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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Found this gem yesterday while trying to research “k3s vs k0s” on Google: https://www.nops.io/blog/k0s-vs-k3s-vs-k8s/#:~:text=While%20....

Unsurprisingly it is on the blog of an AI company. The article contradicts itself multiple times, restating who is the developer of each of k0s, k3s, and k8s. Even if you are unfamiliar with these things a human being reading it can easily see it’s false information from the contradictions alone, which just goes to show this “nops.io” is just publishing AI blog spam without even having a final human proof read.

And the worst is that Google’s automatic algorithms are consuming it and thinking it is good content, making it the featured snippet.

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It could be AI, but content farm garbage has been around for a long time. I remember seeing one that was on how calculate total addressable market, and the whole post was "find out the total market, and determine what percentage you can address." It was back in 2018 or so, so someone had to put in the effort to write it.

Only now its more scalable to do content farm garbage with AI, it's cheaper SEO on steroids.

I'm optimistic it will one day be possible to sift through AI generated garbage, but it will take time just like it did with email/spam. And the most likely outcome will be through paid services, either paid content or paid filtering, just like email works best to this day.

I remember the early email days, early 2000's, pretty much anyone could setup their own email server (qmail/sendmail), there wasn't much spam to worry about and it required a lot of effort to make spam cost effective. Fast-forward today, even though you can still setup one, it requires a crazy amount of effort to ensure delivery in-and-out due to spam abuse, that, or pretty much paying a transactional fee, which is the easiest, so large providers don't flag email as spam.

But they have an audio version of the article!

The information super-trash-way, the data is feeding on itself.

We're heading back to the information dark ages. I don't know if I'm glad or sad, the pendulum is swinging the other way, where printed books or face-to-face learning, will come back in vogue to get vetted information.

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