Discontent with the intent of our content
Reading news today is increasingly becoming an exercise of determining whether it is worth tapping on a clickbait title and then deciding if it is worth it to try to skim through the article to eventually scroll down to the bottom where some conclusion related to the title is finally revealed. They force you to go through such inane, tangentially related commentary to fill up space, and force you to scroll through ads, only to end up with a moderately satisfying answer to why Olivia Rodrigo upset Taylor Swift or something like that.
The intent of that ‘journalism’ was not to provide information on a topic. The intent was not to provide commentary or critical analysis on some current event. The intent was to get your attention, fill up space, and force you to see ads of something you just bought on amazon 5 minutes ago. Is this what LLMs are being trained on?
And what about all the trolling that goes on in reddit or twitter/X or youtube, etc… The intent on those platforms is a mixed bag. Some are genuinely having meaning conversation and others are trolling. Are LLM’s being trained properly to be discriminating?
And what about these fake news sites that are being spun up overnight to affect SEO rankings? Again, the intent of these sites is not to provide meaningful information. Rather it is typically regurgitation of content on specific topic meant to tip the balances of SEO scoring, regardless of whether the content is true or helpful. The intent of that content is to be recognized by SEO monitors and skew scoring.
Someone jokingly said government should mandate that all AI-generated text must rhyme. I personally think that would be amazing. It’ll never happen, but it brings up a good point – it is hard to ‘watermark’ text, but it is something that is needed. These sites full of generated content can pop up quickly and with little effort, and they can have significant impact. Can LLM’s discern this kind of content from genuine human-generated content?
I’m sure there are lots of smart people already looking at these issues and developing solutions. But I think we need to be mindful of the potential negative impacts that generative AI can usher in.
Speaking of rhyming text, it’s crazy how easy it is to generate content today. Here’s a song created in seconds based on the text of this blog post. Will the chorus ever become an earworm? Will we ever have an “AI Top Ten”? who knows..
Thursday January 4, 2024