Comment by permo-w

In the past, I'd find one wrong answer and I could easily spot the copies. Now there's a dozen different sites with the same wrong answer, just with better formatting and nicer text.

A colleague sent me a confident ChatGPT formatted bug report.

It misidentified what the actual bug was.

But the tone was so confident, and he replied to my later messages using chat gpt itself, which insisted I was wrong.

I don't like this future.

> the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently

Some of the science, energy, and technology subreddits receive a lot of ChatGPT repost comment. There are a lot of people who think they’ve made a scientific or philosophical breakthrough with ChatGPT and need to share it with the world.

Even the /r/localllama subreddit gets constant AI spam from people who think they’ve vibecoded some new AI breakthrough. There have been some recent incidents where someone posted something convincing and then others wasted a lot of time until realizing the code didn’t accomplish what the post claimed it did.

Even on HN some of the “Show HN” posts are AI garbage from people trying to build portfolios. I wasted too much time trying to understand one of them until I realized they had (unknowingly?) duplicated some commits from upstream project and then let the LLM vibe code a README that sounded like an amazing breakthrough. It was actually good work, but it wasn’t theirs. It was just some vibecoding tool eventually arriving at the same code as upstream and then putting the classic LLM written, emoji-filled bullet points in the README

Yes it is a big deal. I cant find new artists without having a fear of their art being AI generated, same for books and music. I also cant post my stuff to the internet anymore because I know its going to be fed into LLM training data. The internet is dead to me mostly and thankfully I lost almost all interest of being on my computer as much as I used to be.

> besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway.

Yes, it is because of the other side of the coin. If you are writing human-generated, curated content, previously you would just do it in your small patch of Internet, and probably SEs (Google...) will pick it up anyway because it was good quality content. You just didn't care about SEO-driven shit anyway. Now you nicely hand-written content is going to be fed into LLM training and it's going to be used - whatever you want it or not - in the next generation of AI slop content.

SEO-spam was often at least somewhat factual and not complete generated garbage. Recipe sites, for example, usually have a button that lets you skip the SEO stuff and get to the actual recipe.

Also, the AI slop is covering almost every sentence or phrase you can think of to search. Before, if I used more niche search phrases and exact searches, I was pretty much guaranteed to get specific results. Now, I have to wade through pages and pages of nonsense.

Yes indeed, it is a problem. Now the old good sites have turned into AI-slop sites because they can't fight the spammers by writing slowly with humans.