Spam, junk, slop? The latest wave of AI behind the 'zombie internet'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Bookmark your favorite reference sites and use their search. We're coming back around to the pre-Google era of search engine result quality. Who knows, maybe human-curated web directories[0] will come back into fashion.
I know slop is going to ruin everything else, but I've been able to carve out my little space well enough for my on-the-job need internet needs. Off the job, it's probably better to be IRL anyway.
It's not an infinite number of webpages. Someone could just put all those links into a .json and make an applet that let you instantly look up any of them.
- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slop
... but I think the usage is new. Either way my thinking is that it is beneficial for a specific word for the concept of "unwantes AI generated content" to exist, as a thing, so we can discourse about it ...)
It's not yet in published dictionaries, and was only added to Wiktionary in January.
I think the blog post was from some kind of home air filter review site or something, but I can't find it....
Now there is a small chance AI generated content could get more content available not behind paywalls, with more small and micro publishers. But getting rid of the factually inaccuracies and hallucinations would be a huge task, that google doesn't seem to be capable of, at least their recent blunders suggest.
The old internet as we know it, the free one, will be a cesspool of ads, spam, and scams. A deserted wasteland no one goes to.
Internet connected devices, (especially for kids) will only connect to whitelisted, paid sites.
Perhaps we'll look back and remember the innocence we used to have about the old, open internet.
As soon as social media went from this really cool place to connect with communities and people into a cesspool of partisan politics, overbearing ads and massive echo chambers and horrific abuse of people's private information - the sheen of the internet had worn off for me.
Maybe I'm just being a pessimist and am only seeing the negative stuff, but it just feels overwhelmingly bad. this AI spam is just another nail in the coffin for me. I've already been pulling back from the internet for a while now, and nothing has given me any encouragement to engage any more than I absolutely have to at this point.
> We're coming back around to the pre-Google era of search engine result quality.
A solution is just to formalize this process. Does a site have a high reputation? Then return its results. What makes a high reputation? Can't really quantify "quality content", but you can say "a lack of slop", good citations, and fact checking.
There's really no such thing as "reputation quantization" (as far as I know), but it would certainly help address the "slop" problem.
I’ve been marking it as spam, but since it sounds like a human I realize some of my actual human correspondents are going to spam.
Well, as long as it doesn't fall into prompt injections.
Sadly I don't know of existing solutions to do this.
Why LLM's, unless it's the only hammer you have? For instance, "is it from an acquaintance?" seems like a case for a classic mail rule. It's not like an LLM can read your mind to find out who your acquaintances are, and mining your correspondence to figure it out doesn't pass the smell test. If you chat with a friend about "Steve," how would it figure out who that actually is? Should it let all mail from every self-identified Steve in?
The only way to do better than a mail rule is privacy-invading metadata collection a-la Facebook (who slurped the address books of you and your friends, and tracks all your communications that it can, so it knows who your friends are who who your friend's friends are).
I'm not sure exactly how they all have the same ideas at the same time, I suspect that journos are highly interlinked and when a spicy tip or publication drops, they all get excited about it.
The press release effect is real however
"Agreeing to disagree" is the last redoubt of conspiracism because it's so bankrupt in the standing of a given claim that there's nothing else to lean on.
More broadly, there's the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which had been noted well before it was given that name, including by Thomas Jefferson.
The hiring process needs a revamp - and needs to pivot to recorded applications quickly.
That said, if someone applying to a Junior dev position linked me to a YouTube video in their cover letter explaining a personal project they’d been working on, it’d for sure put them at the top of the Junior dev pile for interviews for me. So I guess maybe it did help, as I did end up getting the job.
The weird part about ragebait content is that most of it doesn’t have an obvious monetary benefit to the posters. The goal appears to be generating as many upvotes and engagement as possible. There might be some secondary monetary goal such as building a following to sell to them later (Instagram, TikTok) or to build an account’s reputation to use it in spam operations later (Reddit, Twitter). However, I think a lot of people just post the content for the thrill of getting a lot of upvotes and seeing people worked up.
Try checking the front page of Reddit while logged out (to see the default subs). It’s a wild place that describes an alternate reality in which the worst possible outcomes are the norm. During COVID, everyone was going to die. After the vaccine, the talk was about everyone getting evicted and the “homeless wave” that was coming. Now that inflation is a topic, there are daily posts about how masses of people are going to starve to death because nobody can afford food.
A couple days ago one of the top posts on Reddit was a photo of 30 pills and nothing more than a title claiming it costs $12,000. Thousands of angry comments followed, demanding riots in the street and revolutions and talking about people dying. Buried in the comments was a single thread where someone actually looked up the price of the pills: It was $34, not $12,000. The manufacturer also has a program where people who can’t afford it can get the pills for free. It didn’t stop the post from staying on top Reddit for a day and convincing countless numbers of people of a complete lie.
This content seems to appeal to people who enjoy being outraged and don’t mind an exaggerated lie as long as it is in furtherance of a narrative they believe. People will look at that outrage thread and say it’s okay because America does have a drug price problem even if that story was a complete fabrication. This is the root problem: Too many people like the ragebait, the karma farming posts, and soon, the infinite AI generated content coming to feed them exactly the outrage they want to read every day.
You raise a good and valid point. Methinks we need not just one more neologism, but an entire bestiary of internet content.-
For example. I literally just saw a video on my feed of a professional barber trying to fix a balding person’s haircut, by spray painting his scalp. The barber was acting serious, pretending to show off his skills, but the real content was how ridiculously awful it looked, and this accounted for 99% of the (many) comments. He knew what he was doing.
Is there a name for this kind of slop?
I’m sure there’s prior art to this kind of thing but it just feels like a hunch at this point.
This is a big part of the issue, and it's happening in non-social media contexts too. My parents use no social media, but they're constantly afraid and angry about things that often don't exist or aren't real issues.
When platforms like Twitter and TikTok monetize engagement you realize that these can often be intentional. Once you recognize the patterns it becomes very hard to unsee.
Yet another source of horribleness from Amazon's book department. I recently wanted to buy a softcover copy of Lovecraft's collected works. I know it's out of copyright but I want a book I can hold. What came was junk, poorly scanned to the point of having extra page numbers stolen from the original. This is what Amazon does with books. No matter how much or little you pay, the delivered book will somehow not be what you wanted.
What came was exactly the same thing. I think the cover was legit, but the contents were so poorly photocopied, you could see the shadows on the corners of many of the pages where they were copied. Many of the pages were just flat out crooked to boot. It was comical the seller passed this off as legit.
It was the last straw for me ordering things off of Amazon. Now I try and order stuff directly from the manufacturer so I know for sure it's legit. I'm now comfortable paying more for stuff knowing that's it legit than rolling the dice on Amazon and getting a fake or counterfeit item.
If someone uses ChatGPT to help them write and iterate on a well researched essay about a topic and verifies that the details are correct, I don't see that as slop.
People with English as a second language are getting a huge boost from these tools. That's great!
This.-
Unreviewed, or downright unsupervised. And, unsolicited. Perhaps, also, "unmarked".-
PS. Perhaps also, "low quality".-
Where is the presupposition? The parent comment seems to match your sentiment.
Yes, a human always has to review the output, but not necessarily to micromanage or edit it further, sometimes only to approve or reject the claims.
It is an uncontroversial fact that LLMs make mistakes.
If a human being has reviewed the output of GPT and is willing to stake their personal reputation on that content being "correct", then I'm happy to read it.
If nobody has done that then it's slop and a waste of my time.
(Unless of course I requested that information from GPT myself, in which case it's on me to review it before sharing it with others.)