A fun AI anecdote

Lots of concern is being expressed about bad effects of AI (artificial intelligence). AI will definitely do and has done some good things. But it definitely will do and has done some bad things too. One bad thing is pollution of the internet and books with AI drivel. Author Eric Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective writes:
Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI

Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube's kids content

The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it. Back then I called it the coming “semantic apocalypse.” Well, the semantic apocalypse is here, and you’re being affected by it, even if you don’t know it. A minor personal example: last year I published a nonfiction book, The World Behind the World, and now on Amazon I find this.




What, exactly, are these “workbooks” for my book? AI pollution. Synthetic trash heaps floating in the online ocean. The authors aren’t real people, some asshole just fed the manuscript into an AI and didn’t check when it spit out nonsensical summaries. But it doesn’t matter, does it? A poor sod will click on the $9.99 purchase one day, and that’s all that’s needed for this scam to be profitable since the process is now entirely automatable and costs only a few cents. Pretty much all published authors are affected by similar scams, or will be soon.

And rather than this being pure skullduggery, people and institutions are willing to embrace low-quality AI-generated content, trying to shift the Overton window to make things like this acceptable:

SEO = search engine optimization, i.e.,
optimized to scam the search engine

That’s not hardball capitalism. That’s polluting our culture for your own minor profit. It’s not morally legitimate for the exact same reasons that polluting a river for a competitive edge is not legitimate. Yet name-brand media outlets are embracing generative AI just like SEO-spammers are, for the same reasons.

Investigative work at Futurism caught Sports Illustrated red-handed using AI-generated articles written by fake writers. Meet Drew Ortiz. He doesn’t exist. That face is an AI-generated portrait, which was previously listed for sale on a website. This isn’t what everyone feared, which is AI replacing humans by being better—it’s replacing them because AI is so much cheaper. Sports Illustrated was not producing human-quality level content with these methods, but it was still profitable.


Sports Illustrated, in a classy move, deleted all the evidence. Drew was replace by Sora Tanaka, bearing a face also listed for sale on the same website with the description of a “joyful asian young-adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes.”



AI pollution is a tragedy of the commons.
The solution .... isn’t technical. You can’t detect AI outputs reliably anyway (another initial promise that OpenAI abandoned). The companies won’t self regulate, given their massive financial incentives. We need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. We can’t just sit by and let human culture end up buried.


Boys 'n girls, it is time to gird your loins and stockpile canned food. Prepare for the onslaught of cheap AI pollution online, in books and in political rhetoric. 



By Germaine: Old dinosaur losing his battle for truth, rationality, common decency and defense of the public interest

Not AI generated
(note the guy's foot)

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