Originally published at: Crappy AI-generated websites flourishing in search results | Boing Boing
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I’m surprised Mr. Fusion didn’t even make the list of top portable nuclear reactors this year. The quality of products must have really started slipping since 2015.
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I have to take another look at Neal Stephenson’s Fall to see if he factored AI into his vision of the future garbage-strewn state of the Web.
What do you expect? We live in the universe where Biff Tannen became President.
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I really want to hit the heart button on this, but I am crying too hard to get my mouse there.
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About the only thing that Back to the Future Two got right about 2015 that couldn’t be predicted in the 1980s was the possibility that Marlene McFly could be trans and accepted by her family.
I know that wasn’t what was intended when Michael J Fox did drag for the role. This is now my head-canon.
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Me too! None of this shit is A.I. - it’s “machine learning” and even that phrase is inaccurate, because the machine learns fuck all nothing. We need more realistic terminology, but I don’t know what to call it and “AI” is the meaningless catchphrase that advertisers are plugging to death. I can only hope it quickly becomes dated and quaint like “cyber” and left behind. Hopefully before the actual AI apocalypse.
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Every one of those blurbs about portable reactors reads just like something I’m sure I’ve seen right here on BB, regularly. Can’t quite put my finger on it… something about gadgets?
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There is only one time that sci-fi got the future pretty much dead on…
But it’s not nearly as fun as Back to the Future…
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I keep reading all this fanboi stuff about how the next-gen AI we are starting to have is going to change the world for good, and then I read here that it’s already making the Web crappier than it already was. I do not think it’s all a positive thing.
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There will be some amazingly good things that comes of it, but unfortunately those advances will likely be drowned out by the other 90% that will more generally make the world a worse place to live in.
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I think even the idea there’s anything to name is part of the problem. It’s like “cryptocurrency” and “web 3” and (to a large extent) “self-driving cars”; you start with the kernel of some modestly interesting idea, but it’s fluffed and pumped and lit up until we’re just discussing a big empty ball of air.
What 2023 calls “AI” may someday have its place, like Fourier transforms or thermoplastic co-molding – and I suppose it’ll need a name in the specialist literature – but I’m not even sure about that, as it’s a very expensive way to achieve not much.
It makes me think of the CM Kornbluth short story The Marching Morons, where the elite can’t provide the masses with the 300mph highways and rocket ships they expect, so they just fake it by adding sound effects and changing the speedometers in regular cars, because the population are dumb swine anyway.
That’s how tech companies are treating us when they pretend their expensive new autocorrect software means they’ve delivered Skynet. The only bit Kornbluth got wrong was thinking the elites would be smart enough not to buy their own bullshit.
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Yes, yes, why should the enemy have to pay for fancy warheads when they could use the conventional kind and just target a few ground-based, portable mini-nuke plants to get a similar effect?
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“Autoplagiarism engine” or “artificial stupidity”, maybe?
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Algorithmic Inarticulation: AI
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i feel like i will know ai has finally arrived when google stops trying to show me pictures of me and my ex on days that are no longer anniversaries.
hmm… 
… maybe this was tmi… 
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FB kept telling me for years “Hey! You might know your ex-wife! Why not friend her?”. Time heals all wounds but they heal faster when the algorithm isn’t constantly poking the wound.
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You’re kind of joking, but imo you hit on one of the AI critical applications - mining personal or corporate data for personalized searches. I was just talking with my boss the other day, how great it would be to have a context-aware search of our email and common files.
“Find emails generally on Topic X, prioritize emails to X, Y, or Z”
Doing that beyond simple keyword search would be a real enhancement. Google tries to do it, but not nearly as successfully as other LLMs
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We went so quickly in the past several years from like “wow technology is so amazing, it’s like we have everything from the jetsons except hover cars” to “how do we unplug everything? Can we do that or is it too late?” (Im being hyperbolic but I’m almost there…)
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