AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.
Same for software for that matter. GenAI has killed my interest in releasing web apps outside of work. Before I used to find value in putting stuff on the web for others to find and enjoy, and it sparked some interesting interaction with other people. Now anything I publish will mostly be consumed by bots and thrown into an AI blender that completely divorces it from the creator.
Sorry for the somewhat sarcastic tone. But the hyperbolism deserved it.
edit: I might add that anna's archive and sci-hub are good alternatives to the slopweb.
Also it doesn't even make sense... How could we know this without Plato writing it down??
It's just exhausting to read, and it displays a lack of effort put into communication.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine two blog entries on the same subject, but one is written by an expert on the subject and one by a layman. As humans, we can generally (not perfectly) tell which is which. The expert will write in a certain quality that comes with expertise and is genuinely difficult to fake without it.
LLMs disrupt this pattern. LLMs are able to write with the expert’s quality even while writing bullshit. I don’t mean quality as “measure of goodness” here but merely a set of traits or properties. Humans reading LLM text are far more likely to misjudge the author’s level of expertise.
The next step is unscrupulous humans exploiting this to trick unsuspecting readers into misjudging a text, and now you have an internet where you can’t trust anything anymore, at least not at first glance. Even relatively discerning readers now have to waste time reading more of the text before being able to dismiss it as having substance of little value.
So, as I see it, the upset is not simply from AI provenance of a text, but from this level of dishonesty and subterfuge, coupled with the helplessness with which we’re exposed to it.
Unfortunately that's a big assumption and for many their "signing off" process will amount to "skimmed it and seems ok?".
When I get an LLM-generated doc or runbook, my first thought is that its very possible that I'm the first person who has ever read this. It used to be that writing something took a big time and energy investment up front by one person so that many others could comprehend the ideas with less time and energy needed. LLMs flip this equation around which is a very bad thing.
For example, I was searching for a guide for realigning the v-brakes on my wife's hybrid bike and found this: https://volatacycles.com/how-to-adjust-bike-brakes-rubbing/
Now, this is for disc brakes, so not applicable in my situation. I've never ridden a bike with disc brakes, so I can't vet for the accuracy of this guide. Maybe it's totally right; I'm sure someone reading this will know.
However, just look at this article! Zero pictures for a process that _really_ needs it. It just drones on. Imagine following this guide only to discover that the 12-15 Nm rotor torque the article is asking for is actually too high!
A similar article from before AI would at least have (stolen) pictures describing the process. It would also very likely be shorter. Which creates the rub: if I know how to write something engaging and correcting AI's copy will take _just as much time_ as writing it myself, why would I use AI to do it?
In short, AI content is lazy content. My time is valuable and finite; if I'm reading your stuff, I want to know that you at least tried to give a shit about my time as a reader while producing it.
For me the issue is very clear: I happily use AI to answer tons of questions each day, but if I’m reading your website/blog/article/Jira ticket, I expect real human input.
It should matter whether the author “sweated over it for hours”, because that means they actually considered the best way to communicate something. If they didn’t do that, then they clearly don’t care enough about about the quality of their output and I shouldn’t spend any time at all on it. In fact it’s worse than that because if the author doesn’t respect the reader enough to craft their output, then I as a reader have no respect for their work, and I resent that they’ve taken my attention for the time it takes me to realize it’s ai generated. If you’re publishing Ai content, then I can only presume you have an ulterior motive than plain communication- in the case of OP I’d assume this is for ad revenue or clicks.
There are many types of writing, and I struggle to think of many where a statistical model could feasibly produce an acceptable output for the given intention.
Eg. A poet chooses their words extremely carefully; a good instruction manual is written by the designers of the product (not just guessing at a common or plausible method); a news article has an angle/story beyond just the facts.
I'll go further. Even if it were falsifiable, why should it matter? An example: I subscribe to a reputable US publication and I enjoy its journalism. If it turned out that one of its writers had (somehow) used AI to generate their article (which I enjoyed) in a click, here's what I would say to them: Hats off to you! How did you do it?!
I don't care if the article took them two minutes or if they used AI any more than I care if they used a spellchecker or wrote it while standing upside down. Why should I? The author put their name to the article and I got something out of it. That is all I was ever looking for.
Buckle up, because the next phase of this AI content generation nightmare will be articles like this featuring AI generated images of a bike repair in progress, except the bike will only kinda-sorta be like the real bike the article is describing.
An LLM can't convey your ideas and your voice better than you can convey them to the LLM, right? It's a middleman between you and those you want to reach that adds more points of failure, an additional entity that must be understood and made to understand, or else meaning is lost.
EDIT: Never mind the motivations behind a majority of LLM-generated articles, which is to be One Unit Whole Content, a colloid for ads.
If people used AI to get the scaffolding of their article going and then re-humanized the entire article, it might be really good, still at a fraction of the time it would have taken to write it themselves, but no one seems to want to expend enough effort to go the extra mile.
With video it's pretty well hopeless, unless the AI helps accelerate fully human traditional production techniques.
With music, there might be a middle ground, I have had some success getting AI to generate good sounding loops to use in electronic music production, but it was just a matter of brute forcing enough outputs to finally get something decent, which isn't fun at all.
A lot of our culture is disappearing before our eyes and people are defending it.
I don't know why you'd ignore the output of talented musicians because AI exists.
You can't complain about culture disappearing if you're choosing to ignore it.
Perhaps they did and quit?
Q2: How does nobody still working on this not see that this is an obviously horrifying idea?
A: They passed the filter. The fact such people are in control is even more horrifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory
What's more realistic; 50+ year olds of today just parroting sensory experience where they heard their dead or dying elders complain about the kids back in the 00s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s... etc etc
Or the 50+ year olds actually figured out how everything must work for the next 1,000 years they won't be around for
The olds who grew up in a PTSD addled post world war and cold war social reality while huffing leaded gas smog? They figured it out forever, everyone!
...No. You figured out yourselves relative to technology of your day. Tech will change and the living will figure themselves out relative to their technology.
You're just engaged in parroting specifics of your own experience.