We would lose the long tail, but if I were a search engine, I would have a mode that only returned results on a whitelist of domains that I would have a human eyeball every few months.
If somebody had a site that we were not indexing and wanted to be, they could pay a human to review it every few months.
You can make as many sites as you like, but I would still ask a human to review them and make a judgment call on whether other humans might be interested in the content before indexing them.
You can record as many albums as you like as well, but the DJ needs to like your music before they play it on the radio.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want the Internet to become a Top 25 radio station cranking out scam entertainment for the masses. I want “small pirate and indie radio” to be the norm. If you want top 25’s, go back to centralized, curated media.
The thing with the AI content boom is that if there’s 1000x more of it than there is genuine indie stations, it gets harder to find the real content. Piping things through a top25 filter doesn’t fix that, or actively makes it worse due to the incentives to monopolize / plan the system.
For example, i've been appending "site:reddit.com" to some of my Google queries for a while now —especially when searching for things like reviews— because, otherwise, Google search results are unusable: ads disguised as fake "reviews" rank higher than actual reviews made by people, which is what i'm interested in.
I wouldn't be surprised if we evolve some similar adaptations to deal the flood of AI-generated shit. Like favoring closer-knit communities of people we trust, and penalizing AI sludge when it sips in.
It's still sad though. In the meantime, we might lose a lot of minds to this. Entire generations perhaps. Watching older people fall for AI-generated trash on Facebook is painful. I hope we acted sooner.
Ok, i'll concede that you have a very good point there. Trust can be (and is being) exploited.
I guess for me, so far at least, some sites feel much more legit and human that the obviously bot-ridden mess that are the likes of Twitter/Instagram/FB. Like for example here or on Lobsters (and more on the latter) i have the feeling that it's mostly people talking with people. On the couple of relatively-small subreddits i visit, i feel the same too.
But i could be wrong of course. Maybe the tone of an HN poster is super easy for an LLM to copy; there's a reason why "shit HN says" exists after all. The only reason i have to believe otherwise is that, in comparison, Instagram or Twitter bots are so obvious and bland, and those companies have way more resources to throw at AI than HN or reddit :P