I suspect we'll address this by just going back to older ranking algorithms for search. We'll go back to the primary signal of good content being links from trusted sources.
People gaming the content based algorithms will eventually cause their own downfall.
It's becoming much harder to determine on a daily basis what content is original, thought-out by a person, and trustworthy. Ironically, verifiably-old content is easier to trust now. Examples from recent personal experience:
1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.
2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.
3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".
Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.
I've seen an increase in this "firehose" tactic among the passive-income folks, where the idea is to just saturate certain niches with AI-generated content, and collect some cents here and some cents there - in the hopes it will generate as much money as maintaining a single high-quality content channel.
Don't know if they actually make any money doing it like that. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some content-creator that said he had hundreds of faceless YouTube channels, which was made possible due to AI tools.
Serious question: What is this post about and why should we care? It's a repo with 35 stars. Is adding 12,000 posts in a single commit somehow technically difficult or significant?
I have visited a blog on this site while searching for something. Suffice to say it was a very shoddy attempt at a blog and at this point I should just network block this site entirely
Just this morning I opened up my RSS reader and found that it was flooded by weird, twisty prose exalting the virtues of online gambling. Since I follow a few blogs that post long form content I first thought this was satire or something, but after reading for a bit and seeing that the posts just never end my best guess was it's just AI slop indented to drive traffic to some gambling site - not clear which since there were not links. All posts came from a RSS feed of an apparently abandoned tech blog I was following that had the last legit post in 2020. My guess is the domain expired, a squatter bought it, saw a bunch of requests for the RSS feed and grabbed the opportunity. Although to what end I'm not sure.
These blog posts are written by the OneUptime team and open source contributors. We write about our experiences, our learnings, and our thoughts on the world of software development, Kubernetes, Ceph, SRE, DevOps, Cloud and more. We hope you find our posts helpful and insightful.
I don’t see how the author isn’t embarrassed. Maybe it’s just me having imposter syndrome or maybe I can self reflect, maybe. If he used AI to slop all those articles up doesn’t he know any developer can use AI to get that content through the IDE? He’s trying to game something with a tool that effectively killed off that game in the first place.
You can fabricate a professional business image in a few days with AI now. It's going to be hard to build an honest brand when everyone is going to point and say "vibe coded slop" because of examples like this website.
I'm already seeing such comments whenever someone posts an app on /r/macapps and it's really discouraging for beginners. If I would have met that resistance and amount of mean comments when I launched Lunar, I would have probably never put in that amount of effort.
I've seen this blog slop on Google for the last month or so, no action taken whatsoever. it's mostly bullshit or regurgitated info from docs.
like Google or their Search team really doesn't seem to care at all. all of a sudden a random blog website just happens to rank first page on every topic
If it's between a human or an AI copywriting SEO slop, I'm happy to see an AI take that job. SEO content marketing is so painful to read once you realize you're reading it, and I have to imagine it's as painful to write if you're a technically talented writer.
Ironically due to slop I feel like we are regressing as a civilization
2020, want to know how to use Redix for Redis connections in Elixir? Google it and the results were most likely high quality, written by senior engineers who knew what they were doing
Today google that, and it will be endless amounts of slop
We are all quickly becoming allergic to AI writing.
To fool us into thinking writing is not AI generated, we will create "human-ifying" filters to the LLM. This will introduce common keystroke, grammar, and spelling issues that surely no automation would ever create on its own.
Soon the writing most vaunted and trusted will be the writing that appears written by a 4 year old with a crayon.
I have to imagine that one quality post worth reading would be linked in multiple places, thus would beat tens of thousands of slop articles for SEO purposes?
Now we know why GitHub has a hard time with stability and reliability. Because of this AI slop BS inflicted on us by the Silicon Valley tech bros and all their followers.
148 comments
People gaming the content based algorithms will eventually cause their own downfall.
1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.
2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.
3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".
Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.
I guess that means the log message was authored by AI as well. Figures.
They're absolutely dominating search results. The quality isn't terrible, but there's so much content that I can't trust them to be accurate.
Don't know if they actually make any money doing it like that. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some content-creator that said he had hundreds of faceless YouTube channels, which was made possible due to AI tools.
> All content must be original and not published anywhere else.
Do what I say, not what I do.
The sentinel servers, meta/google/ms/etc. just seem to be largely ignoring it, or even supporting it.
It's already nauseatingly common on all major platforms.
I miss the days when we could assume that's just a pagination code bug
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ndhandala
wonder when will he submit them here.
--- start quote ---
These blog posts are written by the OneUptime team and open source contributors. We write about our experiences, our learnings, and our thoughts on the world of software development, Kubernetes, Ceph, SRE, DevOps, Cloud and more. We hope you find our posts helpful and insightful.
--- end quote ---
https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/538e40c4ae724e...
https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/2bc585df20e6bb...
You can fabricate a professional business image in a few days with AI now. It's going to be hard to build an honest brand when everyone is going to point and say "vibe coded slop" because of examples like this website.
I'm already seeing such comments whenever someone posts an app on /r/macapps and it's really discouraging for beginners. If I would have met that resistance and amount of mean comments when I launched Lunar, I would have probably never put in that amount of effort.
like Google or their Search team really doesn't seem to care at all. all of a sudden a random blog website just happens to rank first page on every topic
Interesting to see this after the fact.
2020, want to know how to use Redix for Redis connections in Elixir? Google it and the results were most likely high quality, written by senior engineers who knew what they were doing
Today google that, and it will be endless amounts of slop
I'll just leave this here: https://developers.google.com/search/help/report-quality-iss...
To fool us into thinking writing is not AI generated, we will create "human-ifying" filters to the LLM. This will introduce common keystroke, grammar, and spelling issues that surely no automation would ever create on its own.
Soon the writing most vaunted and trusted will be the writing that appears written by a 4 year old with a crayon.
Sigh.
Why would anyone read AI generated blog posts when I can just ask AI for what I need already
For gaming SEO this is still bad, no backlinks.
To reverify correctness?
> Showing 1-25 of 58891 posts
I have to imagine that one quality post worth reading would be linked in multiple places, thus would beat tens of thousands of slop articles for SEO purposes?