Discussion
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miyuru: Commit maker is here and have only posts slop here as well.https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ndhandalawonder when will he submit them here.
r_lee: 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
ThrowawayR2: If the dead Internet theory wasn't true before, it sure will be soon.
MattGaiser: I would argue SEO should already be considered dead internet theory. Most of it is not intended to do anything but convince Google.A dentist buying freelance articles from a guy off Upwork is not intending to communicate anymore than this guy generating articles is.
StrLght: I am so glad DuckDuckGo allows blocking specific sites from the search. Just did this for a domain linked in this repository.
cebert: What is the point of this?
cachius: At which URL(s) are the blog posts visible?
diehunde: I’m guessing https://oneuptime.com/blog
agilob: Dead Internet is a product now, why aren't you monetizing it yet?
gib444: "Showing 1 - 25 of 45488 posts"I miss the days when we could assume that's just a pagination code bug
pilsetnieks: Great point! At this point the Dead Internet Theory isn't a conspiracy – it's a roadmap. It's worth noting he distinction between "authentic" and "synthetic" online spaces is eroding faster than most people realize – that's a genuinely important conversation to be have./s
nubg: Great imitation
gibsonsmog: Louis Rossman recently posted a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc) where he had Gemini replace his 10+ year carefully curated content with AI slop and he instantly shot (back) up to the top of the rankings. They're very clearly favoring their own generated generic content rather than any sort of organic, well written or well informed entries. Shame.
emsign: There's AI features and tips in Youtube's Creator Studio, they are encouraging creators to use AI tools. Makes sense that they also then reward videos that make use of it. That's how these platforms nudge people into products and behavior that they want to bring to market.
tempest_: Google is not incentivized to show you good results. You don't pay them, advertisers do and that is who they are working for.Their job is provide you just enough "results" that you don't or cant go any where else.No more, no less.
pawelduda: Search engine that punishes sites with AI slop or SEO spam, while rewarding content that has the most substance to it. But there doesn't seem to be any ungameable solution that spans just the "online" dimension.In the future, we'll have unhackable sensors that will be hooked to author's brain and will prove that a measurable effort was spent (human proof of work), which resulted in specific piece of content. It will show different readings when someone just typed text originating from another source (like LLM). Yes, I know, dystopian much.
ieie3366: Ironically due to slop I feel like we are regressing as a civilization2020, 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 doingToday google that, and it will be endless amounts of slop
ConceitedCode: 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.
iuvcaw: Ironically this post is doing wonders for its page rank, as people are linking to it in the comments
pilsetnieks: The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead but we're already way past the point where any discussion worth anything can be had on the internet itself. The problem is not that everything could be AI slop but that anything could. It simply takes the wind out the sails and makes one question what's even the point if anything could just be written by a clanker. Anything you write could just be screaming out into the void, affecting no one, and just maybe adding to the training corpus for the next generation of clankers.Just writing this made me question "what's the point" several times. If you or anyone replies cogently, I still won't have any idea if it's a person or a Chinese room.
shevy-java: > The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly deadWell - I would say the internet is not totally dead yet, but we approach the point of it being very useless now. I remember the 1990s era and early 2000s - it was almost innocent compared to the total slop era we have now. Young people today don't even know that Google Search was useful at one point in time. If you use Google Search now, you get so much irrelevant crap output that it is really useless now.
konradx: So now you don't get any hits from "Hacker News" ? :-)
shevy-java: SEO also showed that Google abuses its market position. One wonders why the USA promotes a de-facto monopoly here.
sigmonsays: when AI starts training itself accidentally on AI generated content, we all lose...
shevy-java: Only if we allow it to happen. It is time for the Empire of common man and woman to strike back against AI slop and companies that promote it - such as microslop.
fn-mote: I thought somebody counted them… incredibly, the log message admits to committing 12,000 articles.I guess that means the log message was authored by AI as well. Figures.
shevy-java: I am kind of upset at github that we can not easily block AI content coming from their site.
wartywhoa23: AI is the stellar moment for all mediocrity and conmen.
vova_hn2: It's "Showing 1 - 25 of 58891 posts" now. HN tells me that your comment was posted 6 minutes ago, which gives us approximately 37.23 posts/second rate.
post-it: It's kinda exciting. The social media status quo has its upsides but a lot of downsides. I'm hopeful that the change will be good. We'll have to figure out a way to authenticate the people we're talking to, which will encourage tighter-knit communities.
dataviz1000: This will end with the only way to authenticate the people we're talking to is meeting them at the coffeeshop in the morning.
Topfi: I know there is a lot of valid criticism of GitHubs poor performance when scrolling, but in this case I think we can let them off the hook.I'll just leave this here: https://developers.google.com/search/help/report-quality-iss...
johnbarron: >> Ironically due to slop I feel like we are regressing as a civilizationWell after 50 years we cant reproduce what Apollo did, and I would doubt current students of the same age would handle a 1912 Eight Grade Examination: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...
post-it: Survivor bias.- Apollo had a significantly higher accepted risk. Apollo 1 or 13 would be untenable today.- The percent of 13-year olds that made it into and through eight grade was significantly smaller in 1912. Your average poor farming kid did not go to eighth grade.
schmookeeg: 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.Sigh.
sesm: Don't we already have "RLHF on synthetic data"?
raincole: 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?
username223: [GitHub] platform activity is surging. — https://twitter.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
politelemon: I wonder if we ought to be flagging it then? There's already so much uninteresting AI slop observations.
jpdb: I've been seeing this company in ~all of my searches across various tech topics.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.
bakugo: You should care because this website has a high ranking on Google and these 12000 posts will show up every time you search something programming related.
conception: Stop using Google. Kagi lets you block and prioritize sites.
self_awareness: This post is added because it's so easy and to show that it's being done in real life. That we can't have nice things, because of mindless people like Nawaz Dhandala.
raincole: I'm quite sure in every passing second people are pumping more AI slop to the internet. I just don't see why this is something special (unless it's a well-known project among HN users that I'm not aware of.)
self_awareness: I'm also quite sure, but this is the proof, not hypothesis -- with git commits and all.
whycombinetor: Meanwhile on the HN main page right now: "Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637757
post-it: That might be okay. We'd lose a lot, obviously, but if you could 100% trust that the person you met at a coffee shop is real, and you could 99% trust that the person they met the day before is real, and you could 98% trust the person that person met is real, you've got three degrees of Kevin Bacon.
vohk: I don't have a ton of hope just yet because I think it's still an incentives problem rather than a technical one.I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.
conception: Spotify 100% rather buy/produce AI music than pay artists. Also they demonetized most of their artists so if they can pump AI songs that sound enough like what you listen to and then stop promoting them they don’t have to pay anyone.
VladVladikoff: Maybe it’s that AI music isn’t being spammed as hard at ‘platform I’ve never heard of before’?
Tepix: Did you forget about Blade Runner?
whycombinetor: 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.
setnone: i guess 11K won't do it and 13K is just way too much
radicality: About to go do that on Kagi for the linked site
TrackerFF: 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.
swores: For just $199, I'll sell you my PDF explaining exactly how to do this well enough to make WAY more than only "some cents here and some cents there". Special limited time offer for HN readers, reduced from my normal price of $1,489!P.S. Or get it free when buying my $499 "how to make money selling people how to make money guides" guide!(/s)
iLoveOncall: My son and his friend made a YouTube channel that's just brainrot memes that, while they do it manually, could easily be fully automated by AI (or even without AI).They have 17 million views in 2 months.The strategy of spamming trash no-effort content definitely pays.
bakugo: > I suspect we'll address thisWho is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.> trusted sources.What trusted sources are there that haven't yet been taken over by AI?
chromacity: I'll believe it when I see it. We like articles that say our own thoughts back to us. LLMs are fantastic for generating that and so far, I'm seeing broad acceptance of AI-generated content on social media. It's also pretty common in top-ranking articles on HN.
thadt: Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.
Steppphennn: 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.
ThrowawayR2: [delayed]
masfuerte: Google used to prioritise search quality. About six years ago they decided to enshittify. Slop with more adverts is promoted over quality with fewer adverts. This isn't speculation. It came out in emails released as part of antitrust discovery.To reiterate: Google search is shit now because they want it to be.
bakugo: I have used Kagi, it's not a suitable replacement. It still struggles with relevance even compared to the garbage that is current-day Google, and is particularly bad at finding recent (less than a month or two old) information.
chloeburbank: 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
arctic-true: Until the humanoid robots gain the ability to process caffeine, then we’re all hosed.
dang: <a href="https://oneuptime.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://oneuptime.com/blog</a> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641348(By coincidence, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641829)
abathur: But can you trust that the things they say aren't just laundered AI blogspam?
post-it: Well I trust that the things my friends say aren't laundered AI blogspam. And if they trust the things their friends say, I can likely trust that too.
eh_why_not: 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.
lconnell962: Something I've recently started seeing, maybe even an emerging #4 is AI generated translations. You could have someone very intelligent, making well written subject matter expertise. Or just someone who has valid thoughts they wish to express to the world in a language more of a common tongue than their own.Or on the other end you could have someone who wrote a sentance or two in their language and had some combination of AI generation and translation algorithm bloat it out.In both cases you will get something that can look right and well thought out or explained, but probably will have at least some of the AI slop signs present. I don't know what the solution is for this type given claims Google Translate has started to do this kind of translation for people. An AI translation is probably just as prone to hallucinations as any other AI, but it probably will look more natural to readers than a direct translation.
troupo: Ironic, considering the README:--- 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 ---
fg137: Sounds like a good argument for using Kagi.
Retr0id: Now that we have better ML, maybe we could take "link sentiment" into account too.
zahlman: I don't know how good it was, but sentiment analysis was definitely a thing pre-ChatGPT.
nickvec: It’s simply not possible to enforce at scale. How can you definitively say whether something is AI or not?
IsTom: > to be have.Meatbag spotted, get 'im boys.
MattGaiser: One of the issues is that the purpose of business internet writing is not to be read, but to be ranked well.
thm: By now, Google is smart enough to not even index this garbage.
AndroTux: I wish that were true.
nunez: Welcome to the slop age!
nelsonfigueroa: Well, at least they're not exactly hiding it.
nelsonfigueroa: SEO purposes would be my guess
dvfjsdhgfv: > Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites. If they continue, they will basically lead Google Search to a tipping point where a good competitor can take this market by storm. Microsoft also believed Windows is indestructible and now they have a rude awakening.
onion2k: The fact is what people really want from a search engine is a single perfect result that answers their query exactly. An LLM does the 'single result' bit, but it's dubious whether or not it's a perfect answer. Most of the time that's probably not very important so long as the answer satisfies the search enough that the user is happy.Google is trying to turn Search into that product e.g. the single answer to a given search. They could do that now with Gemini, but the ads in the results are what makes them money, and the backlash to embedding adverts into the output of Gemini would drive millions of people to OpenAI overnight. They have to do it slowly. Give it 5 years though, and search engine results pages will be a thing of the past.
alin23: They even have a scrolling 5-star reviews section, clearly generated: https://oneuptime.com/#reviews-titlehttps://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.
noslop: "This enhancement improves the user experience by showcasing positive feedback from customers"you can't make this up
hackable_sand: ... Did you ...?
predkambrij: I feel for you. I was looking for some wildlife events on Youtube, only to find that all of them were AI generated, trying to get views. I can only find content somehow reliable if I put filter for content before of AI era.
anal_reactor: You're making the classic mistake of looking for a trustworthy information source and then trusting it, instead of focusing on whether the information itself is trustworthy regardless of source. It's literally the same as my grandma saying "they said so on TV, therefore it must be true" while completely dismissing anything I've read on the internet because reasons.If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source, you won't mind AI-generated content as long as it's helpful.I talk to LLMs a lot. It's fucking great. Do I take everything they say at face value? No. But neither do I take at face value things that biological intelligence outputs.
predkambrij: Well, if not disclosed you could assume that somebody did due diligence for you, and could include sources. I don't even trust LLM even if all the information is included in the context window if I need reliable information. Trying to make money on slop is really bad manners. It's a scam, you can't call it otherwise. Btw, I like AI, it did a ton of value for me. We just need to find a way to live with it, without getting doomed in misinformation.
dvfjsdhgfv: > Most of the time that's probably not very importantWell... Maybe, but what's the point of an answer if you can't trust it? For ultra-fast answers for unimportant stuff I keep Cerebras tab open.
oliveroot: I think they have something better - “link rank” which essentially takes into account the quality of backlink.I believe it is nuanced enough to have different rank per “topic”, or “keyword” etc. but admittedly just kinda guessing from the outside.The last time I tried to build something like this I realized it’s useless without first having a gigantic amount of data already crawled. When I started crawling I realized I would never catch Google. I think without Wikipedia the LLMs might have taken 10 more years to surpass them.
cyanydeez: Crawlers would need to use backlinks but also rank vector similarity to ensure the linked content matches the linked intent. Some kind of rainbow shades of how relevent the link is to the linkee and reverse.
