Technology

59770 readers

3112 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1412

The Verge shows how Google search is useless (www.theverge.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

193 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[+] [email protected] -15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

It isn’t about trying to “sneak in” AI content

But he says right in the article that he's including AI content at the bottom of the article, to pad it out.

an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.

My point is if he's being honest and that's the true reason, or just being sneaky and trying to slip in AI content into a human written article.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Well if he announces it, I'm not sure how it's being sneaky and slipping it in. But either way, what would that achieve?

[+] [email protected] -15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But either way, what would that achieve?

Us being more acceptive of, and not belligerent to, AI written articles.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Nilay Patel - the editor in chief is anti-AI especially when it comes to article content. He doesn't allow anyone at the company to use generated content except when they are writing an article about AI and even then only to demonstrate a point - e.g. "here's a comparison of two LLMs with the same prompt". It was also his decision to stop AI's from crawling any content on their website.

He used AI to pad the article because that's what real spam articles do. It had nothing to do with acceptance.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

He used AI to pad the article because that’s what real spam articles do. It had nothing to do with acceptance.

That was a stated goal, yes, but if that sort of tactic is done again and again, at some point, people will push back less against AI in reviews. Toad in a slow boiling pot sort of thing.

Again, tongue-in-cheek. Don't overanalyze it, no need to defend, I'm just stating that was a possibility in the back of my mind, but not most likely what's really going on.

Relax, everything is fine. It's just conversation.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The thing is that the AI text is atrocious and vapid. It takes up a lot of space and says

"Laser printers are better in every way minus full color than inkjets, but are bigger and more expensive than inkjet printers."

The trick is that AI took 12 paragraphs and using a list incorrectly to do it instead of a sentence. And the editor calls it out for that.

[–] traches 3 points 7 months ago

It’s a gag, I promise. He’s talked about it on their podcast