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I wonder if AI companies already have a good way of filtering out these generated sites, or if the internet has just become worthless for training.

dlenski 24d ago
Given that AI companies are buying up tons of old books and scanning them destructively… I'd bet that the Internet has already become relatively useless as a source of new training material.
- eru 24d ago
  We can't make that inference. Just because people use escalators doesn't mean that cars are relatively useless.
- citrin_ru 24d ago
  AI companies are data hungry, they likely use everything from books to the internet and chat logs.
chvid 24d ago
My guess is that a llm would swallow a slop site like this raw. Look at what companies like Telus or ScaleAi are doing. There are probably tens of thousands contractors at the moment sitting carefully tuning LLMs with quality, vetted, question answers.
chao- 24d ago
I read a prediction back in 2023 about there being some epoch date, where any data after it is untrustworthy for training, as it might result in a sort of fixed point, with LLMs training on LLM-generated content rather than human-generated content. In truth, I don't think that's quite how it works, but I wouldn't be surprised if teams who scrape data for training apply weights in favor of data that is known to be generated prior to the GPT-3 era.
- eru 24d ago
  The people who curate training data use all kinds of tricks, yes. They also constantly try new ideas and see what helps. Btw, learning from your own generated data isn't necessarily bad, if you have an external source of validation. See how AlphaGo learned from self play for a simple example.
- dr_dshiv 24d ago
  The vaaast majority of LLM training data is LLM generated. Source: look at how good Chinese models are.
- b112 23d ago
  Not only for training, but for anything really. I'd say at least 99% of all new youtube videos are AI generated video, whether taking snippets from other videos and voiceovering them, or just making entire fake personalities up from scratch. That number will raise to 99.99% soon. There is no veracity to these videos, and within a year I'd say no one will ever be able to detect AI or not. This is exasperated by the fact that normal, real productions are being AI edited, and metadata or other non-visible means to detect AI or not will be meaningless. Bluntly put, most people currently get their 'news' from Tiktok and Youtube. When I discuss current events with random, not-tech people, they all "believe" that if it's video, and on youtube or tiktok? It's real. I cannot express how much the average Joe thinks, in their mind, "Something published on the Internet" is high in trust. I'm verbose, I talk to a lot of people, and there is an inverse relationship to computing skill, and Internet trust. And using a computer to "do things" is not "computing skill", any more than driving makes one a mechanic, or ensures you understand a car engine. I guess my point is, I suspect that the continued degradation of reporting, and news, conjoined with alternate sources being 'news sites', will continue to the point that "reliable source" is non-existent. For example, imagine if every single post from a phone, such as "I see troops in City X' are seen as almost certainly faked. Or even, "I don't see troops in City X'. And if you think of it, certain sectors of society preferred the curated, more controlled news of the past. There may be attempts to purposefully destroy the credibility and believability of every and all independents on any platform. Create a personality, have it trusted for months or years, and then show that its data was false. Doing this is easy with the tools today, doing it by creating one million such personalities with the same goal, is just as easy. The end of truth for all is here now. There is no point of trust now on the Internet. The cut off isn't just for AI, and training. The cut off is for humans believing anything.
deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
dev_hugepages 24d ago
To be fair the internet also had huge amounts of slop before the advent of chatGPT
- reddozen 24d ago
  I always wonder why this comment chain exists in every thread about LLMs uniquely harming our sphere of information. Yes, <bad code, fake pictures, security vulnerabilities, malicious actors> existed before LLMs. No one is saying otherwise.
nonameiguess 24d ago
For model training, maybe, but the concern of this article is web search, including AI summaries and search as an assistant tool to agents, gets infected with this. You can see it searching virtually any technical troubleshooting topic these days. You've got at least a 50/50 chance the infamous "oneuptime" blog, which once posted over 20,000 posts in the span of a single minute, will be in both the top five links and a reference for the summary.
GuB-42 23d ago
What the author did in the article, AI companies can do it too, in particular he used pangram, an automatic AI detector, there is no reason AI companies can't use something like this. It is even simpler because AI companies don't need to be that precise, just a classifier that can tell roughly what is slop and what is not, missing some of the non-slop is no big deal, and having having a bit of slop get through is not going to change things much. LLMs are relatively robust, otherwise considering the amount of bullshit we find online, they would be completely useless.

dlenski 24d ago

Given that AI companies are buying up tons of old books and scanning them destructively… I'd bet that the Internet has already become relatively useless as a source of new training material.

eru 24d ago
We can't make that inference. Just because people use escalators doesn't mean that cars are relatively useless.
citrin_ru 24d ago
AI companies are data hungry, they likely use everything from books to the internet and chat logs.

chvid 24d ago

My guess is that a llm would swallow a slop site like this raw. Look at what companies like Telus or ScaleAi are doing. There are probably tens of thousands contractors at the moment sitting carefully tuning LLMs with quality, vetted, question answers.

chao- 24d ago

I read a prediction back in 2023 about there being some epoch date, where any data after it is untrustworthy for training, as it might result in a sort of fixed point, with LLMs training on LLM-generated content rather than human-generated content. In truth, I don't think that's quite how it works, but I wouldn't be surprised if teams who scrape data for training apply weights in favor of data that is known to be generated prior to the GPT-3 era.

eru 24d ago
The people who curate training data use all kinds of tricks, yes. They also constantly try new ideas and see what helps. Btw, learning from your own generated data isn't necessarily bad, if you have an external source of validation. See how AlphaGo learned from self play for a simple example.
dr_dshiv 24d ago
The vaaast majority of LLM training data is LLM generated. Source: look at how good Chinese models are.
b112 23d ago
Not only for training, but for anything really. I'd say at least 99% of all new youtube videos are AI generated video, whether taking snippets from other videos and voiceovering them, or just making entire fake personalities up from scratch. That number will raise to 99.99% soon. There is no veracity to these videos, and within a year I'd say no one will ever be able to detect AI or not. This is exasperated by the fact that normal, real productions are being AI edited, and metadata or other non-visible means to detect AI or not will be meaningless. Bluntly put, most people currently get their 'news' from Tiktok and Youtube. When I discuss current events with random, not-tech people, they all "believe" that if it's video, and on youtube or tiktok? It's real. I cannot express how much the average Joe thinks, in their mind, "Something published on the Internet" is high in trust. I'm verbose, I talk to a lot of people, and there is an inverse relationship to computing skill, and Internet trust. And using a computer to "do things" is not "computing skill", any more than driving makes one a mechanic, or ensures you understand a car engine. I guess my point is, I suspect that the continued degradation of reporting, and news, conjoined with alternate sources being 'news sites', will continue to the point that "reliable source" is non-existent. For example, imagine if every single post from a phone, such as "I see troops in City X' are seen as almost certainly faked. Or even, "I don't see troops in City X'. And if you think of it, certain sectors of society preferred the curated, more controlled news of the past. There may be attempts to purposefully destroy the credibility and believability of every and all independents on any platform. Create a personality, have it trusted for months or years, and then show that its data was false. Doing this is easy with the tools today, doing it by creating one million such personalities with the same goal, is just as easy. The end of truth for all is here now. There is no point of trust now on the Internet. The cut off isn't just for AI, and training. The cut off is for humans believing anything.

deleted 24d ago

[deleted]

dev_hugepages 24d ago

To be fair the internet also had huge amounts of slop before the advent of chatGPT

reddozen 24d ago
I always wonder why this comment chain exists in every thread about LLMs uniquely harming our sphere of information. Yes, <bad code, fake pictures, security vulnerabilities, malicious actors> existed before LLMs. No one is saying otherwise.

nonameiguess 24d ago

For model training, maybe, but the concern of this article is web search, including AI summaries and search as an assistant tool to agents, gets infected with this. You can see it searching virtually any technical troubleshooting topic these days. You've got at least a 50/50 chance the infamous "oneuptime" blog, which once posted over 20,000 posts in the span of a single minute, will be in both the top five links and a reference for the summary.

GuB-42 23d ago

What the author did in the article, AI companies can do it too, in particular he used pangram, an automatic AI detector, there is no reason AI companies can't use something like this. It is even simpler because AI companies don't need to be that precise, just a classifier that can tell roughly what is slop and what is not, missing some of the non-slop is no big deal, and having having a bit of slop get through is not going to change things much. LLMs are relatively robust, otherwise considering the amount of bullshit we find online, they would be completely useless.