Well, GPT-4’s out, and it’s apparently a lot better at random standardized tests and such than the previous version. Just still prone to hallucinations.
This is a general thread to discuss “AI”/“Large Language Models”/[whatever you want to call them].
My thoughts, having kept an arm’s length distance from them but monitoring sentiment, the tech industry seems strongly divided, and I think this is going to lead to some very “interesting times” ahead, as the capabilities seem able to replace a lot of human content generation, if you don’t mind the random creation of “facts not in evidence.” So not much different from your normal content mills.
Policy here is simple, I want no MML generated content.
As for the impact on the future of humanity, well, that would be an interesting thing to discuss!
I wonder if we can have a “tag” similar to “spoiler” for ML content, because it’s moderately hard to critique it without being able to post it.
I’ve seen some pretty strong evidence that GPT-4 has “internet awareness” insofar as if you ask it circumstantial questions about Internet personalities (even relatively obscure ones) it “knows” who you’re talking about.
I think the biggest outcome is going to be the total enmachination of content farms (and this includes not only spam/google SEO/recipes) but things like customer service which will become even more chatbot oriented and less useful.
I also think a bunch of the “oh my God it can pass the bar” kind of misses the point, the bar is specifically designed to test humans and not AI/web searches/wikipedia. But it’s being oversold and people will get burned (we’ve already started to hear rumors of people ACTUALLY using it to try to generate legal defenses for actual court cases, this will certainly end well).
I suppose that would be fine, as long as it’s clearly marked as such. I don’t mind discussing it, but I’ll be a bit skeptical of anything that reads GPT-ish if that’s all someone is posting.
I’m not sure this is a big change, but it just means the volume of crap will increase dramatically. I’ll be interested to see if I see impacts in my search traffic - I’m literally the sole “not sale site” talking about a bunch of the stuff I’ve written in, and I’m either the #1 hit for a lot of stuff, or “right after the videos.” My SEO secret: Write about things nobody else writes about!
“Customer service” has been a joke for so long I’m not sure it will matter much.
But one of the interesting impacts is going to be the “shits where it eats” problem - at this point, any training set is going to include a massive amount of LLM-generated content, so it probably means the internet will end in a “stuck at a 2020” state - the machine generated content will dwarf human generated content, and so things won’t follow the flow of human language evolution.
This is going to happen 100% - PaulG of HackerNews fame already noted it (linked discussion). In some areas, it already has even before GPT.
Your point about your blog is more pertinent; you probably have the traffic numbers can could work out exactly “what it’s worth” to Adsense it; my guess it is too small for current SEO spammers to care about; but when the whole world is a wasteland of SEO-generated content (and my goodness it is bad now, trying to search for various xbox settings stuff is hell) then the small pickings may become worthwhile.
And if GPT-4 can create content it certainly should be able to rewrite it.
Hopefully all the major big sites like reddit et al become complete wastelands of useless SEO garbage so we can finally ignore them entirely.
I ran ads over when it was hosted on blogspot, it generated “beer money,” but I decided some while back to not bother with ads because I don’t like them. I should A/B test it at some point, I’ve still got an adsense account laying around… my conclusion based on my analytics tracker vs “pages delivered” is that most of my reader base uses ad blockers of some variety. I should probably toss a donate button up too.
Well, https://notbyai.fyi/ is a thing. Icons for human written content. In that I just yesterday modified my blog template to include text along these lines (haven’t pushed it yet), I’ll make use of these instead!