Yahoo" is a decent start but certainly nowhere near a complete answer in 2022!
My guess is that it may not even take the form of what we have today, with an arbitrary text box. Maybe you have to go down to a specific category at least. Who knows. I sure don't. All I can say is that it sure looks to me like the spammers are only a year or two from effective total victory in the current paradigm.
The problem is the space between "AI generated" and "human generated" is fundamentally getting smaller. That's a real problem. We don't seem to be that many steps away from that space going to zero for generalized writing.
I'm not expecting this to hold for very long (openai has partnered with microsoft; and there are at least 2 groups currently working on replicating it open-source), and expect strong detoriation of overall web content soon afterwards.
Under such a system any company that begins producing spam could be removed, and we could go back to the lovely days of something simple like page rank being used to provide relevant results.
It would also be cool if I could upload my own crawling modules, so I could index more than just websites.
It’s a project I have on the back burner to analyze Reddit history to check what ratio of comments are actually original, and I’d like to build a link aggregator that sorts by novelty.
Whether it’s convincing depends on your background. Those in society who can distinguish reality from fiction will still be rewarded, for obvious reasons. So that’s a difference from our current world in degree, not in kind.