AI Megathread
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Major newspapers post a summer section of AI slop that includes, among other things, a summer reading list for kids with imaginary books (complete with imagined summaries).
Apart from the obvious debacle, I think that article has a good take on the second-order effects of GenAI that many don’t consider.
- Most “free” internet sites are free because they have ads.
- As more people get their content from AI-generated slop like ChatGPT, the only people coming to sites are AI bots.
- Nobody’s going to pay to advertise to bots.
- Ad money dries up.
- Site goes behind a paywall, or (if it can’t sustain itself with subscriptions) no longer exists.
We’re already seeing more paywalls, and the problem will only get worse.
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If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.
Until there’s no more content for them to gobble up because all the websites they stole from have shut down.
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Part of the reason we’re now drowning in content slop farms that themselves use generative AI is because advertising revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for advertisers or those who are paid by them because they form part of the ecosystem that put us in this mess. Let the model collapse, it stopped serving us long ago.
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@Juniper The existing ad model sucks, but there are other ways to solve that problem. If someone is doing work to put out professional content, they shouldn’t be expected to give it away for free, and it certainly shouldn’t be stolen from them by a plagiarism machine. They deserve compensation, whether that’s through a subscription or ads. I have no problem with, for instance, YouTube’s model where you get to choose between the two.
But regardless of philosophy, what I’m talking about is simple cause and effect. ChatGPT has to get its information from human content creators. If OpenAI drives them all out of business, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot too. But by the time that happens, the damage to all the other creators will already have been done.
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@Juniper said in AI Megathread:
revenue made content profitable and incentivised creating content as quickly as possible while eliminating any kind of standards for quality
That’s just late-stage capitalism. Internet advertising standards are a symptom rather than a cause.
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cool cool cool this isn’t problematic at all
