this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Found it first here - https://mastodon.social/@BonehouseWasps/111692479718694120

Not sure if this is the right community to discuss here in Lemmy?

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[–] [email protected] 151 points 10 months ago (11 children)

Not as bad as the AI-generated articles showing up in search results. Some websites I get driven to make absolutely no sense, despite a lot of words being written about all kinds of topics.

I'm looking forward to the day when "certified human content" is a thing, and that's all search engines allow you to see.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (11 children)

I'm looking forward to the day when "certified human content" is a thing, and that's all search engines allow you to see.

I can't wait for that. I get the feeling it's gonna get real messy before we figure out solutions to all the problems caused by AI-generated content.

I mean yeah, there's already plenty of human-generated misinformation and shit, but it seems to me (not an expert) like ai is capable of fucking with society on a whole new scale.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

The big difference is that high quality human generated content is often based on reputation, a history of quality content, and frequently reviewed by experts in the field (very common for medical articles).

But AI has none of that. It's 100% quantity over quality, and that's just internet pollution as far as I'm concerned.

We really do have to figure something out, though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

https://mashable.com/article/world-of-warcraft-wow-reddit-ai-glorbo

Reddit already tricked a bot into writing an entire article when they noticed a website was clearly scraping /r/wow

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I mean, they would have started appearing in there from the first moment that someone created one and hosted it somewhere, no? So it's already been a thing for a couple years now, I believe.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (52 children)

Yeah but AI is a buzz word and hating it is fun at the current moment!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Well it is pretty shitty though. It needs conscousness and feelings. That crap out there is barely AI.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm wondering if we give AI consciousness is it more likely to identify humans as a threat to the Earth and try to eliminate us or would it empathize with it's creators? Seems risky...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Humans are not a threat to the Earth. Do you mean that humans are a threat to the environment? That would mean that we're a threat to ourselves. It wouldn't make sense to destroy us to save us from ourselves.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 10 months ago (1 children)

AI generation sites about to become Pinterest 2.0 for clogging up search results.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I hate so much how pinterest occludes and pollutes google images 🙄

[–] [email protected] 53 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Why would they not? There’s no way for such a system to know it’s AI generated unless there’s some metadata that makes it obvious. And even if it was, who’s to say the user wouldn’t want to see them in the results?

This is a nothing issue. It’s not like this is being generated in response to a search, it’s something that already existed being returned as a result because there is assembly something that links it to the search.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

To put it bluntly: this is kind of like complaining a pencil drawing on a napkin showed up in the results.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There’s no way for such a system to know it’s AI generated unless there’s some metadata that makes it obvious.

I agree with your comment but just want to point out that AI-generated images actually often do contain metadata, usually describing the model and prompt used.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

By the time a user has shared them, 99% of the time all superfluous metadata has been stripped, for better or worse.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Its time to start talking about "memetic effluent." In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they're pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.

This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it's own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it's own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, "How can I tell you 'I love you' after hearing 'cars love shell?'"

While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.

This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It's interesting, because the idea is basically that knowledge and ideas should be constructive, so as not to pollute the sum of human knowledge.

So that raises the question, what is the constructive conclusion to "memetic effluent"? Without one, is the concept itself an example of such effluent?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It also raises the very thorny issue of who adjudicates what is and is not "memetic effluent."

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Well, of course. The search algorithm has no way to know the difference.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Google is a search engine, it shows stuff hosted on the Internet. If these AI generated images are hosted on the Internet, Google should show them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Except is VERY heavily weights certain sources.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (4 children)

That’s a completely different topic though.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Internet was already unreliable source of information (for some stuff) without AI, just wait

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for circling the largest photo, my eyes didn't know where to go #bless 🙏

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I wonder what would happen in the future as future AI's get trained with AI generated images that they got from the internet. Would the generated images start to degrade or have somekind of distinct style pop out.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah something like that. I imagine it would be something like jpeg which degrades as you keep converting over and over. But not sure how would AI generated images would look like.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

If you are interested in the subject, this is an interesting medium article.

And should you wish to go directly to the technical source, skipping Medium's stupidity, here you go.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Just wanted to point out that the Pinterest examples are conflating two distinct issues: low-quality results polluting our searches (in that they are visibly AI-generated) and images that are not "true" but very convincing,

The first one (search results quality) should theoretically be Google's main job, except that they've never been great at it with images. Better quality results should get closer to the top as the algorithm and some manual editing do their job; crappy images (including bad AI ones) should move towards the bottom.

The latter issue ("reality" of the result) is the one I find more concerning. As AI-generated results get better and harder to tell from reality, how would we know that the search results for anything isn't a convincing spoof just coughed up by an AI? But I'm not sure this is a search-engine or even an Internet-specific issue. The internet is clearly more efficient in spreading information quickly, but any video seen on TV or image quoted in a scientific article has to be viewed much more skeptically now.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This isn’t new, I’ve seen ai in the Google images results for months now, close to a year.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

the internet is really going to need some kind of centralized hash signature authority

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have been for a while. Pretty annoying and I wish you could filter them out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The Google AI that pre-loads the results query isn't able to distinguish real photos from fake AI generated photos. So there's no way to filter out all the trash, because we've made generative AI just good enough to snooker search AI.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Why wouldn't they?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

What the hell is going on with that mustache?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I noticed this with Bing as well.

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