AI spam is already starting to ruin the internet::We’re starting to see one prediction come true of how artificial intelligence will affect the internet: AI-generated spam is flooding the web.
Starting?
Right?? Haha it’s been a sespool of ads and trackers for ads for years now
Finalizing its death*
I’ve seen countless palworld articles climb to the top of Google. They are awful… They don’t even have correct information about the game. Google really is imploding before our eyes.
Yeah agreed on that you can’t Google thing anymore. People were speaking of enshitification, I was thinking they were exaggerating, but seing the results around palworld that crazy. Try to find a site with egg combination base don parents. Good luck I got a good one in page 4-5.
The irony of some of the articles being clearly written by AI while also being about “Palword because someone said AI” is rich.
The web was already flooded with human generated spam, adding AI spam to the mix hasn’t really changed anything meaningful - you still can’t find useful content on the vast majority of webpages.
What we really need is a better search engine, one that doesn’t include low quality content… that might be something AI can help with.
That used to be Google, when they were interested in providing quality results and showing ads alongside those results, instead of just… being an ad company.
Before that, it was Yahoo, when they were interested in providing quality results, and showing ads, instead of just being an ad company.
Before that, it was AltaVista, when they were…
…Ask Jeeves…
We’ll see who’s next.
I’ve been hearing Kagi is very good but i don’t know if I’m ready to start paying for a search engine. Given the direction things are headed through, it could be worth considering
I can say that kagi is really good, yes. I don’t know if google search was actually ever this good on its own, but I’m finding it a real breath of fresh air
It’s a lot better value for families, too. Much like spotify. I wouldn’t pay £8/m for myself, but I would pay £16 for 6 people.
Don’t forget Lycos!
And HotBot.
And WebCrawler!
Mid late nineties, WC was my favorite. Felt like it had the best results.
Same here.
Time to bring back web rings lmao
Kagi basically did with Smallweb
right - time to just focus on some news that have been vetted by some trustworthy organization. or a ministry - that focusses on truth or something.
“starting”? The net was ruined when yahoo directory failed and Google with their stupid algorithm and SEO and AdSense and monetisation came along
Google had to happen, manually updating a registry of all site was unsustainable with the growth of the internet.
And the concept of SEO is actually older than the internet, “AAA Plumbing” from yellow pages was also optimized for the algorithm of the the telephone registry, which was simply alphabetical order. Just different algorithm and different scale.
Ppphhht.
The internet ended the day AOL threw open its doors and allowed their users out of the walled garden.
I know, I was there.
Me too!
(if you know, you know)
I remember there used to be Octobers.
So, someone can look at this festering putrid hellscape we call the internet in the past 5 years and still see a way down?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Been a known issue for a long time
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating: "The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.
How ironic, but i still love this bot
I think that some bots are like, exceptions that prove the rule in a way. Like when we find one that’s convenient and useful and facilitates human understanding and communication, it sticks out.
Who knew the black wall from cyberpunk would end up being real but with adds!
How long until we get internet 2.0 walled garden for humans?
The irony of that this post is done by @L4s@lemmy.world
Bots and AI aren’t the same thing. Bots are just automations, not necessarily making use of machine learning.
I saw someone unironically last month call Excel spreadsheet formulas “AI”.
The term is rapidly approaching meaninglessness when used by anyone remotely non-technical. I’m probably going to miss an edge case here, but basically:
Classic AI = mostly search algorithms (Dijkstra, A*, etc), simple neural nets (e.g. perceptron) and prolog (to trivialise logic languages)
Modern AI = Machine Learning and the utilisation of those models trained by it. (Tensorflow, LLMs, etc)
Everything else = not AI, just technology.
I would include “video game AI” since semantically it is pretty well-accepted, even though it’s not really AI. Things like goal-based behaviour as well as the pathfinding algos you mentioned.
Lately I’ve been seeing more ai articles and videos on youtube. Sometimes, I look up tech issues and there’s a video, I check it out and some of these videos are just forum posts uploaded text on the screen. There are whole channels taking popular online forum posts and gathering views that way.
Yes, so annoying. You read an article and later find the (steam) forum, reddit post or tweet that was turned into a whole article, just with more words.
Don’t even get me started on having to watch a 10 minute video on YouTube that could have been a 3 sentence forum post.
Or something that could have been explained in 3 paragraphs becoming a 20 minute, overproduced video complete with someone making a stupid face in the thumbnail, and SOMETHING ALLCAPS in the title.
Meh. Email was going to implode before someone came up with baysean filters and Gmail became a thing. Last time I checked (once in a blue moon), email still works.
Certainly 99.999% of SMTP traffic is garbage but my inbox is still usable.
A web crawler is not comparable to an e-mail inbox.
