Big companies eager to make a buck have always been willing to flood the Internet with garbage in pursuit of that goal.
Fifteen years ago, this came in the form of content mills like eHow. A handful of online publishers paid writers to churn out superficial, unhelpful content about a wide variety of topics. Content farms dominated the search results for many subjects. For a few years, it was impossible to avoid them, and they hopelessly clogged up Google’s search results. There was a financial incentive behind all this: content farm publishers wanted to earn money from ad revenue.
Then, in 2011, Google issued a new update that ranked the content farms lower. Nowadays, it is rare to find one of these sites among your Google search results. That’s a good thing, of course!
Today, however, the Internet has a new source of mass-produced garbage: generative AI.
Generative AI’s initial inputs were acquired through a barely legal, marginally piratical scraping of the Internet, carried out on a massive scale.
Generative AI still relies on scraping. (Note: it isn’t really “artificial intelligence”.) But now there’s a problem: generative AI—like the content farms of fifteen years ago—is producing so much online garbage, that it now threatens the collapse of its own business model:
“As Futurism and countless other outlets have reported over the last few years, the AI industry has continuously barreled toward the moment at which all available authentic training data — that is, information that was produced by humans and not AI — will be exhausted. Some pundits, including Elon Musk, believe we’re already there.”
It’s the tyranny of that old computer acronym: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).
But this is not 2011. In 2011, reputable tech giants like Google were generally opposed to the content farms. The tech firms are not so clear-headed where generative AI is concerned. Google, Meta, and Microsoft all seem to genuinely believe that consumers go online to consume a sea of AI-generated gobbledygook. They have bet the farm on this technology, and there is a real price for them now, if they acknowledge their mistake and attempt to backpedal.
One does not need to be a Luddite to notice that AI is gradually degrading search results for Google and other search engines. The AI collapse seems inevitable. I only hope that the tech companies, who have foolishly over-invested in shoddy, overhyped AI, don’t collapse with it.
-ET