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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

With content from humans, there has to be sufficient motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in your daily life.

Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe" from that, since only people who care about cookies would bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly have to mistrust all sources of all information, which is a new thing.

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Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds relevant for a lot of people.

For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet is going to be the echo chamber of that content being used to train new AI models.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The bullshit asymmetry principle puts forth that algorithmic 'bullshit' content is even worse as quantity is a quality all in itself when you're debunking the bullshit. In general the reader will not know if the producer of the bullshit is a real human or a bot. This makes the search engines job even harder as not only do you have the standard human bullshit you have to get rid of, you have an oceans torrent of AI generated bullshit that you have to waste energy on getting rid of.

HN has a common theme of saying that "Dead internet theory is wrong", I personally just think they've not waited long enough and it's becoming more true every day.

It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10 curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the commons. Even if 99.999% of it is complete nonsensical garbage, if they produce fast enough the remaining 0.001% of actually good content can still result in massive profits

> A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care.

It's less about if the businesses care and more about if the consumers care. Businesses will respond to whatever consumers are willing to tolerate.

Honestly, it'll probably be a battle around requirements to label AI-generated content so that consumers can make an informed choice about what to trust. But, given the global nature of the internet, that's probably not possible. You probably end up with private/commercial reputation rating firms, and consumers can decide who they want to trust.

If people decide they don't care about the veracity of information or don't want to put in the extra work to ensure they are consuming "true" information they you'll end up with businesses built on auto-generated garbage.

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