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It's not clear to me why linking to AI-generated articles is far worse than, say, linking to a human-written article with tons of falsehoods. If AI is writing entire articles and confabulating facts that didn't happen, the problem is that a person linking to the article is assuming those facts are true when they aren't. Why does it matter if a bot wrote them or a human did?
The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar. This led to a modest degradation of Google search results, but you could always still find the facts without too much trouble if you were aware of this.
AI generated nonsense is approximately 40,000 times cheaper than hiring an Indian to make human nonsense.
Some quick google check says that human Indian ghostwriters charge approx 5 INR per word, so for 1M words it would cost approximately $60,000. GPT-4.1 mini costs $1.60 / 1M tokens.
Let me say that again, it would cost you $40,000 to hire human slopwriters to write the same amount of slop that $1 buys on OpenAI.
This absolutely lowers the bar on bad actors in a transformative way. A person trying to make a human slop site with humans still has to invest 5 figures of money on content, and cares about things like not getting sued, having a passable reputation, and retaining repeat customers. A person making an AI slop can be set up a fly-by-night operation on a shoestring budget, with their black hat SEOs being the bulk of the cost.
As I said to the other guy: it's an issue of demand, not supply. The price was already cheap enough that it was saturating what (revealed) demand there was. As a toy example, let's say the price dropped to fully $0. Would that lead to infinity words being generated by the slop-meisters, and the entire internet being nothing but SEO stuff? No, obviously not. It can't replace things already being written by humans, nor can it infinitely crowd out something like Google search results -- there can only be one top result, one second result, etc. Plus, well-known sites like the NYT are already heavily favored, and that's unlikely to ever change. Maybe things get slightly worse, but I bet that would be more from AI being able to lie/confabulate more convincingly rather than a cost proposition.
There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI, but the notion that it will just broadly destroy the internet somehow isn't one of them.
Citation needed.
Yes, this is already happening. I can easily link you to black hat sites that have tens of millions of words of AI generated slop. That would be >$100K to pay Indians to ghostwrite, but only $5 of AI costs.
Here take a look at some examples:
So yes, I can confidently say that the introduction of AI slop has significantly increased the quantity of negative-worth garbage out there. It might even be that the amount of AI generated slop currently on the internet is greater than the amount of text ever written by humans in all history.
Only if google gets on their game of bonking these malicious sloppers. I only know of these slops because they were able to successfully rank on the first page or even as the first result on some keywords.
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AI writes slop cheaper, faster and better (in the "exploits SEO better" way) (perhaps better even than most whites).
What do you mean by this??
That the modal native English speaker is white, or if not native, then more likely to be in contact with anglophone culture, and finally, if you believe that sort of thing, is more likely to have higher verbal IQ.
I shrank that down to "white" because I write for the audience I'm in, and admittedly I overestimate the number of those who already believe most Indians are innately worse at things.
@George_E_Hale
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The grandparent comment is skeptical that AI will ruin the online media landscape, comparing AI to brown third-worlders (Indians and Indonesians), who have been writing slop for years:
Whether AI is better than (the more expensive) white writers is relevant to if AI writing will lead to a paradigm shift or if its just kind of the same old at a slightly different scale.
This is an extrapolation but you're explaining for the person who posted, who made no caveats about "more expensive" white writers, just wrote "most whites" as if we are to believe whites (defined how I do not know) are somehow more talented as a whole at writing than ___. This kind of presumptuous comment jars and I concur with @ThomasdelVasto that it shouldn't be just left unquestioned.
I would be shocked if the average white person was not better at writing convincing lies in European languages than the average Indian person, if for no other reason than because the average white person speaks a European first language. I'll give two more, though: Firstly because every signifier of Indian dialect is considered a red flag by people hunting for spam, so the Indian has to try not to trip over their dialect. Secondly because if you're writing copy then it matters whether you have a native command of the language and are immersed in the culture.
At least this is a rationale. I'd counter with the notion that the average person, white or not, probably can't write very well anyway. Twenty five years ago as a grad student I taught freshman composition, and the majority of my native-speaking students (almost entirely white) couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Also dialects are legion even within the English language, and not as prominent in writing as speaking, in particularly phonological dialect. I can write "pen" and you read it in your own dialect, not realizing I'm imagining it pronounced "pin." Even lexically there aren't all that many terms in English used by native Indians that wouldn't be used by, say a British person* (e.g. "lift" for the proper term: elevator).
In any case I appreciate your having a stab at defending the position. I still think it's giving "whites" way too much generalized credit. Admittedly my experience with Indians has been with the highly educated.
*Let's say white British person.
I'm kind of sympathetic to Sunshine, there's a tendency in certain parts of India to write ridiculous lies in quite poor English.
See here: https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/rafale-superior-to-chinese-j-20-a-comparison-of-the-two-fighter-jets-1705178-2020-07-28
Firstly, these sentences look like they were written by a child. Extremely awkward structuring and poor grammar.
Secondly, the content is extremely silly. 3rd generation engine in the J-20? The Russian engines they were using at the time in the J-20 were 4th gen and they were introducing better Chinese engines. A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom, around the end of Vietnam, it's like saying China is 50 years behind. The Air Marshal is a fool, there was considerable schadenfreude in some parts of military-aviation twitter when export-grade Chinese J-10s wrecked India's Rafales.
Basic spellchecking failures too. Is one go? This is from the most popular Indian newspaper apparently. I have no doubt that much Indian journalism is better than this but it's easy to see a qualitative gap.
I think what rubs me the wrong way (a phrase of my mother's) is the default alternative to word salad writing was not even to native speaker, but to "white."
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FWIW, Wikipedia suggests that the Chinese definition of 3rd generation is different from that of the West, with the Su-30 (which Nambiar mentioned) being a 3.5 generation fighter. While it's quite possible that Nambiar is making ridiculous claims, it seems a bit more likely to me that he is using the PLA fighter generation definition...although that doesn't preclude making ridiculous claims – amusingly Wikipedia thinks that the Rafale would also be a 3.5 generation aircraft under that scheme, and I personally don't think the Rafale is exactly all that compared to an Su-35, particularly not with the original PESA array, although it looks like the Indians got the AESA variant.
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I’ve seen similarly grandiose lies come out of the Western military establishment (like the claim that four 20 year old MRLS systems being donated to Ukraine would allow them to singlehandedly win the war.) The difference here is that there’s no apparatus to gaslight you when you you point out the obvious fact that it’s ridiculous.
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It's always been an issue of demand, though. Indians and Indonesians were always cheap enough that they could "flood the internet" with false, low-effort clickbait, but as long as people had some degree of standards then it wasn't a huge issue.
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