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AI The Internet

AI Junk Is Starting To Pollute the Internet (wsj.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the growing-problem dept.
Online publishers are inundated with useless article pitches as websites using AI-generated content multiply. From a report: When she first heard of the humanlike language skills of the artificial-intelligence bot ChatGPT, Jennifer Stevens wondered what it would mean for the retirement magazine she edits. Months later, she has a better idea. It means she is spending a lot of time filtering out useless article pitches. People like Stevens, the executive editor of International Living, are among those seeing a growing amount of AI-generated content that is so far beneath their standards that they consider it a new kind of spam.

The technology is fueling an investment boom. It can answer questions, produce images and even generate essays based on simple prompts. Some of these techniques promise to enhance data analysis and eliminate mundane writing tasks, much as the calculator changed mathematics. But they also show the potential for AI-generated spam to surge and potentially spread across the internet. In early May, the news site rating company NewsGuard found 49 fake news websites that were using AI to generate content. By the end of June, the tally had hit 277, according to Gordon Crovitz, the company's co-founder. "This is growing exponentially," Crovitz said. The sites appear to have been created to make money through Google's online advertising network, said Crovitz, formerly a columnist and a publisher at The Wall Street Journal.

Researchers also point to the potential of AI technologies being used to create political disinformation and targeted messages used for hacking. The cybersecurity company Zscaler says it is too early to say whether AI is being used by criminals in a widespread way, but the company expects to see it being used to create high-quality fake phishing webpages, which are designed to trick victims into downloading malicious software or disclosing their online usernames and passwords. On YouTube, the ChatGPT gold rush is in full swing. Dozens of videos offering advice on how to make money from OpenAI's technology have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Many of them suggest questionable schemes involving junk content. Some tell viewers that they can make thousands of dollars a week, urging them to write ebooks or sell advertising on blogs filled with AI-generated content that could then generate ad revenue by popping up on Google searches.
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AI Junk Is Starting To Pollute the Internet More

AI Junk Is Starting To Pollute the Internet

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  • Starting? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @12:46PM (#63685969) Homepage
    The internet has been filled with useless Junk since inception. But now instead of junk it is useless money grabs via advertisements and flat out bad information; junk is an understatement.

    • Re:Starting? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:23PM (#63686103) Homepage

      The internet has been filled with useless Junk since inception.

      That is true, but it used to be human-produced. Now it is mass-produced in large volume.

      Orders of magnitude easier to produce means orders of magnitude more.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        The internet has been filled with useless Junk since inception.

        That is true, but it used to be human-produced.

        Indeed, now we may actually see a jump in quality of the internet junk as we remove humans from the loop.

    • Re:Starting? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RockDoctor ( 15477 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:50PM (#63686195) Journal
      I don't know about you, but I can remember when the Internet was incipient, in the early 1980s (well, OK, it was approaching teenaged by then). Back then it did have useful information on it, but you had to work out for yourself how to use it. (I had an email account for nearly 2 years before I sent or received an email. Then nearly another decade until I started using electronic communications again.)

      "Junk" has always been a problem. And there have always been solutions to it, from the Internet JunkBuster [wikipedia.org] in the late 90s to today's tools of NoScript, Adblock and their myriad friends. The problem isn't the tools, or the junk, it's the fact that most people are too stupid to use the tools to make "junk" unprofitable.

      • Its easy to take a well working modern internet for granted.

        Both Mosaic and NCSA HTTPd (precursor to Apache) were released 1993. The internet itself is older of course, and I saw a demo of it in room full electronics in 1980. The technician spent 15 minutes trying to get a some number. Finally he typed a command (not ping) and the number and thereafter proudly declared that what he had showed was a working internet over the Atlantic, and this was the future. The first fiber cable across the Atlantic cam

    • The internet has been filled with useless Junk since inception. But now instead of junk it is useless money grabs via advertisements and flat out bad information; junk is an understatement.

      Wouldn't it be nice of we could perhaps identify an ideal virtual community that would be known as the only legal place online useless Junk can be marketed. A sort of spam dumping ground, located far away from the useful portions of the web.

      I hear Social Media is quite toxic this time of year. Why just last week Aunt Karen was buying Grandma's freedom with a Nigerian wire transfer, after those horribly realistic kidnappers deepfuked their way into her Meta-world.

      Sounds perfect.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yusing ( 216625 )

        >an ideal virtual community that would be known as the only legal place online useless Junk can be marketed

        Ooo Ooo I know one! It has existed since day one ... the dot-com domain. Limit ALL marketing (ads, spiels, , buying, selling of all kinds) to [whatever].com.

        New users must OPT-IN to .com .

        Anyone who BREAKS the LAW by marketing elsewhere (after they finish their jailtime) gets an IP-filtered connection to .com ONLY ... FOR LIFE, without parole.

  • Starting to? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @12:50PM (#63685985)

    Google has returned almost exclusively crap for two years now, and the problem has gotten seriously worse since about 2016

    • So, why are you still using Google?

    • Between the rising ad placement and the ever-improving censorship it was already on its way down. The flooding of crap content was also well underway prior to the release of AI content generators.

      Day'll come when the Internet 'shrinks' from the individual's perspective because you'll only want to visit and participate in verified local sites - anything else will just involve too much filtering effort and still be too untrustworthy to be useful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Puls4r ( 724907 )
        You aren't kidding about the censorship. I've noticed increasingly that if you type a word google doesn't like (even a legitimate word or phrase in your search) it refuses to give suggestions at all. And when you press enter, you get a very curated internet - you can compare it to other search engines and the content google is returning it heavily redacted.

        I wonder how many people realize they are only seeing a part of the internet. The part their corporate overlords agree with.

    • People used to brag how they rarely had to go beyond the first page to find what they wanted on google. These days you disregard the entire first page as nothing but promoted sales pitches.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I stopped using Google about 3 years ago. Why are you still using it?

      • OK, what is today's version of Alta Vista? (what are you using instead of Google?)

        • Most likely using nothing instead of Google, the open internet having been whittled down to a handful of "content platforms" each with their own search tool.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          There is nothing that comes close to the original Alta Vista, sadly. There are some search engines that do deliver less crap though. Google is really "worts of breed" at this time. What I am currently using is DDG, but I am open to move again

  • My heart goes out to the Russian penis-pill sellers, Indian and Filipino ersatz-blogger ad farmers, and Chinese domain squatters being displaced by this latest entrant into the Search Enshittification Optimization sweepstakes.

  • Welcome to the new world of the AILie. What the hell did you think was going to happen?

  • AI just allows anyone to flesh out an idea in a way that is comprehensible to others.

    So maybe the first step is to use AI to put ideas into buckets you can review to filter out entire categories of ideas as being fundamentally bad, then have a human decide which submissions are worth keeping from the summaries that remain...

  • AIs spamming each other (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @12:59PM (#63686019)

    You know how holding a microphone near a speaker creates feedback noise, that's what is going to happen with all the AIs spamming themselves and learning from each other. You'll get some weird shit as the result. Multiple generations of feedback loops result in bias errors being amplified until it crowds out everything else.

    • Re:AIs spamming each other (Score:4, Interesting)

      by denny_deluxe ( 1693548 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:23PM (#63686105)
      That's why I never worried about this technology. If it hoovers up everything ever written to generate content, everything ever written will eventually include AI-derivatives of everything else, which will then be part of everything AI hoovers up to make AI-derivatives of everything, and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on until AI-derived content drowns out all else. And it'll all be identical since homogenity is inevitable with such a cascade.
      • Or it'll just decide humanity is too banal to exist after endlessly eating everything humanity has ever written and then shitting it back out again, and just nukes us all from orbit.

      • Good thing that no greedy people will ever be able to think of a solution to this problem!

      • Wait and that's why you never worried about this? It seems like a perfectly good reason to actually worry about it.

      • And the end result is everything will be Turtle - all the way down.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      I explained that problem here back in March [slashdot.org], the hot new tern for it is model collapse [arxiv.org].

      Now is the time to start building a 'clean' content database. It only gets harder from here.

    • that's what is going to happen with all the AIs spamming themselves and learning from each other. You'll get some weird shit as the result.

      That's exactly what's going to happen. Probably for a long time to come. Or perhaps until the weird shit it just happened to randomly regurgitate turns out to be useful. Who knows.

  • IMHO, I believe that it is because tech like this started filtering into the training data, making the results worse, not better. Companies that are locking down access for a $$ like Reddit may have already let the horse out of the barn, as the datasets that are useful have already been scraped from their sites.

  • The internet was already polluted (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:02PM (#63686035)
    By spam and commercial companies. I miss the early days of the internet.

  • Usually online publishers are the source, not the victim, of such junk, though.

  • And this junk will train the next LLMs (Score:3)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:25PM (#63686119)

    Just imagine, ChatGPT-5, Llama-2 and Bard-2 will be trianed on all the crap generated by ChatGPT-4, Llama and Bard, + decades of SEO Optimized crap wrtitten by Humans.

    Definetly, a recipe for a "Bad Experience" tm

  • Marketing droids ruined the World Wide Web long before ChatGPT. Give it a decade or two and we will all be back to using the Internet for sending/receiving specific files for offline use again.

  • AI In-breeding (Score:4, Insightful)

    by laie_techie ( 883464 ) on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:27PM (#63686123)

    A local radio personality warned that as AI generated content is put on the internet and used to train other AI systems, we will end up with the AI equivalence of inbreeding. I liked that analogy a lot and thought it appropriate for this conversation.

    • I already see this on image boards. All those AI images look cool from a technical perspective, but... they all look the same.

      Some people don't understand why quickly-created sketches like Trollface were so popular. Sometimes, you just got to throw something out of left field.

  • ... is going to develop AI tools for spotting AI-generated "junk" and filtering it out.

    Then there will be AI tools for spoofing the AI junk-detection tools. And another turtle on top of that on. Then another. Until the system collapses, crashes, and destroys a few dozen "paper billionaires".

    We may be seeing the first such melt-down with Musk not paying his bills for Twitter - and when that collapses, the lawsuits (for unpaid wages, unpaid compute-farm bills, etc) will move on to disembowel his other const

  • Your sewage is contaminating my cess pool.

  • It's not like the rest of the internet is so perfectly useful.

  • I know it'd be crazy, but what if you forced companies to CARE about what they hosted. And then... PUNISHED people for bad stuff.

    I know it's crazy on the internet to even think stuff like that, but... Otherwise... I'll keep generating more stuff you hate. I swear it!

  • ...to 'write' their posts?

    I'm seeing an uptick in odd spelling errors, consistent and repeating grammar errors, etc. It seems that AI is being used by these authors to transcribe their thoughts.

    Ugh.

    The spelling errors aren't outright misspelling, but wrong spelling for the use. I see errors in tense. Odd stuff.

    fwiw, I do not use AI for my posts. All the odd stuff is mine and mine alone.

    • Haha, scroll to the bottom of this page and click on 'About'. Now read the 'What is this?' answer.

      -Bingo. You won some thing. Automated story telling :D
  • Wait until much of the gen"AI" models are trained on generated content! That's going to be so much fun!
  • AI posting junk... The quality of said junk seems about level with the quality of junk posted by humans. It doesn't look like anything to me. ;)
  • IIRC in Anathem, the "internet" was so full of junk you had to rely on an expert to find any legitimate information.
  • I have heard that a community of fact checkers is going to fix it all for us. Is it not?
  • Google, Facebook, et al. have managed to turn most of the internet's business model into publishing to generate ad revenue.

    If doing it with AI is more efficient, i.e. generates substantially more ad revenue than it costs, then it is an effective business model & the internet as an ad revenue generating platform is working as intended.

    If inciting indignant outrage with articles about the world & the people in it regardless of whether it is true or not is the most efficient & competitive wa

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