Although I am not actually a believer that the current LLM ‘s will lead to sentient AI systems, their improvements and their inevitable mixing with, and amplification by, other technologies is likely to bring us pretty close in the few years.
However, in this weird period where everything is an AI, and yet nothing is an AI, we have a problem that they are good enough to fake most human activity on the internet, so such things as summarizing or plagiarizing articles or creating new ones from a few bits of random text or an RSS feed is not beyond them.
This has led to a lot of brick walls going up across social media platforms and news aggregation sites to try and mitigate this, and where in the past it used to be fairly straightforward to write an article and post links to that article to aggregation sites (such as reddit or hacker news say), this is now a lot more difficult.
The problem started with Google, and I expect its fingers extend a long way into the current problems too. Google ranked its page results depending upon a lot of special sauce, which expected an article to conform in a way that is search engine could optimize. If your post or article fell short, it dropped it down the search rankings. (and when was the last time you went more than 2 or 3 pages into a search?) To get around this we had spring up a lot of things called SEO’s (Search Engine Optimizers) which took your perfectly hand-crafted piece and excreted out a bunch of changes someone who has only ever used tick-tock would be able to read.
But it gets worse!
In an irony of ironies twist, many of these sites are now actually using AIs to tell if it is an AI or a human who wrote the post and in an outcome that could have been guessed by anyone except the person writing or commissioning this it seems humans are having more difficulty than ever, proving they are not AI’s!
This madness has even now extended on to comments sections and reviews, where a myriad of tiny algorithms now exist solely to ensure you, God forbid, don’t post an off-site link or recommend an alternative that is better.
The bottom line is if you extrapolate the trend, the hoop’s humans have to jump through to publish information are getting bigger and bigger every year, and every year these hoops are getting smaller and smaller for AI to get around.
I don’t actually know how this will pan-out; Maybe AGI (not necessarily sentient) will be able to undo the mess, or maybe it will just exacerbate it, either way as a non-SEO-optimized site, thank you for scrolling the four or five pages in through the other search items to read.
