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Speaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI. My suspicion is this i

Speaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI. My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a entropic gene pool in nature, but with information.

jonathankoren 5y ago
Probably zero. People are really cheap.
NavinF 5y ago
~0% right now. I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.
numpad0 5y ago
Apparently, using a machine translation as a basis and working through correcting it to read or write foreign languages is a growing trend and that’s a form of computer assisted literacy if I were to guess. Bar that, it’s humans outrunning AI in the race to the bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like.
- technofiend 5y ago
  > Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like. Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says, sometimes it's the only work people can get. [1] https://www.mturk.com/ https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Sports stories are frequently written by bots/AI/whatever you want to call them. Sports stats makes it relatively easy to create written text articles about games. When first rolled out, there were some obvious tells such as an excessive amount of "for the first time this season" or "set a record for the season" in articles about first games of the season. Unusual plays or quirky behavior by participants tend to be missed in these articles but otherwise they're serviceable though somewhat dry and bland.
- siltpotato 5y ago
mixedbit 5y ago
Stock analysis articles are very commonly generated automatically from templates. The selected template is based on some real characteristics of a described company (whether the stock went up or down recently, what is the P/E etc.), but the content is generic and reused across all companies with similar characteristics.
- elihu 5y ago
  Yeah, I see a lot of those via Google Finance.

jonathankoren 5y ago

Probably zero. People are really cheap.

NavinF 5y ago

~0% right now. I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.

numpad0 5y ago

Apparently, using a machine translation as a basis and working through correcting it to read or write foreign languages is a growing trend and that’s a form of computer assisted literacy if I were to guess. Bar that, it’s humans outrunning AI in the race to the bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like.

technofiend 5y ago
> Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like. Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says, sometimes it's the only work people can get. [1] https://www.mturk.com/ https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Sports stories are frequently written by bots/AI/whatever you want to call them. Sports stats makes it relatively easy to create written text articles about games. When first rolled out, there were some obvious tells such as an excessive amount of "for the first time this season" or "set a record for the season" in articles about first games of the season. Unusual plays or quirky behavior by participants tend to be missed in these articles but otherwise they're serviceable though somewhat dry and bland.

siltpotato 5y ago

mixedbit 5y ago

Stock analysis articles are very commonly generated automatically from templates. The selected template is based on some real characteristics of a described company (whether the stock went up or down recently, what is the P/E etc.), but the content is generic and reused across all companies with similar characteristics.

elihu 5y ago
Yeah, I see a lot of those via Google Finance.