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Comment by catchnear4321 | Hacker News Reader

humans. humans did this. not an ai. not some cold machine. cold humans.

the simplification/corruption of discussion through misuse of “ai” has been happening for decades. the shift is that now it is being used to shield humans from responsibility. that cannot be permitted.

humans did this.

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This is what baffles me about the discussions on AI making the search based experience of the web worse. Worse? Have you searched for anything in the last 10 years? It’s just awful SEO garbage - at least the LLM SEO garbage might actually tell you how to pickle dog biscuits, while the human generated garbage just meticulously structures the text to imply they might tell you while they actually can’t because the don’t actually know.

But regardless of whether it’s LLM SEO or human SEO, a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage. A human did that. The same humans that have been screwing everything up for everyone else for at least the last 10,000 years.

IMO I think this trend is just an acceleration and democratization of enshitification tools. But I think the future result is three fold:

1) dependence on automated algorithms to differentiate between garbage and quality is now demonstrably dead, while it just seemed dead before

2) open LLMs backed by information retrieval systems will be a much better tool for learning than a naked search engine

3) humans will need to curate lists of good material and depending and algorithms and automated information retrieval systems alone will be insufficient, and hence curated and editorialized directories will become the primary way of discovering human generated content of quality.

Looks like Yahoo was just 25 years too early!

this tracks, and makes an interesting argument for a modernized librarian curriculum. maybe there already is something of the sort under a different name. llm usage makes a lot of sense for dealing with… data.

granted, universities are decaying in much the same way as information access online.

> a human decides to make fake pages about pickling dog biscuits because it was more important for them to make some money personally than for the search based internet to be anything but garbage

If I think I make the best dog biscuits and I want to be found, then it’s not a “fake page” from my perspective — it’s just marketing and in a way I’m doing you a service because you’ll be happiest if you buy my dog biscuits.

so essentially lie to get attention, and that’s ok because you just wanted to help people find the best product - yours?

What’s the lie?

That’s a different scenario altogether. I think the parent is referring to link farming and arbitrage type pages that serve the purpose of netting a commission, not selling more first party products.

And no one will find your page with the best dog biscuits because it’s buried on page 30 of the search results behind all of the people trying to generate ad money who don’t actually know anything about dog biscuits

Do you think you’ll be found? That’s not how search engines work. You’ll make your lovingly made page, but someone with a link farm will bury you 20 result pages deep. The internet as indexed by search engines hasn’t worked for at least 10 years.

Yea, this is the story that marketers tell themselves so they can sleep at night: "Well, I'm different! Unlike everyone else, my product is high quality! People will want to see it!" All ~10M marketers in the world excuse their actions with this rubbish.

Well one of them must be right, no?

And many of them will have good products/offer a good value, too?

> Well one of them must be right, no?

Not necessarily, but even if so, the fact that all N million minus one of them incorrectly think they are the special one, results in the sea of crap we have today.

Another tough pill for marketers to please to swallow: Even IF the product is great, AND it's exactly what I need, AND I would be happy to buy it... I don't want to hear about it randomly throughout the day as I'm trying to live my life and do normal things other than "discovering products". I don't want to be actively or passively contacted uninvited by companies, even if I would be interested in their products. I'm not shopping. I don't want to hear about it.

That’s the power of a curated list. Consumer reports, Michelin, etc. It’s not you that’s advertising your product, it’s a trusted third party. Gaming search engine scoring algorithms is not the right way to prove your product is better. It’s the way to game a search engine to force yourself on to people.

Right. AI is a tool utilized by humans. Humans did this.

I'm increasingly concerned about how regularly I'm seeing examples of entire framings of issues that serve to externalize responsibility. AI is a very fascinating, arguably unprecedented kind of tool. But it's just a tool, wielded by humans, to do the desired bidding of the humans, who are in complete control of that tool.

A different POV might be: humans built a tool that, because of various extremely difficult to change propensities in human cognition, it was obvious that humans would find it hard to control their use of.

While this had been true for many previous tools (especially during the computer age), the fact that this tool evoked one particular human behavior - taking the intentional stance [0] - created many additional problems.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Intentional-Stance-Daniel-C-Dennett/d...

This argument is just “guns don’t kill people…” redux. Yes, humans control technologies, and thus we have to regulate our technologies.

would you like to know the actual intent? because no, it is not an argument for regulation.

perhaps you would like to argue for it.

before regulation, I think we have to settle on the moral aspect. It’s not clear for everyone for guns, so don’t rush for «AI» if you want effective results, regardless of the projected risks and the urge that goes with it.

I'm sure this approach—just regulate the symptoms without thinking too hard about the underlying causes—will yield just as effective a solution as it has with guns. We're doing a great job, let's keep up the momentum.

If humans did it, the least they could do is attribute it to their real name rather than a pseudonym.

I'm fine with humans using AI to write books if the humans are willing to attach their human name to their work.

The absense of a human name credited to the work makes it appear as though the human doesn't want to take responsibility for the AI's work.

People have been using pseudonyms and ghostwriters for centuries.

I think that ship has sailed.

you know dr stones won’t be doing that. taking credit for these works. this is purely for profit. not celebrity.

amazon could care. so could users of their products and services.

let’s see what happens.

Few days ago Democracy Now! on YT had a first-person interview about corporations, taking advantage of difficult situation, trying to buy out land from people who owned the land for generations. Can't find now in which video it was.

The vultures are incredibly depressing.

The money, they have too much money and it is causing problems big time.

We created the "bomb" and now humans have the "bomb".

We knew before how humans are and we still create tools that cause great damage if maliciously used.

the human condition has not been addressed successfully. both the creation and mis-utilization of explosives (or similarly explosive “disruptive technology,” as misused as that term is as well) seem inevitable.

bombs are just controlled explosions used for evil. but sometimes it benefits humanity to move mountains, and explosives make that easier.

a daunting task, but not insurmountable. oddly enough, language models could be utilized towards making this an easier problem to solve.

but you aren’t wrong, and the “books” on amazon are proof. misuse already rampant.

The Shift key is the one underneath your left pinky. I see those apostrophes, so I know you know which key I'm talking about!

it has taken quite some time to finally catch one.

knew one of you had to be out there.

I think you’ll find that people are more willing to take your posts seriously when you use proper capitalization and punctuation. Particularly in a place like HN.

perhaps that is why this one is so stubborn. :)

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