This is going to happen for a while. Execs who actually have no clue have now been sold on the idea that AI lets them keep making money without paying labor.
It will fail eventually when the execs eventually take the time to learn what AI is capable of and what it isn’t capable of.
Who am I kidding? It’ll continue indefinitely because there are few consequences for clueless executives.
I see a possibility where these sites eventually become terrible and there is a new person can come in and make content made by humans.
Holy shit. Haven’t heard of How Stuff Works since like 2002…
Someone should create a blocklist for all these new AI-driven websites.
For me personally thee primary appeal of websites are that there’s human authors behind the content… otherwise I’d just ask an ‘AI’ myself.
It would be great to have a list of sites so id know whose links I can just immediately ignore.
I’ve read articles that were clearly created using ChatGPT, there was no extrapolation to add context/details to illustrate their points, and parts of it read like it just pulled from a Wikipedia page. The tone felt more robotic than pieces they published 6~8 months ago.
ChatGPT can be useful when it’s part of a larger writing process, but I have a feeling that sites that create prompts and paste the output as their articles will slowly die-off because the quality isn’t there.
We’re probing the limits of generative AI right now. I expect a snapback of sorts as people find what does and does not work.
I was checking something on a Fandom “wiki” the other day and I swear to god the summary for a bunch of episodes for several shows was either written or rewritten by AI. You can tell because it uses a bunch of nonsense synonyms, like replacing the name Ray with Beam.
Great. Now people are going to read up a bunch of bs generated by a language model and confidently spread around “hallucinations” as facts.
They must be having proof readers
Probably, though it might be too optimistic to assume that. However, I believe it will still result in more mistakes simply because it’s harder to spot errors in an existing text than to not put errors in the text in the first place by fact-checking beforehand and then having another person proof-read.
One of the reasons for that is that LLMs don’t feel guilty when they hallucinate while most humans don’t like to lie or be too lazy to fact check, and even if they don’t care about that, they still have to think about getting caught and damaging their reputation, which again LLMs don’t have. And you can’t call stating something false as a fact in an article an honest mistake (it’s negligence at best) unlike an editor’s missing something (due to a looming deadline, perhaps), especially when it’s assumed there won’t be too many hallucinations, which isn’t a certainty.
That’s optimistic.
You know that’s not how this works.
No, that’s exactly how this stuff works. Lay off 80% of writers and keep all your fact checkers and editors.
I wonder how Josh and Chuck from SYSK feel about this.
What’s SYSK?
Stuff You Should Know! It’s a great podcast that’s affiliated with How Stuff Works, from my understanding.
Stuff You Should Know podcast.
They got their start on HSW, but I believe the podcast division is now separate, owned by iHeart?
Ah ok, I thought they were still some how legally related.
People really don’t understand the current state of LLM, like the pictures generated “Its a really good picture of what a dog would look like, it’s not actually a dog”. Like a police sketch, with a touch of “randomeness” so you don’t always get the same picture.
I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated. These verifers will probably not be experts on all the subjects that the llm will be spitting out, more of a “That does kind of look like a dog, APPROVED”.
Let’s say I’m wrong, and LLM’s can make as good of an article as any human. The content would be so saturated (even a tumblr user could now make as good and as much content as one of these companies), I would expect companies to be joining in on all the strikes 😆.
Funny world we are all going into.
Boas Entradas
I’m guessing they will try to solve this issue with some cheap human labour to review what is being generated.
They already do. These current "AI"s are starting to look more and more like Mechanical Turks, except with a couple hundred third-world wage-slaves inside the box.
One thing I disagree with is the assumption that anyone could create the same article by themselves. Coming up with a good prompt is a skill in itself and not everyone is equally good at it. I actually believe a prompt writer is going to be a new profession in the near future.
Are we assuming AI won’t be able to create a good prompt? 😂
This seems really short-sighted. Why would I go to How Stuff Works when I can just ask the LLM myself?
Maybe there’s just no possible business model for them anymore with the advent of LLMs, but at least if they focused on the “actually written by humans!” angle there’d be some hook to draw people in.
The thing is, the LLM doesn’t actually know anything, and lies about it.
So you go to How Stuff Works now, and you get bullshit lies instead of real information, you’ll also get nonsense that looks like language at first glance, but is gibberish pretending to be an article. Because sometimes the language model changes topics midway through and doesn’t correct, because it can’t correct. It doesn’t actually know what it’s saying.
See, these language models are pre-trained, that the P in chatGPT. They just regurgitate the training data, but put together in ways that sort of look like more of the same training data.
There are some hard coded filters and responses, but other than that, nope, just a spew of garbage out from the random garbage in.
And yet, all sorts of people think this shit is ready to take over writing duties for everyone, saving money and winning court cases.
Yeah, this is why I can’t really take anyone seriously when they say it’ll take over the world. It’s certainly cool, but it’s always going to be limited in usefulness.
Some areas I can see it being really useful are:
- generating believable text - scams, placeholder text, and general structure
- distilling existing information - especially if it can actually cite sources, but even then I’d take it with a grain of salt
- trolling people/deep fakes
That’s about it.
generating believable text - scams, placeholder text, and general structure
LLM generated scams are going to such problem. Quality isn’t even a problem there as they specifically go for people with poor awareness of these scams, and having a bot that responds with reasonable dialogue will make it that much easier for people to buy into it.
It isnt going to take over, its being put in control by idiots.
Literally predictive text but for whole articles.
It doesn’t know the limits of it’s knowledge or indeed know anything. It just “knows” what an answer smells like. It even “knows” what excuses are supposed to look like when you call it out.
I mean I would say maybe “regurgitating their training data” is putting it a bit too simple. But it’s true, we’re currently at the point where the AI can mimic real text. But that’s it - no one tells it not to lie rn, the programmatic goal of the AI is to get indistinguishable from real text with no bearing on the truthfulness of the information whatsoever.
Basically we train our AIs to pretend to know, not to know. And sometimes it’s good at pretending, sometimes it isn’t.
The “right” way to handle what the CEOs are doing would be to let go of a chunk of the staff, then let the rest write their articles with the help of chatgpt. But most CEOs are a bit too gullible when it comes to the abilities of AI.
This is a very good write up about how ChatGPT works.
The thing is, the LLM doesn’t actually know anything, and lies about it.
Just like your average human journalist. If you ever read an article from not specialist journal on a topic you are familiar with - you know. This seems actually where LLM are very similar to how human brain works - if we don’t know something, we come up with some bullshit.
So modern journalists were redundant all along?
But yeah, the quality of what is passing as journalism now is often ridiculous. But the only way to combat this is by having editors that are knowledgable about topics. But it seemed editors were the first people laid off, when internet articles became a thing.
So modern journalists were redundant all along?
24 hours news cycle of online media creates junk journalism on new level. Good journalism needs time and can’t spit out news articles every minute of the day. Editors won’t help, because it’s just not possible to do good journalism on that scale. But jeh - in general with AI, the jobs will shift more to editing. Which will be extremely soul-draining, going though tons of AI generated bullshit
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though. There is a cohesiveness even to the bullshit. The LLM is just putting words down that match the prompt. It’s rng driven, readable Lorum Ipsum.
If the results were still edited afterwards, there may be some merit to the output, but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality. They want to use it to churn out endless content that they simply can’t get from even a team of humans. More than could be edited even if they kept editors on staff.
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though
Sure, but a lot of humans are rather bad writers.
but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Sure, but a lot of humans are rather bad writers.
Bad writing is still a step above rng junk, imo.
but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Yes, that was my point. Setting up your company to put out more content than can possibly be processed by humans is a glaring sign of their values - ie quantity far above quality.
Bad writing is still a step above rng junk, imo.
I’v read writing worse than GTP. I had to help someone write an essay - and I just wrote it for him in the end, because he absolutely lacked the skills to write a long meaningful text. At at the same time - genius of a percussionist.
Do you think that person was signing up for jobs writing for blogs or content farms?
It’s a combination of three things:
1- most people still google things;
2- the more content you have the more organic traffic you’re likely to attract from Google;
3- displaying ads on your website makes you money.
Websites full of LLM generated content are just the natural continuation of MFAs (Made For AdSense) and there were lots of tools on sale back then in the 2006~2008 period that promised to automatically create websites for you and fill them with randomized content that is optimized for AdSense.
This seems like a really dumb idea.
Chat-GPT became far less useful to me when I realized it will actively lie to you. It was too good to be true it turned out. These people will figure it out eventually, Chat-GPT is not an AI, it’s a god damn “Chinese Room” (It’s a thing in philosophy, look it up)
Bizarre. Not even keep a few editors for… the editing??
I wonder how this will affect the Stuff You Should Know podcsst.
How long until we can a browser extension that lets us know when we are on a site written by AI?
I don’t mean AI detection, but instead, sites that announce they are laying off editors in favor of AI.
If there was such a thing then sites wouldn’t announce they’re laying off editors in favor of AI.
Considering most articles on the internet that don’t come from legitimate newspapers sound like they’re written by a 6-year-old who gets paid by the word, how much worse could it get?
Never ask that
I wonder what they will do when the tripe the LLM spews doesn’t match the pictures they are showing.
Nothing lol.
Used to be one of my favourite sites when I was younger. Haven’t visited that site in ages. Holy crap, has it gone to complete shit. Like way worse than I thought possible
When I read the OP I thought “oh yeah I used to use that all the time, I wonder what its like now?”. Seems to have changed a lot…
totally unrecognizable. I can’t believe I actually used to learn stuff there
