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Comment on Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who’s a real person. Information that’s true will be almost impossible to verify online.

In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain’t seen nothin yet.

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ParanoiaComplex@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search

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- rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In the past I remember it made using search engines less rewarding than using web directories, web rings, asking people on forums etc. That was slower, but gave you results (and acquaintances). While using search meant looking through dozens of pages of search results, mainly SEO.
  
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- ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The top results pages, sure. I belive it’s going to take over the top 500. Along with flooding places like lemmy and reddit.
  
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lloram239@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, so a lot of the “lets plaster everything with ads” will lose effectivness.

The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.

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- ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They have already been trying to use ai to combat and identify ai in college and highschool papers. So far it’s been severely ineffective. AI has gotten pretty good at writing out a sentence or two that looks like it’s real. If ai improves enough I doubt they’ll be much of a way to identify it all.
  
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  - lloram239@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s not about identifying AI or even spam, but about extracting useful information. Are the claims made in a source backed by other sources? Do they violate information from trusted sources? That’s all stuff that an AI can reason about and then discard the source as junk or condense it down to the useful information in it.
    
    Basically you completely skip browsing the Web yourself and just use the AI to find you what you want. Think of it like some IMDB or Wikipedia, but covering everything and written and curated by AI. When the AI doesn’t already know some fact, it goes crawling the Web and finding it out for you, expanding its knowledge base in the process.
    
    At the moment there are still some technical hurdles, the AI systems we have are all still a little to stupid for this. But that seems to be the direction we are heading, things like summarizer bots already do a pretty good job and ChatGPT is reasonably good at answering basic questions. Only a matter of time until it gets good enough that you couldn’t do a better job yourself.
    
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    ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re looking at it in a flawed manner. AI has already been making up sources and names to state things as facts. If there’s a hundred websites for claiming the earth is flat and you ask an ai if the earth is flat, it may tell you it is flat and source those websites. It’s already been happening. Then imagine more opinionated things than hard observable scientific facts. Imagine a government using AI to shape opinion and claim there was no form of insurrection on Jan 6th. Thousands of websites and comments could quickly be fabricated to confirm that it was all made up. Burying the truth into obscurity.
    
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- EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think it’s just a new world for spam.
  
  At some point, probably soon, AI content will generate so much data it becomes untenable to store all the scraped data.
  
  We’ll also reach a point where it becomes much more costly to parse the data for AI spam+trustworthiness+topics. If you need LLMs just to filter spam, that is a large step up in costs and infrastructure vs current methods.
  
  When that happens what happens to search? The quality will have to degrade or the margins will drop off sharply.
  
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