Comment by ErikAugust

11 days ago

Someone needs to invent a “for humans, by humans” web. Possibly a future luxury.

It's so hard to do this because the better you make it, the more valuable it is for someone to a) scrape it all b) try to insert fake content

Hear me out: is that Wikipedia? I am sure people are submitting all sorts of AI-generated information, but it's probably getting rejected? (If someone better informed than me has any data one way or the other, I'm super curious)

  • Quite contrary, people are gleefully machine translating Wikipedia to make more Wikipedia (in different languages). And arguing for it.

LLMs are reinforced through adversarial training - you would essentially be playing a keep-up game with AI generated garbage that would get exponentially more difficult to pull ahead in.

There was this image that was circling some 20 years ago around and later, with the Internet becoming a cable tv-like service where you'd be a subscriber to particular big companies sites and additional "free-range" pages

So the pessimist in me can see the Internet being affected by the free-vs-premium formula: "basic" Internet with ads, tracking, AI fillers, limited access to +18 content, in the worst form comes with these pre-defined sites and "premium" that's free of these limitations but it also in time tries to squeeze more money from users - like "premium but with ads"

I feel like this is what we are trying to do at Reddit, but needless to say it's going to get harder and harder.

  • I sense Reddit is a lost cause. Even before the latest wave of generative AI you could tell things were heavily manipulated.

    I dare say that I haven’t noticed that much of a change in things and that could either be because LLMs are just that good at Reddit content, or that because Reddit was already so botted and manipulated it didn’t really change much.

    • Reddit started to decline dramatically once they started to charge for API access last year. Mods on a politics subreddit I was talking to said all the free tools they used to keep on top of things stopped working, so they could no longer filter out the trolls and bots.

      I sure hope the money that Reddit made makes up for the readers who are fleeing.