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I sounded the alarm when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz, and nobody listened.
Now, our very own self_made_human, a generally intelligent and well regarded poster here, has succumbed to the exact same trap and posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about OpenAI and the UAE.
It appears that this problem is getting out of hand. In the past (let's say <2022) we had shitty reporting too, with low quality tabloids like daily mail, kotaku, vice, etc. posting poorly sourced sensationalist stories. But at least for those, they had human authors on the payroll whose job was to find sensationalist stories that were ideally true. And the tabloids could be sued for defamation if their false claims went too far, meaning that anything too spicy had to enough evidence, however thin, to cover ass for lawsuits.
Now we have 100 million Indians all trying to set up fake websites masquerading as "news" all hooked up to script kiddie scripts and ChatGPT, configured to pump out stories without the hand of a human even touching on the process. There was no human who even pressed a button to generate the fake article about Tim, just a cronjob that triggered the generate_todays_hoax() function like it does every day. And they simply need to put up lookalikes of real news sites (think scameras, white van speakers, etc.) and pay black hat SEOs to get their results into Google/Yahoo and get eyeballs on their absolute diarrhea of shit.
And yes, I admit that writers can use AI to help them be more productive and effective. But that absolutely isn't what's happening here. These scammers/hoaxers are only after clicks/money and have literally 0 care for the accuracy or reality of their bullshit at all.
You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...I would like to humbly ask everyone here to please be aware that these grift websites (distinct from AI output in general, feel free to chat with ChatGPT on your own time) have zero truth value and should be regarded as about as trustworthy as those nigerian prince emails in your inbox. The people creating this slop are literally malicious hoaxers and scammers who only see you as moneybags and run this as a side gig from their main job of scamming grandmas in tech support scams.
Edit: It appears that business today does in fact publish real human written articles in addition to fake AI hoaxes, so uhhh your mileage may vary
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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