Even if it’s not the main topic of this article, I’m personally pleased that RationalWiki is back. And if the AI bots are now getting the error messages instead of me, then that’s all the better.
Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?
Under the YouTube video, somebody just commented that they believe that in the end, the majority of people is going to accept AI slop anyway, because that’s just how people are. Maybe they’re right, but to me it seems that sometimes, the most privileged people are the ones who are the most impressed by form over substance, and this seems to be the case with AI at the moment. I don’t think this necessarily applies to the population as a whole, though. The possibility that oligopolistic providers such as Google might eventually leave them with no other choice by making reliable search results almost unreachable is another matter.
I’m not surprised that this feature (which was apparently introduced by Canva in 2019) is AI-based in some way. It was just never marketed as such, probably because in 2019, AI hadn’t become a common buzzword yet. It was simply called “background remover” because that’s what it does. What I find so irritating is that these guys on LinkedIn not only think this feature is new and believe it’s only possible in the context of GenAI, but apparently also believe that this is basically just the final stepping stone to AI world domination.
This somehow reminds me of a bunch of senior managers in corporate communications on LinkedIn who got all excited over the fact that with GenAI, you can replace the background of an image with something else! That’s never been seen before, of course! I’m assuming that in the past, these guys could never be bothered to look into tools as widespread as Canva, where a similar feature had been present for many years (before the current GenAI hype, I believe, even if the feature may use some kind of AI technology - I honestly don’t know). Such tools are only for the lowly peasants, I guess - and quite soon, AI is going to replace all the people who know where to click to access a feature like “background remover”, anyway!
By the way, is there a DuckDuckGo bang for Google “udm=14” (“web” tab) yet? I have been looking for something like this for awhile, but no success so far. It’s very frustrating to receive these AI generated answers even when using “!g”.
Of course, it has long been known that some private investors would buy shares in any company just because its name contains letters like “.com” or “blockchain”. However, if a company invests half a billion in an “.ai” company, shouldn’t it make sure that the business model is actually AI-based?
Maybe, if we really wanted to replace something with AI, we should start with the VC investors themselves. In this case, we might not actually see any changes for the worse.
Edit: Of course, investors only bear part of the blame if fraud was involved. But the company apparently received a large part of its funding in 2023, following reports of similar lies in as early as 2019. I find it hard to imagine that tech-savvy investors really wouldn’t have had a chance to spot the problems earlier.
Edit No. 2: Of course, it is also conceivable that the investors didn’t care at all because they were only interested in the baseless hype, which they themselves fueled. But with such large sums of money at stake, I still find it hard to imagine that there was apparently so little due diligence.
As all the book authors on the list were apparently real, I guess the “author” of this supplemental insert remembered to google their names and to remove all references to fake books from fake authors made up by AI, but couldn’t be bothered to do the same with the book titles (too much work for too little money, I suppose?). And for an author to actually read these books before putting them on a list is probably too much to ask for…
It’s also funny how some people seem to justify this by saying that the article is just “filler material” around ads. I don’t know, but I believe most people don’t buy printed newspapers in order to read nonsensical “filler material” garnished with advertising. The use of AI is a big problem in this case, but not the only one.
Reportedly, some corporate PR departments “successfully” use GenAI to increase the frequency of meaningless LinkedIn posts they push out. Does this count?
In my experience, if some “innovation” makes no sense and yet is continuously hyped up by people who should absolutely know better, it is usually because it allows them to circumvent some law or regulation they don’t like. That was certainly true for cryptocurrencies and for a lot of complex financial products during the subprime crisis, and it appears to be true in this case again (this time, it’s copyright laws). If AI “rewords” existing content and adds fresh errors, the result is (supposedly) not copyrighted anymore (I guess) and can be used to sell more ads - mission accomplished.
For me, everything increasingly points to the fact that the main “innovation” here is the circumvention of copyright regulations. With possibly very erroneous results, but who cares?
It’s also worth noting that your new variation of this “puzzle” may be the first one that describes a real-world use case. This kind of problem is probably being solved all over the world all the time (with boats, cars and many other means of transportation). Many people who don’t know any logic puzzles at all would come up with the right answer straight away. Of course, AI also fails at this because it generates its answers from training data, where physical reality doesn’t exist.
This is particularly remarkable because - as David pointed out - being a pilot is not even one of those jobs that nobody would want to do. There is probably still an oversupply of suitable people who would pass all the screening tests and really want to become pilots. Some of them would probably even work for a relatively average salary (as many did in the past outside the big airlines). The only problem for the airlines is probably that they can no longer count on enough people being willing (and able!) to take on the high training costs themselves. Therefore airlines would have to hire somewhat less affluent candidates and pay for all their training. However, AI probably looks a lot more appealing to them…
To me, those forced Google AI answers are a lot more disconcerting than even all the rest. Sure, publishers always hated content creators, because paying them ate into their profit margins from advertising. However, Google always got most of its content (the indexed webpages) for free anyway, so what exactly was their problem?
Also, how much more energy do these forced AI answers consume, compared with regular search queries? Has anyone done the math?
Furthermore, if many people really loved that feature so much, why not make it opt-in?
At the same time, as many people already pointed out, prioritizing AI-generated answers will probably further disincentivize creators of good original content, which means there will be even less usable material to feed to AI in the future.
Is it really all about pleasing Wall Street? Or about getting people to spend more time on Google itself rather than leave for other websites? Are they really confident that they will all stay and not disappear completely at some point?
The only reason the tool supposedly has value is because the websites are made to be bad on purpose so that they make more money.
Yes, and because, as it appears, AI occasionally ingests content from some of the better websites out there. However, without sources, you’ll be unable to check whether that was the case for your specific query or not. At the same time, it is getting more and more difficult for us to access these better websites ourselves (see above), and sadly, incentives for creators to post this type of high-quality content appear to be decreasing as well.
In terms of creativity, this seems almost on par with the ability to convert photos to the style of, say, impressionist paintings or pop art, which has been available in standard photo editing software for many years. These were also impressive gimmicks, but of very limited practical value.
FWIW, years ago, some people who worked for a political think tank approached me for expert input. They subsequently published a report that cited many of the sources I had mentioned, but their recommendations in the report were exactly the opposite of what the cited sources said (and what I had told them myself). As far as I know, there was no GenAI at the time. I think these people were simply betting that no one would check the sources.
This is not to defend the use of AI, on the contrary - I think this shows quite well what sort of people would use such tools.
It is admittedly only tangential here, but it recently occurred to me that at school, there are usually no demerit points for wrong answers. You can therefore - to some extent - “game” the system by doing as much guesswork as possible. However, my work is related to law and accounting, where wrong answers - of course - can have disastrous consequences. That’s why I’m always alarmed when young coworkers confidently use chatbots whenever they are unable to answer a question by themselves. I guess in such moments, they are just treating their job like a school assignment. I can well imagine that this will only get worse in the future, for the reasons described here.
In any case, I think we have to acknowledge that companies are capable of turning a whistleblower’s life into hell without ever physically laying a hand on them.
I would argue that such things do happen, the cult “Heaven’s Gate” probably being one of the most notorious examples. Thankfully, however, this is not a widespread phenomenon.
It’s so ridiculous - supposedly these people have access to a super-smart AI (which is supposedly going to take all our jobs soon), but the AI can’t even tell them which pages are worth scraping multiple times per second and which are not. Instead, they appear to kill their hosts like maladapted parasites regularly. It’s probably not surprising, but still absurd.
Edit: Of course, I strongly assume that the scrapers don’t use the AI in this context (I guess they only used it to write their code based on old Stackoverflow posts). Doesn’t make it any less ridiculous though.