This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it.
It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback to go live here. Thanks to Si Dawson for backing me up when I asked on Mastodon.
I can’t find any information on the company detailed in the footer, so it’s probably an early LLM-generated splog.
Google has already plagued the web with all sorts of junk websites by financing them through ads (and leaving them up when they’re alerted to piracy). Its featured snippets have shared fake news, on queries I’ve fed in. It’s only going to get worse with this so-called “AI” content.
We might wind up with a two-speed internet all right: one with legitimate stories and one with computer-generated material. And the legit stuff will be outnumbered, just like bots on Facebook and Instagram overwhelming real humans, unless we can cut off their financial raison d’être. There shouldn’t be an incentive to put up fake sites, and again we must direct our gaze at Google.
It’s in our collective interest to isolate the bot stuff, just as we don’t make friends with bots in social media (or at least I hope not).
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I agree with you; I wouldn’t link back either. Just yesterday there was a hoax that spread throughout the internet about some kind of explosion near the Pentagon that turned out to be an AI-generated fake. I’ve been talking to Holly & a few others about my displeasure about what I felt was coming; it’s moving faster than I expected, but the last thing AI needs is our help and approval.
A friend posted about an animal recently and there are AI-generated images of it all over Google Images. All fake, since they look nothing like the real thing. You are right: humanity is not prepared, not by a long shot. We still haven’t deal with the tech we have.
As an update on this post though, Mitch, the creator of that website got in touch and the stories are human-curated. In fact, he saw this very post which alerted him that I was talking about him. To me that says there is some human agency and I’ve allowed it as an exception. In the past I have disallowed sites that copy or spin our content, but I have allowed those that excerpt just the first paragraph. Here they have rewritten the story and linked, which leans more to the latter “green-light” case for me.
But anything that falls into the former category and where I believe there is no human agency will wind up in spam.