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Comment by mmckelvy | Hacker News Reader

One of the frequently raised concerns is that soon we will be drowning in AI generated blog posts, articles, presentations and emails, and most of this AI generated content will be meaningless noise.

I wonder if the opposite may be true. With the advent of AI, will there actually be _less_ meaningless noise?

When I was in finance, we would regularly produce 100 page decks for client meetings. Usually only 2 or 3 pages of the 100 page deck would really matter. The rest was what I call "proof of work". _Look at how much work we did for you. Isn't it impressive_? With AI, that kind of proof of work no longer makes any sense, so maybe all those 100 page decks, marketing blog posts, investment memos, and white papers will slim down to only the salient points and in many cases vanish altogether.

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There will be more noise, at least in the near term, so people have more "content" to attach ads to and more chances to win the SEO lottery, and people use generative AI to pad out their work to look more impressive.

So, we'll waste tons of resources as presenters say "GenAI, pad out this outline into a 10-page presentation" and people receiving the presentation say "GENAI, summarize this 10-page presentation and give me the main points". Anyone who tries to short-cut this by just sending their outline will be accused of being a shirker.

Even if 100 page decks don't go away, AI can be leveraged to find the 2 or 3 pages that actually matter.

Google search has become worse and worse over the years, I could see using an AI plugin that performs a search on top of the Google search results (or aggregate all search engine results), pre-filtering SEO garbage, pre-filtering advertisements that are LARPing as information, removing the top 90% of any cooking recipe that is a diary entry about why this beef stew recipe changes the chef's life, and so on. Perhaps also the AI plugin could slightly tweak your Google search query to better align your search intent. Preferably running a local LLM plugin to do this for you so that you aren't steered towards "sponsored content".

If we do end up drowning in AI generated content then at a certain point you will probably have to use AI to combat against it, fundamentally changing how we currently use the Internet for information retrieval.

Adversarial neural networks playing out an information arms race on the Internet in a nutshell.

Bing Chat does that. It searches internet, goes through results and extracts information to generate answer. Also, gives references as links so you can consider them (filtered) search results.

I wonder if people holding those fears are even using the internet today? Its been this way, full of automatically written noise for decades perhaps now. The limiting factor is not what method you use to churn out junk content. Its probably just limited by cost of compute and hosting, things that have been “too cheap to meter” for these sorts of junk content websites for a very long time now.

The future ai spam internet will look exactly the same as the current automated spam internet, is my guess.

The people holding the fears are the ones currently paying out the ass for anti-spam system to try to block it. It's forking expensive. And will only get more expensive as the spam gets better and more human like.

This will further push consolidation behind huge companies like Google and Cloudflare.

> "proof of work"

Isn't it the case that if you ask an LLM how it arrived at a "conclusion", it can't detail its chain of reasoning because there isn't one ?

So proof of work might mean: proof of human work.

Beg pardon if I'm missing something important here.

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