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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Every time a new easy-to-use content generation AI tool drops, the collective blood pressure in Google's spam detection department goes up by 1% :D

This one should be promising!

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I think that department has already had a stroke.

For the last month or so, on a daily basis, I have been getting the same spam messages (subject line: "You've been chosen”) in my inbox, often classified as important. No amount of reporting them as spam seem to help.

However, what ended up in my spam folder are emails from Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes. (When I found them it was too late to claim the prize as confirmed by Amazon's rep.)

I get that spam is hard, but weighing an account owner's signals more than other signals seems like a good strategy. (And if it is not, please do correct me!)

> Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes.

Is this for real?

Enter your credit card details to find out.

Yup. Look up: Small Business Prime Day 2022 Sweepstakes

Meanwhile my mailbox decided to send every single email to spam.

>Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes

Are you joking? Surely this is not something that exists.

It did exist. Look up: Small Business Prime Day 2022 Sweepstakes

I have been getting those emails too, and I noticed that they get automatically send to spam ~5 minutes after I receive them.

I seem to be getting a spam email of this kind almost every day for the last ~6 months. Maybe the spammer found a way to prevent fingerprinting by Google and each batch of emails only gets automatically marked as spam after so many people manually mark it?

It has been the same for me. A small but noteworthy fraction of legitimate emails go to Spam and illegitimate emails come into Inbox; in spite of marking "spam" or "not spam" multiple times.

Another day older and a deeper neural net, one step closer to a dead internet.

Loaded 16 terabytes of AI code, and the scrum master said “Well, bless my soul”

It's going to be real fun when more than half of "user" generated content on the net will have been generated by AI content farms: forum comments, code, videos, pictures, entire websites.

I honestly think this is how we reach this "dead internet" meme. We're probably less than a decade away from this.

EDIT: here's my bold prediction. In the next 10 years, a very successful content aggregator (imagine Reddit, Instagram or Tiktok), where content is exclusively and openly AI generated, will reach the Alexa top 100 ranking.

We will have HN users saying we're too old and we just don't get why it is more fun to mindlessly get your dopamine fix from scrolling and liking AI generated images.

Arguably, we're already there. Most of the Internet is content marketing, and that content isn't meaningfully different than AI output. That it's generated by protein bots instead of silicon ones is just implementation detail.

> Most of the Internet is content marketing, and that content isn't meaningfully different than AI output.

I argue that it is. Human content farms don't create long-form articles, artwork or deep fake videos by the truckload, in minutes, from just a little prompt. And humans are relatively expensive.

AI generated spam will be orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and thus incredibly more common.

I'm terrified at the thought of all this hollow, low-on-details content that's about to hit the internet. Interestingly, if this degrades Google's search result quality, it could be an opportunity for someone else to create a new search engine.

Honestly, no reason why we will have the same search experience as we do today in 5 years.

I expect search engines to be more like an AI assistant.

I don’t think Google can pull that off. Not because they don’t have the expertise for it (they do) but because their organisation is built around monetizing ads and an AI assistant might not work with it.

The past 5 years Google went downhill. If they lose the ability to search, users and ad revenue follow.

> I expect search engines to be more like an AI assistant.

> I don’t think Google can pull that off.

Does Google Assistant not count? Searching for things with the assistant is certainly one of its main features.

I'm thinking more like some of the demos I've seen of Adept AI, where you type in (or speak) a complex command and it does the job for you. Like telling the assistant to "find flights to New York between 15th and 18th December that are under $250".

Regardless, if the future of search is less a list of pages and more a set of focused, customized results, I can't see how Google will work in that context. Google, so far, has shown zero ability to monetize anything that can't be papered over with ads.

I think it will go the opposite way. Spend some time physically inside your local library.

All the search results are from experts, and have been proofread and stuff. None are ad-supported, and very few are paid-placement.

> I'm terrified at the thought of all this hollow, low-on-details content that's about to hit the internet.

Honestly it feels like "hollow, low-on-details content" hit the internet at least 5 years ago. Developments in indexing and searching have incentivized writing of low-quality content that makes it to the top of results, and here we are

What will it search for?

Already buulding one. Assuming content like this will be ad-supported (what is the other way to monetize it? nobody would pay to read it) Kagi is already successful at downranking sites with a lot of ads.

Why is this spam?

It isn't. But tools like these make actual spam, and pseudo-spam (e.g. SEO content) easier and quicker to produce.

If your site has a lot of fresh, unique content on a topic you appear to be an authority about related search terms and your search engine rank goes up. So pair a bunch of AI generated pages with ads or e-commerce and you’ve got a spam-driven revenue model and we have a worse internet full of regurgitated AI content.

I think their point is that if both real humans and spambots are using AI to generate their articles, then detecting which one is spam becomes that much more difficult.

This is where I see natural language AI causing a real kerfuffle. We're probably already reading bot spam articles without realizing.

If you are reading about the results of sporting events, you've been reading bot spam articles for several years, at least.

The local newspaper where I lived until this summer used software called “Lede AI Sports Desk” to automatically generate high school sports articles with headlines like "High School A edges High School B in snug affair 54-52" and "School C drums School D in sound fashion 48-4".

This is clearly not actually using any process that could be called "AI" with a straight face since it's obviously just playing madlibs with different sets of vocabulary based on the scores and margins, but the results were invariably stupid and repetitive headlines and articles.

To be fair, the special case of the Turing test where participants only discuss recent sporting events seems substantially simpler than the general one. I'm not totally convinced you need GPT-3 level capabilities.

that is fair; my only real complaint is that if the software were just maybe 5% more clever, the headlines it generates probably wouldn't look as bad as they do.

> both real humans and spambots are using AI to generate their articles

Are you suggesting that humans do not create spam too?

AI is a massive force multiplier.

Of course they do, they just don't have the same throughput as a bot network.

> both real humans and spambots are using AI to generate their articles

But humans create spam too!

Using facebook's latest https://galactica.org/ i can get wiki pages that are pretty informative summaries of topics that don't yet exist on the net (though not very good yet).

A lot of the blog posts i read here are manually generated blogspam. These timelines these will converge, so i don't see a huge difference .

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