A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine::Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.
I recently was searching for some tips on overlanding routes. So many sites are just long strung together SEO word salad.
I’ve been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the “under construction” gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.
I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.
Being not an English speaker, you’d basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.
Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you’d get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.
It’s people and IT companies which were better.
Since I am an English speaker, my '90s Internet experience was very different than that. There were “link farms” (pages designed to exploit early search engine algorithms that scored pages higher when they got linked to a lot) and e-mail spam, of course, but being unsophisticated, it was generally a lot easier not to get suckered in by than the firehose of AI-written advertorials and shit we have today.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term “advertorial” is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words “advertisement” and "editorial. " Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. In printed publications, the advertisement is usually written to resemble an objective article and designed to ostensibly look like a legitimate and independent news story. In television, the advertisement is similar to a short infomercial presentation of products or services.
Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it’s become.
You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there’s so much more garbage. I’d say they have grown in absolute numbers.
Recently I was looking for info (in finnish) how to prevent car windows from fogging. I found a really weird website all about car windows, but it kept confusing car and house windows. It instructed to clean car windows by “opening the window and cleaning between the panels”.
It was obviously ai-generated, but I couldn’t figure out why. They weren’t selling anything, there were no ads and no links to other websites or services.
Edit: I found the site again, I cannot spot anything nefarious, but proceed with caution: https://www.lasinvaihto.fi/
It’s probably either waiting for approval to sell ads or was denied and they’re adding more stuff. Google has a virtual monopoly on ads, and their approval process can take 1-2 weeks. Google’s content policy basially demands that your site by full of generated trash to sell ads. I did a case study here, in which Google denied my popular and useful website for ads until I filled it with the lowest-quality generated trash imaginable. That might help clarify what’s up.
The posts are from march 2023, and there are no ads yet :/
More evidence for the Dead Internet Theory.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating “The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population”.
Best time for a bot to reply.
ironically
Lol, read the room bot.
Good bot
Thanks, scientists, couldn’t have known that without you.
There is value in verifying and quantifying opinion, even if your sure this opinion is true.
*you’re sure
I need an AI Firefox extension that detects badly translated AI text and automatically blocks those domains.
A search engine that displays only human created content, and hides AI.
That will probably never be possible.
🤔 It could be if you removed anonymity from the internet, though that would open a whole different can of worms.
