Comment by EarthIsHome

6 hours ago

Nearly half of online articles are now AI-generated. [0]

[0]: https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...

This is good information, but a bit superficial - before AI, what percentage of online articles were generated from templates? What was written by content generation farms? Fiverrr and co pay-per-word writers?

I suspect that market has been more affected than anything.

  • I don't know, at least half of the front page seems to be LLM generated at any given time on HN. I couldn't say half seemed templated a few years ago.

I imagine something like 98% of articles also get less than 100 views. So the question is more about the articles you're reading rather than articles in general.

  • If one cant remember what they generated, whats the point in generating? Half of those who write articles do not remember what the AI put in it... Reviewing has become a slop work by humans!

I'd say even half of my Youtube feed nowadays is.

1. Find some nicher but interesting topic (e.g. some historical event like Lepanto's battle)

2. Have AI generate the content of the 20 minutes video by collecting information about it online

3. Have AI generate the video

4. Have AI generate a realistic voice to comment on the video

5. Upload it without mentioning it's all AI generated

6. Have me get mad 4 minutes into the video because footage/paintings referring to that battle...do not exist at all...slowly realize it was all AI generated

  • I started "do not recommending" and removing channels that had any stink of AI. I also removed some subscriptions from major YouTube channels. My subscription and homepages are much quieter now and easier to parse.

  • The YouTube algorithm got unbearable to me even before the mudslide of AI content.

    I highly recommend using an extension like Unhook and disabling all algorithmic recommendations such as the Home feed, sidebar/endscreen recommendations etc. The only way I interface with YouTube now is through the subscriptions page which shows me videos from creators I follow in chronological order.

> We build on our prior research by using three different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). We independently evaluate each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.

This is all bullshit, none of those actually work, and the false-positives rates are sky-high. I'm not sure how any serious person have tried out any of those services and came away with the impression of "Well, better than nothing" because literally, it seems the opposite.

  • The detectors aren’t great but they aren’t really the issue. The fact that LLMs make it so easy to impersonate human communication is precisely the problem here. There cannot be a reliable way to identify if something is from a human or not. And the ease of access and low price makes using LLM generated content a no brainer, you have to actively go out of your way to produce human generated content.

    We are building a future where human contact will be scarce

    • > We are building a future where human contact will be scarce

      Yes, until you remember there is a world outside of the screen, where people build things with their hands, use their physically to play instruments for others, paint beautiful things for others to see physically and so much more.

      "Humanness" online been dead for decades already, if you want humanness you need to step outside, or at least invite other humans home.

      3 replies →

  • So if these do not work, to what do you attribute the rising positive rate?

  • If you need an AI detector to figure out if something is AI or not, surely that means the AI is so good that there is no need to detect whether it is AI or not, because it is indistinguishable from writings by a human when read by humans?

  • I mean this is an article coming from an SEO company that's really just trying to advertise its services in the end. Their methodology seems very loose.

  • Are you an AI agent trying to gaslight us?

    • Just a boring old organic human tired of other organic beings falling for obvious bullshit most likely made up by machines convincing humans with something like "you really have a neat idea here, the world will appreciate you making this into a product".