How Disinformation from a Russian AI Spam Farm Ended Up on Top of Google Search

wired.com

12 points·rntn··5 comments

Justice Department Disrupts Covert Russian Government-Operated AI Bot Farm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919421

Meh. Whether you blame Google, or blame the sprawling ecosystems of non-benevolent actors who've learned to manipulate Google for their own benefit, modern search results are generally crap. Not that most people care, so long as their buttons are pushed.

In a lot of ways, you could read this story as a PSA du jour for 90% of regular web users...

It would be any search engine or social media site, not google or bing or whoever. The volume of disinformational crap on the WWW was close to zero at its inception and can only go up. The cost of AI-generated disinformation is so much lower than human-generated, it's like comparing the cost of email to the first-class postage. Just like spam, but without spam filters. Remember spam in the pre-filter days? But this isn't selling penis enlargements that you don't need. So we'll easily have more bot-created content than actual human-generated content in a couple of years.

True about the problem not being specific to Google.

But I don't know about the generation cost mattering. The article seems very clear that a serious, non-AI coordinated effort was involved in pushing the bogus story to the top. Compared to that, "generated by AI" vs. "generated by semi-slaves at keyboards somewhere" seems like a rounding error in the cost structure.

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