Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 28-May-2024 22:19:44 JST myrmepropagandist

   These AI SEO spam operations have used lists of common searches to ensure that their pages come up first in searches in the “long fat tail” the kind of search where it used to be about 50/50 if you’d find a page addressing your needs. But, it used to be *if* you found something like “The top 15 smallest ants in the world” it wouldn’t be nonsense. It’d either exist and be the work of another person who cared OR you found nothing. Not so now! I can’t possibly over-stress how bad this is! 1/

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 28-May-2024 22:20:04 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     Once you could count on some things posted online probably being true because, well, why would anyone bother to put out misinformation about a topic so obscure or uncontroversial? now the simple fact that someone might want to know a bit of information makes it worth faking if it can get their eyeballs on an ad— or improve the search ranking for some company. The harmless act of *being curious* about the world causes misinformation to spring to life. We have made wanting to learn destructive.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 28-May-2024 22:20:05 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     The funny results: like the ones telling you to cook with glue hide the fact that some portion of these attempts at impersonating information are not easy to detect. For every obviously bad result there are others going unnoticed since they were plausible enough to pass.

     And those flawed results are being regurgitated and reprocessed by further AIs spreading the rot and half truths deeper and deeper into the body of human knowledge. Like scratching an infected wound.

     2/2

     Paul Cantrell and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 28-May-2024 22:29:26 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     Some day soon a child will ask “what is the smallest ant in the world?” and discover that, unless they want to become an expert they simply can’t know.

     This is the death of polymaths— a hurdle for interdisciplinary learning— and a return to a kind of human gatekeeping for real information: you best ask someone qualified if you are not expert enough to tell on your own. (this was already true for contentious topics, but now it will be everything)

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tristan Harward (trisweb@m.trisweb.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-May-2024 14:42:45 JST Tristan Harward

     in reply to

     @futurebird we need a knowledge bank, kind of like a seed bank but for knowledge untainted by AI.