Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder how the advertisement industry is going to cope with the ever-growing influx of non-human users. What happens when the conversion rates plummet to zero?

Maybe I'm cynic, but a completely walled-off / paid internet doesn't seem too unrealistic. You'll have to pay a subscription to every website you want to visit.

On one side you have the open internet wasteland, filled to the brim with AI bots / generated content, essentially trying to vacuum pennies off human visitors. On the other hand you have the walled internet, where you have to pay for stuff and jump through flaming hoops to prove that you're a human.

View on HN

I've not really considered this before, but I might actually be interested in a 'white-listed' web. This is obviously possible entirely client-side with a plug-in that white-lists domains and allows you to edit the list.

I'm wondering if there's a genuine opportunity here to go further. A client-side browser plug-in, plus a SaaS which automatically vets pages on-the-fly to guesstimate the chance they're AI-generated, spammy, etc. So if you visit a new domain the plug-in auto-updates the white-list, prompting you to confirm the judgement, maybe prompting to add the domain to UB0 or similar.

Again, this could all be done entirely client-side if the guesstimation algorithm is efficient enough. But a centralised database would confer other obvious advantages, like basing the guesstimation score on decisions from similar users, building a giant up-to-date list with fast lookup, that sort of thing. Site listings and other data from Kagi, marginalia.nu and Mwmble.com would be a great starting place. Obviously it would have to protect against the system being gamed, Sybil attacks and what have you.

I'd pay a dozen CURRENCY per year for that.

Maybe this exists already, or something similar?

> plus a SaaS which automatically vets pages on-the-fly to guesstimate the chance they're AI-generated,

the problem is that would create another SEO like arms race. If it takes off everyone will be working 24x7 to defeat the vetting process and gain entry to the walled garden just like they did to gain entry to the first page of Google search results.

Indeed, although client-side opting in/out of any site's ranking would mitigate this.

AI solves that problem - it’s pretty easy to look at behavioral data and identify low v high quality users. Optimize towards what the AI thinks is users likely to convert and the problem Is solved.

What prevents this from becoming a game of cat and mouse? I mean, AIs can pretend to be high quality users, too, right?

I won't pretend to be able to look into the future with any kind of certainty, even if the scope is only a couple of years, but it wouldn't surprise me if we have created a way to make the dead internet theory real.

It is already a game of cat and mouse and has been since forever. There's nothing wrong with cat-and-mouse games from the viewpoint of an advertiser, it just means they have to keep innovating.

Wouldn't it just become an arms race between the two? I.e. the ad companies trying to identify human/legit users the best they can, and the AI actors trying to mimic high quality users?

Having interacted with some bots, it def feels like we've gone from the stone age, to the sci-fi future, in only a couple of years.

This is the principle behind GAN aka Generative Adversarial Networks. By pitting a generating model against a detection model, you can iterate your content until it is indistinguishable from human generated content.

It’s my prediction that a ChatGPG supercharged with a GAN is going to be the most valuable iteration of text generation technology. Granted, it will still likely be off a little but it’s going to get harder and harder to tell the difference.

...and lose all your privacy as those paid internet sites siphon off your search terms, pattern match your purchasing and consumption, and sell advanced psychological profiles to Cambridge Analytica so they can turn around and use it to psyop you into voting for another shitbag Billionaire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com