has anyone noticed pages that are just ai slop popping up recently? they have low quality information and serve no purpose but to waste time.
if you haven’t experienced these, just search up a common tech problem and click on a generically named site. chances are, it will have a table of context and generally low quality writing. if you get lucky, there might also be some blatant lies in there(for example: this site claims garmin instinct watches have an sd card).
is there a ublock origin blocklist for these? thank you for suggestions.
With how much SEO spam/slop that comes up in search engines, it would probably just be easier to whitelist trusted websites
Yeah we need to go back to a curated list of content like back in the days of directories.
I use uBlacklist with this filter and that generally keeps the repeat offenders at least out of image search, but clearing out every SEO-spam print-on-demand mimc-site was already a game of whack-a-mole before consumer LLMs became a thing; I imagine now it’d be like playing whack-a-mole with a hydra. Still, it does at least help.
Search engines need to start using AI detectors and drop the ranking way down when any significant portion of the page is AI generated.
AI detectors are massively flawed. They have terrible accuracy and have high numbers of false positives. Especially over short bodies of text like parts of one page
It’s not just tech. Gardening, DIY, cooking, and similar popular subjects have been completely destroyed by this crap. If I see an AI generated header image or thumbnail I immediately backpedal now because I assume that means the text is bullshit too.
The example stuck in my memory now is when I was trying to read about watermelon growing times and the article said they flower a week after germination.There’s now frequently this, “oh GOD DAMN IT *close tab*” moment when you realize it’s actually total slop. Like, “oh so this article is BULLSHIT bullshit.”
If I’m looking for information that doesn’t need to be super recent/up to date, I just limit my search results to before November 2022 at least.
It’s the “nuclear option” but it’s worked for me a handful of times.
Now just wish DDG let me have that filter for the images tab to make finding new wallpapers easier for me…
Recently? It’s been happening for years.
Every one of these websites looks the same too. Like a mix between a blog and a wiki, and always in FAQ form. You can tell that they’re AI-generated because the questions will seem related to each other but the answers often aren’t.
And they often have the same question worded slightly differently three or four times in the first paragraph.
chances are, it will have a table of context and generally low quality writing
Don’t forget repeating the question over and over again. If my question gets rephrased four times in the first four sentences, it’s a good sign that I’m reading AI slop and there’s no actual answer in the pages and pages of text.
12·1 year agodeleted by creator
Tried looking up how to bake wholemeal bread with just plain wholemeal flour and white bread flour (I can’t buy wholemeal bread flour at my supermarket). AI really is everywhere and it’s making the internet useless.
Guess I could’ve done the before:202X trick.
Increasingly find that search engines ignore instructions to filter by date or site, which coupled with ignoring all operands will kill off their utility entirely.
I guess we’re going back to having to look up stuff on physical books. I love the future!
Full circle
If you can find it, I keep a small bag of straight-up wheat gluten and I add a spoonful or two when I want to make stronger flour. A small bag lasts forever and a little goes a long way.
No, but I’ve had A LOT more cloudflare ‘prove that you are human’ boxes. And I had an infinite loop captcha. I don’t have much in the way of extensions, and I wasn’t using a vpn
Good idea
Just today a number of my searches had me wondering whether AI slop generators were generating articles and suitably titled websites in response to the searches I was making on my search engine.
I don’t know how they’d do that without being able to snatch search terms I make to my search engine (DDG, with its AI features disabled), just don’t find it plausible that anyone is bothering to generate hundreds of sites on extremely narrow aspects of obscure topics, even if semi-automated.
