Ask HN: What will stop AI generated content from flooding the internet?

Boredom. People will get bored of AI-generated content.

And/or... maybe a new industry of "Certified Human-made Content®" will pop up? :)

We are told by news sources the PRC attempted to flood the internet with porn spam, to somehow alter the balance regarding news reportage from mainland China. It didn't work. So, unless I misunderstand something, simply having more dreck does not automatically mean you can't see quality content. It may not always work out that way, but the current generation of 'flood the net with crap and see what happens' hasn't interfered with my browsing markedly, with one exception: I increasingly believe my feedback on any forum is 50/50 with a troll seeking karma points, more than people (present company excepted)

Here's what chatgpt says for your question:

there are several protections and strategies in place to prevent AI-generated content from dominating search results and being used to spread misinformation and advertisements. These include content moderation, fact-checking, user feedback, and transparency.

GPT and its kin are just doing the same thing we had low wage people doing in the past, but with a slightly better quality output in some cases, and possibly lower cost per Megabyte/Text.

The way around this is curation, and an end to monodimensional rankings of postings. In the future, I see the ability to add a number of ratings to a given post and the person who sent it, to allow communities to curate content, instead of a simple OK/Ban approach.

You know how YouTube puts "fighting disinfo" type stuff under some videos? Imagine if instead of some star-chamber buried in the bowels of a corporation, you could choose your own ratings/content verification providers.

Is there perhaps some automatic feedback loop where AI trained on AI content will manifest as obvious uncanny valley?

Short answer: nothing. Just as the first atmospheric nuclear tests mark the end of the era of natural C14 dating, the introduction of GPT and other advanced AI language models marks the end of being able to assume free-flowing natural language text has a human origin. Thus begins the age of Artificial Inanity. (See Neil Stephenson's Anathem for the origin of that phrase and an interesting take on the effect.)

Longer answer: there may be a period of some months still before models approaching the complexity of GPT3 are available at scale to truly black-hat actors like the worst of SEO firms. Training such a beast is still an expensive endeavor and so there is some gatekeeping yet.

Flood? Nothing but imo much of it will be noise. For images for example: stock photos, wallpapers, porn,etc... sure. But stuff that has meaning to people like charts, profile photos, descriptive images (think the picture of a monent in wikipedia) or even paid porn will be humans because meat people like meat people.

Will we be searching the internet for content that an AI can write?

For example: If I can ask an AI to make me a cake recipe, find an error in my code or tell me about the Hindenburg disaster, and the response is faster, more accurate and easier to read than what I’d typically find on Google, then maybe I simply won’t use Google for that anymore (especially since with the AI, I can ask follow-up questions...)

So maybe bad actors using AI to generate their content will just be yelling into the void. (Until their content gets picked up and incorporated by my AI in its next training session.)

It already is. You can't stop them, also Google likely won't stop it, the director of web search even said AI content can be useful, lol.

You can literally find lots of spammy AI sites in 5 minutes, search quality is worse than before after GPT-3 born.

Don't standard tools like PageRank help here where new articles will need to get links from established sites to be ranked? Search engines already have to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning, duplicate/near-duplicate content, low-quality content and black hat SEO tricks so what's the difference here?

I think the place you will be able to escape this will be curated communities. As it becomes harder to tell a human and a bot apart, people will value the knowledge they're talking to a real person more. I think this opens up a place for smaller by-members-invite communities.

While AI technology has made great strides in recent years, it is still not capable of producing content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content. This means that AI-generated content is likely to be easily identifiable and may be less credible or trustworthy than content produced by humans. As a result, it may not gain as much traction or attention online.

We will revert to direct video and phone calls? Dare I say we will return to doing face to face interactions?

It already has

they don't need ai, they got the mainstream media.

I think you will see more of a focus on the creator's individual personality, livestreams, etc. and a shift away from anonymous, generic sources of information. Individuals will become authority sources rather than search engines; e.g. "I listen to Joe's podcast daily and trust his recommendations on products," rather than "I am going to type what I need in Google and then look at the results in order to make a decision." It will be a long, long time until AI can convincingly generate the quirkiness and unpredictability of a person doing a livestream video.

This seems bizarre and futuristic, but in a way, it's actually just a return to pre-technological social norms, except with the benefit of broadcasting to a wider audience.

A passing thought: language.

GPT is built on English which is international and I’d bet it has the most content to train on available.

Maybe at some point Chinese will be added but as far as I know Chinese isn’t as homogenized, and depending on fragmentation might net be viable either.

Being in the country were Siri isn’t yet available I don’t expect AI generators to be available anytime soon, if ever (due to different language complexity, not sure if that matters though).

Facts will be the new gold. If the AI is just sucking up content then someone has to write the OG “x celebrity died” or “Trump wins election” etc in the first place. Google could see who first reports facts and genuine analysis.

Obviously you would need a way to verify trustworthyness. Search might become a lot more curated and require people to think. Maybe Google will employ a million researchers and have to spend all it’s money defending search instead of all the other stuff.

Give a bunch of facts you will then have “write this story with these facts in a left-leaning irreverent but caring voice” etc. for various personas. Newspapers with opposing views might merge into one corporation!

dang could maybe delete the bazillion "I used GPT to answer your question" comments, I would be happier already

I think we’ll go back to things like webrings and personal blogs and stuff, once it gets really bad. Some people may not care that anything is human made someday. Perhaps AI will do all our reading and writing eventually. Things change, though, and it’s not always bad. Used to be that no human wrote text, everything was oral. Maybe our technology can help us surpass the written word while still maintaining its benefits, someday.

What protections are in place for non-automated versions of the same? It’s already everywhere.

This is a very interesting question. We need to change the way we consume information. Even without AI, we are having a problem with exploding information with low SNR. Maybe we don't have a browser any more, information is consumed by a model and we only receive processed information. Currently we try to provide as much as information for a topic, hopefully we can limit the effect of misinformation and bias on a topic. We are not reducing the content, we are providing more content. There is a limit how much information we can process, it is already time for processed information.

It could be that the only way to stop it is regulation. This could be helpful for both people and AI itself. The reason is that if AI trains on AI generated content unknowingly the results could seriously degrade over time.

It could be as simple as adding an HTML tag recognizable by both people and machines to any pages with such generated content.

I'm really scared for the future of the internet.

I believe the answer will be some form of certified (maybe not officially) content creators. We'll need a Google alternative indexing only by whitelist instead of crawling the whole internet, and giving better ranking to articles and content produced by domain experts. "Who" wrote it will become a lot more important.

Not just that, the technology allows for the seamless integration of ads into content that you'd like to read / look at.

Product-placement (Edit: even elegant and subtle product placement) can be automated now.