Partisan websites disguised as independent, local news outlets are shaping chatbots’ responses about key races.
This is how AI actually dies. It dies the slow death that search died.
At first it’s actually useful. Then people figure out how to game it. Then so much of it had been gamed that it ceases to be useful .
Let’s face facts, search has sucked for a long time now. It happened slowly, but I’m old enough to remember altavista, and search today is about as good as that now.
Search dies because of advertising. Google literally promoted their head of Advertising to be their new head of Search, which is why it’s shit now.
One of their decisions which included making search results worse so people spend longer searching on google so they can be served more ads.
Here’s a good article on it for anyone interested: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ (article starts after the horizontal break)
So capitalism?
I will say this about Google’s AI thing: it really is useful to search for products with really precise criteria.
Like for example “Look for product xyz for sale in city xyz, sold in order of preference: 1/ by a local brick-and-mortar, 2/ by a brick-and-mortar that sells online in that city’s country, 3/ by an online retailer in Europe - exclude Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress and all the major marketplaces - exclude US businesses”: it WILL find what you want where you want and give the middle finger to Google’s advertisement, suggestions and plugs, 100%.
That’s a more useful, better search than Google Search ever was, and it certainly feels like Google shooting itself in the foot. Because I really don’t know how Google’s customers - i.e. advertisers - benefit from Google’s AI responses in any way. At least when you search for something to buy.
Don’t worry, that will be fixed soon.
Yeah probably…
Search didn’t die though, it’s just continually gotten worse and we’re stuck with the bad product.
Altavista was much better than most search engines have been in many years now, on account of one killer feature: you could search an exact combination of strings that had to be in whatever you searched or had to be excluded, and it returned only pages that strictly had and didn’t have those strings.
In contrast, whenever you search anything on Google nowadays, even if you absolutely tell it to include or exclude something, it just serves up whatever it wants.
So, we have a fancy new word for propaganda now?
No thanks, I’ll just say LLM output is being manipulated by propaganda on sites pretending to be indepentent and the news falling for propaganda.
It’s just a name for a specific propaganda tactic. Flood the zone, gaslighting, oversimplification, whataboutism, etc. It is helpful to have precise language to describe the specific tactics being employed as different strategies are required to overcome various forms of propaganda.
Pick slime already has a meaning for meat about being low quality that doesn’t really match how it is being used here to refer to promoting propaganda. That makes it less effective than just using ‘propaganda to influence LLM vomit’.
Pink slime would be a great term for ai slop in general.
Also, your examples of things that have precise meaning are funny because people use them wrong constantly.
It’s probably a psyop by Big Beef to dilute a term unflattering to them.
(/s but plausible?)
It’s propaganda all the way down.
sloppaganda
Well… You’d think the bar is already impossibly low with US politics and news. And social media manipulation. They keep digging, though!
One time I left tofu in My fridge for too long and there was pink slime on it
