TL;DR - internet filled with crappy articles with bad info in a desperate attempt for ad revenue, is this written by AI or just dumbasses creating whatever content they can whether or not they know anything about the topic?
I watched a video on YT recently talking about the vast number of "science" education videos that have popped up in recent months that appear to be entirely AI generated. I don't know if it's just my awareness of it making me see it everywhere I look but I feel like a lot of my internet search results lately have been more frustrating, coming up with endless results consisting of garbage word salad that has to either be written by a language model, or a person functioning like a language model, compiling and regurgitating content without actually having any understanding of the topic they're writing about. I've gotten to a point now where I just skip the search engine and go straight to a website that I expect to have the answer, and search there, or I tailor my search terms to specifically find answers on forums that are presumably written by humans.
For example yesterday, I was researching the possibility of towing my LJ to Colorado with my half ton pickup. Many of the results were at nonsense URLs with generic sounding towing or trailer related domain names, and the content was just a series of word salad blurbs about towing that were often clearly wrong and even in conflict with one another within the same page. One talking about flat towing a Jeep said that you attach the tow apparatus by rotating the front axle forward and attaching it to the tow bar, wtf? When trying to find the tow rating for my truck I ended up spending more time trying to find even one with a consistent, believable answer than it ended up taking me to give up and walk out to the truck and find it in the owners manual.
I forgot what exactly they were now but I had similar experiences recently looking up things about lawn care and medical stuff. Multiple blurbs under headings that would either restate the same info in a different way or actually conflict itself from one paragraph to another that made me think it was a language model response to each heading as a prompt, or a human doing searches and copying stuff from anything that looks relevant into a single page to claim as their own content.
link to video
I watched a video on YT recently talking about the vast number of "science" education videos that have popped up in recent months that appear to be entirely AI generated. I don't know if it's just my awareness of it making me see it everywhere I look but I feel like a lot of my internet search results lately have been more frustrating, coming up with endless results consisting of garbage word salad that has to either be written by a language model, or a person functioning like a language model, compiling and regurgitating content without actually having any understanding of the topic they're writing about. I've gotten to a point now where I just skip the search engine and go straight to a website that I expect to have the answer, and search there, or I tailor my search terms to specifically find answers on forums that are presumably written by humans.
For example yesterday, I was researching the possibility of towing my LJ to Colorado with my half ton pickup. Many of the results were at nonsense URLs with generic sounding towing or trailer related domain names, and the content was just a series of word salad blurbs about towing that were often clearly wrong and even in conflict with one another within the same page. One talking about flat towing a Jeep said that you attach the tow apparatus by rotating the front axle forward and attaching it to the tow bar, wtf? When trying to find the tow rating for my truck I ended up spending more time trying to find even one with a consistent, believable answer than it ended up taking me to give up and walk out to the truck and find it in the owners manual.
I forgot what exactly they were now but I had similar experiences recently looking up things about lawn care and medical stuff. Multiple blurbs under headings that would either restate the same info in a different way or actually conflict itself from one paragraph to another that made me think it was a language model response to each heading as a prompt, or a human doing searches and copying stuff from anything that looks relevant into a single page to claim as their own content.
link to video
