More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
- Reference: 0180218131
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/26/1937217/more-than-half-of-new-articles-on-the-internet-are-being-written-by-ai
- Source link:
> The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently [1]published a study showing that [2]more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence . [...]
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> It's important to clarify what's meant by "online content," the phrase used in the Graphite study, which analyzed over 65,000 randomly selected articles of at least 100 words on the web. These can include anything from peer-reviewed research to promotional copy for miracle supplements. A closer reading of the Graphite study shows that the AI-generated articles consist largely of general-interest writing: news updates, how-to guides, lifestyle posts, reviews and product explainers.
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> The primary economic purpose of this content is to persuade or inform, not to express originality or creativity. Put differently, AI appears to be most useful when the writing in question is low-stakes and formulaic: the weekend-in-Rome listicle, the standard cover letter, the text produced to market a business. A whole industry of writers -- mostly freelance, including many translators -- has relied on precisely this kind of work, producing blog posts, how-to material, search engine optimization text and social media copy. The rapid adoption of large language models has already displaced many of the gigs that once sustained them.
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> The dramatic loss of this work points toward another issue raised by the Graphite study: the question of authenticity, not only in identifying who or what produced a text, but also in understanding the value that humans attach to creative activity. How can you distinguish a human-written article from a machine-generated one? And does that ability even matter? Over time, that distinction is likely to grow less significant, particularly as more writing emerges from interactions between humans and AI...
"If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance -- perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past -- it's quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable," writes author Francesco Agnellini, in closing.
"Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans."
[1] https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans
[2] https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-new-articles-on-the-internet-are-being-written-by-ai-is-human-writing-headed-for-extinction-268354
In other words (Score:2)
The useless crap that used to be made by bad writers is now made by robots
Good (Score:3)
I can lose less faith in humanity by writing stuff off as AI.
Copyrights? (Score:2)
> More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
And the copyrights for them go to ... publisher, AI/LLM owner ... ?
Re:Copyrights? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares? The concept is so last century that it is not relevant anymore.
New content is being produced faster than it can be consumed. There is no longer a value to it. The money is made by selling advertising views and by paid manipulation of the narrative. Nobody needs to clone yesterdays work when they can just generate a new work to sell today.
Does that include slashdot articles? (Score:2)
That would change everything here.
The Internet is dead (Score:3)
It's a natural progression of search engine optimization. When the name of the game is ad impressions, you'll try to attract eyeballs as cheaply as possible.
If you're in the business of running these SEO-trap blogs to make money, you need content. You used to have to hire a writer to generate content for you, or buy articles from wholesalers. Now you just generate them from thin air for a few cents. It's evolution at work, really... the content adapts to the algorithm. The real content is long gone.
At this point it's best to go straight to the source and use an LLM, it can synthesize exactly what you want instead of waiting for some blog syndicate to do it for you.
Re: The Internet is dead (Score:2)
> At this point it's best to go straight to the source and use an LLM, it can synthesize exactly what you want instead of waiting for some blog syndicate to do it for you.
What if I want something actual facts that have been researched and put into writing by someone who knows what they're talking about?
Re: The Internet is dead (Score:2)
You are in the wrong decade then! Get with the time grandpa!
Re: (Score:2)
You would need a paid subscription to an actual news service.
There will likely be a few that survive this transition by offering high quality content -but there will not be many of them, and they will not be giving it away for free.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's evolution at work, really... the content adapts to the algorithm. The real content is long gone.
Parasites parasitising parasites parasitising parasites parasitising parasites ... It's parasites all the way down, baby.
Hand Crafted? (Score:2)
> it's quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable
In the same way hand crafted furniture has become more valuable. It will be a luxury good that is able to set itself apart from industrial produced articles. A bit like Winston Churchill as a correspondent had subscribers who paid for his reports.
The experiment to train LLMs on LLM output begins (Score:4, Interesting)
Will be interesting to see if earlier research finding that LLMs deteriorate quickly when trained on their own output is now proven correct in reality. It will be impossible for those training LLMs to avoid LLM output in their training material if they want to include contemporary material, which they must to stay attractive for users.
Re: (Score:2)
There won't be much of an experiment per se. In practice it will quickly devolve into a few big players that control platforms people use so that they can continuously access new training material.
So microsoft, Apple maybe and Facebook and possibly but probably not Twitter (since we just learned 80% of the accounts on Twitter are Russians and bangladeshies pretending to be American conservatives) will continue to thrive because they will be able to tell the difference between a bot and a human being tha
Re: (Score:2)
> AI is also going to result in huge monopolies because it's a technology that lends itself to monopolies inherently
I doubt that is true. AI is currently the product of huge monopolies because they have investors money to spend. It seems to me the whole LLM thing eventually devolves into a bunch of canned responses that require very limited computing resources. The monopolies are going to need intellectual property rights to protect their list of canned responses but I am not sure they can make that work.
The broader AI framework is likely to be similar to any other type of computer program. There will be niche markets w
Like slashdot? (Score:2)
This place feels like a it's being run by AI..
Let's be honest here (Score:2)
There's really not much worth reading "on the internet" anymore.
It's meaning inflation. The more words published, the less value per word.
Think of the endless pages you now find that have a long drawn out introduction, explanation of the history, the meaning, why you should or shouldn't... 99% filler words... just like this post. "The Internet" is like horoscopes, it's just entertainment.
Once you have a hobby, like playing the guitar, or making art, the internet is just a waste of time.
Re:Let's be honest here (Score:5, Insightful)
> There's really not much worth reading "on the internet" anymore.
> It's meaning inflation. The more words published, the less value per word.
Or, there's the same amount of stuff worth reading, but it is being diluted by a much larger flow of sewage that isn't worth reading.
Re: Let's be honest here (Score:2)
Completely agree! Theres loads of brilliant writing out there. Impossible to find as itâ(TM)s all bogged down in AI/marketing drivel. Youâ(TM)re unlikely to find the former given the sheer volume of the latter though.
Re: (Score:2)
Well thats the key isnt it? For an article to be scraped and rewritten, a person has to write it first.
Seems most former journalists who want to keep doing what they do are going to substack these days.
Re: (Score:3)
I expect several consequences of this, including:
1. Model collapse. Training LLMs on the output of other LLMs has been shown to lower the model's quality, and it gets worse with each iteration. So, the Internet has become less valuable as an LLM training data source, and this trend will continue, making it more difficult to train new models or improve existing ones.
2. Increased demand for guaranteed human-generated content. This is both from competition between LLM training businesses who need original s