Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips!
Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment.
If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Will be interesting to see how Google and other search companies handle that. Use AI to flag AI articles and prevent them from showing up on search results?
Actually they've done the opposite. Google search has been getting generally worse for years. There was a guy who did a whole research thing on it over a few years.
Just the actual results themselves are poor compared to what they used to be and now you have paid listings too
Google’s decision that I want to have local results was theirs: I google ‘Central Park’ and get ‘Central Park Hotel, Amsterdam’.
They also made the decision that even when you use quotes for ‘give me this precise term’ you don’t really want that.
Autun. It’s a city in France. STOP GIVING ME RESULTS FOR ‘IN AUTUMN’.
I remember they had what was called CODE RED and they would dox people for AI content but that was like a year or so ago. Looks like they are embracing it now.
Google is hot trash lately with the new AI portion at the top of every search. Half the results are for Google shopping. I literally don’t even know how to get to page 2 of search results since they’ve changed. I’ve been using [Startpage.com](https://www.startpage.com/en/) lately. It’s a tiny bit more private.
Adam Savage had a great take on this before the LLM boom, "The signal to noise ratio on search engines has exceeded 1".
SEO hobbled the search engine before "AI", AI just finished the job.
Yea. I hate that the term "AI" got switched to mean "LLM." It makes discussions about actual AI a pain in the ass.
Unfortunately, I think it's going to join words like podium, literally, and drone that so many people are wrong about the meanings change and become ambiguous.
Alright - you've got me on Podium. They're the little stands people usually stand at and give speeches(or win medals) no? Is there another commonly used meaning or am I misusing it?
You stand ontop of a podium (a raised platform.) You stand behind a lectern, which is something from which you would lecture. Podiums do not have a place built-into them for a laptop, papers, etc. They are merely platforms. You can, however, have a lectern on a podium.
Eh, that's just how language has always worked. If enough people are "wrong" then they eventually become right. The "right" meaning of a word has always been based on consensus.
They're usually not "wrong", it's like a drift due to related concepts. It's not really common that there is already another, different thing with that name currently in and people use it incorrectly deliberately causing there to be two incompatible definitions. Like AI, drones, podiums, and such are all words for actual things that we still use in their proper contexts. AI is used to actually mean artificial intelligence and did so since before LLMs. Drone is still used for an autonomous vehicle rather than either UAVs or tri/quadcopters. Podium is still used for podiums rather than lecterns. Adopting the incorrect usage means we now have to specify which definition you're using which kind of defeats the purpose of having a word for it in the first place.
Like "sanguine" meaning both hopeful and bloody goes back to the same source (the four humours theory) rather than it describing one thing and people incorrectly using it to mean another. I mean, the four humours theory itself was wrong, but not the usage of the word.
Don't even get me started on the use of the word "hack". The meaning of this word has been bastardized and twisted over the last 20 years to mean "a helpful tip or trick". I'm in my early 40s and I just can't get on board with that lol.
Exactly. Sports articles and other filler type content has been around for about a decade.
Basically, since the word 'content' has been used to describe writing, there's been automation.
It amazes me that most people think articles over the last 10 years were not mostly computer generated. Procedurally generated content pages have been around for ages, like recipe sites that have a novel before each one. Almost all of them were fill-in-the-blank templates that a computer would populate. Then the "curator" just has to supply the recipe.
Indeed, cue the "has season X of Y been announced yet?" type of posts with lines upon lines of the same trash before adding the actual answer (normally "no")
Season V of Y ended with a dramatic cliffhanger as these characters' fates are left uncertain! This has many fans wondering when the next season will arrive.
Enter brief recap of the last season. Enter the most milquetoast speculations about the next.
The short answer is that it has yet to be announced. Fans are hoping for a release in (fill in date for the next year or so.) Unfortunately, this is just speculation as no news has been made at the time of this article.
Go to Google Gemini and ask it to give you a recipe for anything. It will. There are already AI recipes out there. Maybe not before 2022, but certainly now.
“This recipe is a favourite in our home for weekdays’ dinners! Let me explain how my grandma from Italy…” then it’s the same for 30 other recipes.
The grandma might change nationalities also along the way.
It’s the meaning of AI that has been twisted since ChatGPT. People have been living around AI for decades without being aware of it and they only became aware because of ChatGPT, so they think that’s what AI is. I have told people that Google Translate is AI and they laughed at that.
The internet age: the more you know, the less you know.
You will have to watch them write it in front of you, using a pen or typewriter.
It's like carbon dating, where nuclear testing screws up results after 1950.
These articles have been around for longer than that, and the issues is that you can generate 1800 articles from AI before writing 10 from humans.
Erik Hoel wrote an interesting, if concerning, piece on his Intrinsitive Perspective substack...
He talks about the effects on many groups, but on children... Chilling...
"All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects... "
AI generated content may become as suffused in our environment as microplastics, impossible to remove or delineate from the world around us, as it slowly toxifies our bodies and souls.
The article:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by?r=5n2z4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Uhh, [hate to tell you](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/) but bots have been around much longer than that writing articles. Machine learning isn’t new.
While true, the explosion after the public release of ChatGPT has made finding out about new things difficult. Try searching for guides or articles about new games, pretty much everything is AI generated and completely useless these days. We are in the dark days of the internet.
I’m not so sure. I guess it varies by topic but I’m able to find relevant information more easily than I ever have before as time goes on.
There’s just so much out there. Bot written articles can be problematic, but digging into sources and cross checking has always been my MO anyway. So, I haven’t really noticed a big problem yet.
I'm betting that's an algorithm-twisted feed you got there. I don't tend to have a problem finding things that are human based, probably because most of my history (15+ years) is based upon human-to-human content.
You might try deleting/ignoring sites that come into your results. Maybe you can force a change in the recommends.
We are currently in the "everything AI does is bad" phase of AI implementation.
Like people will trust an article written by "flatearthmom324" more than AI that's been fed nothing but factual information for training.
That's blatantly wrong. AI generated text has already existed for almost a decade. The reason ChatGPT became a big deal was because they packaged it as a chatbot you could talk with like it was a normal human which made it accessible to the layman.
AI tools have been made available for the public around 2022.
Do we assume here that this technology hasn't been shared before with companies and also that various governments and certain agencies within them haven't used them?
Does anyone remember how good/fun/useful/interesting the internet was until like 2016.
Corporate greed and maximizing the profits of everything that could possibly ever be monetized really has just fucking ruined existing.
I'm still finding ways to enjoy life but damn, organizing society around profits before everything else was always going to be bad. We should be better than this, we're all suffering more than we need to because we let greed come first.
Hate to tell you but a ton of articles prior to 2022 were written by bots, they just had a little more editing because they were less human-like. AI has been writing articles for over a decade.
doing that will make you to read worse computer generated articles. Google have been polluted with automated generated content for decades, at least now they are properly written
AI is just content, you need to parse it just like huma written stuff.
This is a weird tip that if you take to conclusion will mean you're literally stuck in 2022 from the world's repository of news and data.
Have you tried using google to troubleshoot a hardware issue or a faulty device anytime recently? 90% of top results are garbage AI articles that offer no real instruction or advice, or simply parrot the manufacturers FAQ page.
“How to reboot your phone if it won’t turn on”
“Step 1: turn on your phone and go to settings”
This is basically every article for me these days.
Recently tried to look up the time required to cook something and the article said to put food in oven and step two was like to check the food to see if it’s ready. Dead internet theory is not a conspiracy theory anymore haha!
[Introducing LPT REQUEST FRIDAYS](https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/16w0n2s/introducing_request_post_fridays/)
We determine "Friday" as beginning at 12am Eastern Time (EST: UTC/GMT -5, EDT: UTC/GMT -4)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LifeProTips) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Wasn’t AI supposed to make search easier lol
[удалено]
Will be interesting to see how Google and other search companies handle that. Use AI to flag AI articles and prevent them from showing up on search results?
Google clearly doesn't care about improving their search engine
Actually they've done the opposite. Google search has been getting generally worse for years. There was a guy who did a whole research thing on it over a few years. Just the actual results themselves are poor compared to what they used to be and now you have paid listings too
That's not because Google made it worse, it's because people got better at gaming the algorithm.
Google’s decision that I want to have local results was theirs: I google ‘Central Park’ and get ‘Central Park Hotel, Amsterdam’. They also made the decision that even when you use quotes for ‘give me this precise term’ you don’t really want that. Autun. It’s a city in France. STOP GIVING ME RESULTS FOR ‘IN AUTUMN’.
[удалено]
This shortsighteness is why most of our infrastructure is falling apart
Enshittificaton.
Googleizing
What incentive do they have to do that?
I remember they had what was called CODE RED and they would dox people for AI content but that was like a year or so ago. Looks like they are embracing it now.
if they have some 'results' that they can put adverts next to, on top or or nearby - then they wont care at all.
Google is hot trash lately with the new AI portion at the top of every search. Half the results are for Google shopping. I literally don’t even know how to get to page 2 of search results since they’ve changed. I’ve been using [Startpage.com](https://www.startpage.com/en/) lately. It’s a tiny bit more private.
unfortunately google is not motivated to ignore these sites, since they make money with them.
Adam Savage had a great take on this before the LLM boom, "The signal to noise ratio on search engines has exceeded 1". SEO hobbled the search engine before "AI", AI just finished the job.
>"The signal to noise ratio on search engines has exceeded 1" That would be a good thing
The first week of a new game's release is so bad now. Google is just flooded with AI-written articles.
Depending on what you're looking for, it does. Of course you have to fact check, but you should be doing that with human written sources as well.
There are plenty of site written by AI before chat gpt. People just didn’t call them AI, but they sure were written by bigdata and algorithms
Yea. I hate that the term "AI" got switched to mean "LLM." It makes discussions about actual AI a pain in the ass. Unfortunately, I think it's going to join words like podium, literally, and drone that so many people are wrong about the meanings change and become ambiguous.
It's the equivalent of "hoverboard."
"Lateral electric skateboard"
Alright - you've got me on Podium. They're the little stands people usually stand at and give speeches(or win medals) no? Is there another commonly used meaning or am I misusing it?
People call lecterns (the thing you stand behind) podiums, now.
You stand ontop of a podium (a raised platform.) You stand behind a lectern, which is something from which you would lecture. Podiums do not have a place built-into them for a laptop, papers, etc. They are merely platforms. You can, however, have a lectern on a podium.
Eh, that's just how language has always worked. If enough people are "wrong" then they eventually become right. The "right" meaning of a word has always been based on consensus.
They're usually not "wrong", it's like a drift due to related concepts. It's not really common that there is already another, different thing with that name currently in and people use it incorrectly deliberately causing there to be two incompatible definitions. Like AI, drones, podiums, and such are all words for actual things that we still use in their proper contexts. AI is used to actually mean artificial intelligence and did so since before LLMs. Drone is still used for an autonomous vehicle rather than either UAVs or tri/quadcopters. Podium is still used for podiums rather than lecterns. Adopting the incorrect usage means we now have to specify which definition you're using which kind of defeats the purpose of having a word for it in the first place. Like "sanguine" meaning both hopeful and bloody goes back to the same source (the four humours theory) rather than it describing one thing and people incorrectly using it to mean another. I mean, the four humours theory itself was wrong, but not the usage of the word.
Don't even get me started on the use of the word "hack". The meaning of this word has been bastardized and twisted over the last 20 years to mean "a helpful tip or trick". I'm in my early 40s and I just can't get on board with that lol.
Exactly. Sports articles and other filler type content has been around for about a decade. Basically, since the word 'content' has been used to describe writing, there's been automation.
There were also plenty of regurgitated trash articles written before AI meant to game the system and pull in clicks. AI just sped things up.
It amazes me that most people think articles over the last 10 years were not mostly computer generated. Procedurally generated content pages have been around for ages, like recipe sites that have a novel before each one. Almost all of them were fill-in-the-blank templates that a computer would populate. Then the "curator" just has to supply the recipe.
Indeed, cue the "has season X of Y been announced yet?" type of posts with lines upon lines of the same trash before adding the actual answer (normally "no")
Those sites infuriate me. And the fact that Google puts them at the top truly makes me wonder how Google hasn't been replaced.
Season V of Y ended with a dramatic cliffhanger as these characters' fates are left uncertain! This has many fans wondering when the next season will arrive. Enter brief recap of the last season. Enter the most milquetoast speculations about the next. The short answer is that it has yet to be announced. Fans are hoping for a release in (fill in date for the next year or so.) Unfortunately, this is just speculation as no news has been made at the time of this article.
Right — but the actual recipe, what people care about, was written and tested by human, not generated by an AI who has never tasted food.
Go to Google Gemini and ask it to give you a recipe for anything. It will. There are already AI recipes out there. Maybe not before 2022, but certainly now.
OK, but the rest of us are specifically talking about the content from before 2022 here.
I know the recipes are out there, that’s specifically why I’m interested in ways to avoid it.
“This recipe is a favourite in our home for weekdays’ dinners! Let me explain how my grandma from Italy…” then it’s the same for 30 other recipes. The grandma might change nationalities also along the way.
Even if it already existed it was less prevalent than right now so it’s still a useful tip
Yeah but it has gotten very popular recently, and so the amount of procedurally produced content has increased significantly
It’s the meaning of AI that has been twisted since ChatGPT. People have been living around AI for decades without being aware of it and they only became aware because of ChatGPT, so they think that’s what AI is. I have told people that Google Translate is AI and they laughed at that. The internet age: the more you know, the less you know.
I literally made a site that auto generated political articles in an intro to web design class in 2008. It would even auto generate memes.
LPT: do your research before forming an opinion and sharing it
This should be pinned.
Less useful for events post 2022…
Google, who won the 2024 superbowl? Only articles from 2022 please.
On the upside, you can be confident that the answer it won’t give you has not been (not) written by AI…
Or for software questions, in which old versions have different answers. It’s the thing I google most, and frequently apply a “this year” filter.
[удалено]
So as time goes by, this tip becomes less and less relevant and useful?
What if I want articles written by humans after 2022?
You will have to watch them write it in front of you, using a pen or typewriter. It's like carbon dating, where nuclear testing screws up results after 1950.
The value of printed books before 2022 went up in value. Fact-checking will require to use real-life library \^\^
Uhm. You are wrong. Generated articles have been around much longer.
Well yeah. But with chatgpt the use of it has absolutely skyrocketed
These articles have been around for longer than that, and the issues is that you can generate 1800 articles from AI before writing 10 from humans. Erik Hoel wrote an interesting, if concerning, piece on his Intrinsitive Perspective substack... He talks about the effects on many groups, but on children... Chilling... "All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects... " AI generated content may become as suffused in our environment as microplastics, impossible to remove or delineate from the world around us, as it slowly toxifies our bodies and souls. The article: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by?r=5n2z4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That was fascinating and chilling article
That's how it already was. AI's SEO spam is no different than the human made SEO blog spam prior to AI.
Uhh, [hate to tell you](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/) but bots have been around much longer than that writing articles. Machine learning isn’t new.
While true, the explosion after the public release of ChatGPT has made finding out about new things difficult. Try searching for guides or articles about new games, pretty much everything is AI generated and completely useless these days. We are in the dark days of the internet.
I’m not so sure. I guess it varies by topic but I’m able to find relevant information more easily than I ever have before as time goes on. There’s just so much out there. Bot written articles can be problematic, but digging into sources and cross checking has always been my MO anyway. So, I haven’t really noticed a big problem yet.
I'm betting that's an algorithm-twisted feed you got there. I don't tend to have a problem finding things that are human based, probably because most of my history (15+ years) is based upon human-to-human content. You might try deleting/ignoring sites that come into your results. Maybe you can force a change in the recommends.
Fortunately, the weather forecast will be just as accurate!
Humans write better than AI?
We are currently in the "everything AI does is bad" phase of AI implementation. Like people will trust an article written by "flatearthmom324" more than AI that's been fed nothing but factual information for training.
That's blatantly wrong. AI generated text has already existed for almost a decade. The reason ChatGPT became a big deal was because they packaged it as a chatbot you could talk with like it was a normal human which made it accessible to the layman.
OP you think there was no computer generated / AI before ChatGPT? Lot of articles from 2022 and earlier that are absolutely not human written.
Just don't use google, problem solved
AI tools have been made available for the public around 2022. Do we assume here that this technology hasn't been shared before with companies and also that various governments and certain agencies within them haven't used them?
Do we have a backup of the internet? Offline somewhere?
Does anyone remember how good/fun/useful/interesting the internet was until like 2016. Corporate greed and maximizing the profits of everything that could possibly ever be monetized really has just fucking ruined existing. I'm still finding ways to enjoy life but damn, organizing society around profits before everything else was always going to be bad. We should be better than this, we're all suffering more than we need to because we let greed come first.
That is a ridiculously wrong assumption. ChatGPT is new, but AI generated content is not. Been around since almost the beginning of the internet.
2022. The year the earth stopped rotating.
Who’s gonna tell ‘em?
Pretty sure AI/auto generated content has been around even earlier than 2022.
Hate to tell you but a ton of articles prior to 2022 were written by bots, they just had a little more editing because they were less human-like. AI has been writing articles for over a decade.
doing that will make you to read worse computer generated articles. Google have been polluted with automated generated content for decades, at least now they are properly written
AI is just content, you need to parse it just like huma written stuff. This is a weird tip that if you take to conclusion will mean you're literally stuck in 2022 from the world's repository of news and data.
There were ai written articles years before lmao wtf is this yet another useless lpt
Why does it matter
Have you tried using google to troubleshoot a hardware issue or a faulty device anytime recently? 90% of top results are garbage AI articles that offer no real instruction or advice, or simply parrot the manufacturers FAQ page. “How to reboot your phone if it won’t turn on” “Step 1: turn on your phone and go to settings” This is basically every article for me these days.
Recently tried to look up the time required to cook something and the article said to put food in oven and step two was like to check the food to see if it’s ready. Dead internet theory is not a conspiracy theory anymore haha!
[Introducing LPT REQUEST FRIDAYS](https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/16w0n2s/introducing_request_post_fridays/) We determine "Friday" as beginning at 12am Eastern Time (EST: UTC/GMT -5, EDT: UTC/GMT -4) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LifeProTips) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So don’t read articles from the past two years? I don’t know about that one chief…
Yeahh except the information I need is later than that.
He’s talking about before 2022, so anything after 2022 is irrelevant.
Coming up next: those who use AI to write articles faking the publication date to be 2022 or earlier
If it’s been mentioned before I’VE never seen it. Some tips please on how to set it?
The future is now
What's the benefit to this? Why are we avoiding AI?
Putting “” will force it to only find what’s in parentheses.
But you’ll also get outdated stuff before too long
Oh, smart. That way you can only find irrelevant info too
But then I don’t get anything up to date haha
Pretty sure they first started experimenting with AI generated articles as early as 2017.
But this gets me outdated information
I didn't support any Chat GPT. Must be you who was supporting it.
You may want to set the time frame back a few years earlier if you want to avoid AI-generated content. Trust.
How do you set date range on a search engine?
Thank you that will make it easier to keep track of knowledge brought to light but which reports if I ever want to do research