They now train on their own content.
Eating your own d̶o̶g̶ f̶o̶o̶d̶ poo.
1. This is a 2022 era picture that LLMs just suck up what's on the Internet and regurgitate it. It hasn't been true for a long time.
2. There's almost no one who has a stronger incentive to distinguish LLM generated text from non-generated LLM text. Training classifiers is pretty manageable.
The other day for me Google search AI cited triggerbites which is a vibe data website.
The LLM unless explicitly prompted cannot distinguish the validity of a data source.
When I ask ChatGPT certain questions, it very clearly shows me the sources it's searching through in the form of favicons, and they're always the favicons of sites that are in the first 5-10 results for a Google search query that would fit what I've asked the LLM. It will then cite those websites as it's source, with a direct link to the page that also shows up in an equivalent Google search. It does that daily.
if anything it’s more true now, AI chatbots rarely use raw LLM output, instead they have CoT and use search tool calls. and the speed at which webpages are crawled is in the matter of hours. I posted something here on hn, then searched for it on google 1 hr later and its AI answered with my comment
https://share.google/aimode/PkQUVfA68AlHGb7Yr
there’s several companies right now making a killing of organic placement on chatbots similar to the SEO rush of early google
> 2) There's almost no one who has a stronger incentive to distinguish LLM generated text from non-generated LLM text. Training classifiers is pretty manageable
i think it’s pretty naive to think that if LLM companies would develop LLM detection they would use it to skip training on that content.
instead, they use it to train their output to be less detectable.
LLM detection is not solvable because it is adversarial, an arms race
There's a tension there: they want you to use AI for everything, and if they get what they want then new information will be embedded in LLM text.
> Training classifiers is pretty manageable.
Hopefully such things can be opened up, so the slop can be iterated on until it passes. It doesn't need to be perfect, just enough so more garbage gets through.
>It also hasn't happened because there is a reward for cheating. Scammers will label their phone numbers as the customer service number for your cable operator or bank. Counterfeiters will label their batteries or phone cases as official accessories. It's hard enough to get people to correctly label their stuff—but fact-checking billions of labels created by millions of people, none of whom you know personally or whose identities you can verify? That's insurmountable.
There's more he says—the preceding paragraph is below—but that line "there is a reward for cheating" is something I keep thinking about. It's hard not to see in so many of the discussions of LLMs.
>For one thing, there are irreconcilable differences in the ways in which things should be described. A site run by transphobes isn't going to label every story about a trans woman as "a story about a woman," irrespective of what the standard says. Microsoft is never going to label Excel as equivalent to Apple's Numbers, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice's Calc. Hermès is never going to list a $40,000 handbag as being made of the same material and having the same capacity as a $30 leather handbag of the same size and shape.
It’s hard to find and convict people who post actual illegal content online, much less fake reviews
Is this information on this website true/high quality?
We need a google for LLMs!
Oh, but LLMs don't consume ads.
We need ads for LLMs!
Help.
Google came and worked wonderfully for a year or two, until people learned to game page rank algorithm. Soon first google pages were just SEO spam and now half of the google is just spam, big corp websites, etc.
All of that precious stuff from small hobby websites about cool things to blogs that used to be wonderful read like https://www.joelonsoftware.com.
AI were not hurt that much by spam, I guess there were at least some curation done, the question is if this curation will work and for how long. It seems we are throwing the towel here as in case of search.
How can this be fixed? Nothing prevents you from publishing straight BS, and LLMs will use any site that doesn't have a garbage reputation as a valid third-party source.
Of course, LLMs already use Reddit, Facebook and co. as a source, so it doesn't really matter...
"History shows that when a slope appears, regulation steps in, technology evolves to solve the problem, or the culture shifts to reinterpret the tool. In almost every case, the feared bottom of the slope was never reached because humans constantly built ramps or bridges along the way."
if you just lie and an llm or a newspaper or a kid believe you, at that point it isn’t a criticism of their naivete, you are just lying
similarly hacking through systems or picking locks isn’t a showcase of weakness if systems, it’s just being a hacker
When an LLM is the lens through which you view that text, you often don't have the context of where it came from, and the LLM is often really bad at filtering trustworthiness based on context when retrieving information to answer a query with.
I wouldn't go to a random site with a sketchy URL to get the customer service number for my xyz. I'd go to their official domain. Thus successfully navigating the treacherous waters scammers attempt to muddy.
Billions have been spent on it.
Try searching Bing sometime. First result for Firefox is a malware clone site (you’ll have to scroll past the malware ad to see it).
As a human, this is fantastic.
> How can this be fixed? Nothing prevents you from publishing straight BS, and LLMs will use any site that doesn't have a garbage reputation as a valid third-party source.
Personally, I hope it can't, or the fix is onerous and kneecaps a lot of the utility of AIs.
I wonder if we can even have some adversarial competition, where competing businesses try to get AIs to ingest bad data to pollute their competitors' decision-making.
For starters: lets get some fake math papers out there. Given proof-checking systems, maybe they won't totally stop OpenAI, but hopefully the bad math could at least drive up the cost and slow AI down.
s/human/unscrupulous marketer/
Bad for humans in general, good for hucksters and con artists. Net negative for humanity.
Furthermore, you are content to pretend that the rest of humanity is capable of doing this on a regular basis. And not just the top 10% of those who can read, interpret and weigh biases, but a solid portion of it.
It is a completely reasonable interpretation if you are an accelerationist living in the elite classes. In fact, perhaps, they are even counting on a majority of people thinking this is a fine environment.
I don't have the answers, but a lot of this is just a continuation of a very bad trend.
Regardless of how the data is sourced, this is bad. It's poisoning the internet.
Besides, such issues come from a lack of due diligence, which have only been exacerbated by AI.
So hopefully most of these statistics move towards first party sources.
It's a ton of effort and expense, but probably feasible from a technical point of view. So instead, the model providers will probably do something silly like wire up rules like "NYT=Reliable;my.blog.forbes.com=Unreliable" and they'll say the issue is solved.
That said, I expect that OpenAI will eventually have its own search infrastructure that rivals Google's, and the overall system will get smarter. Whatever Google did to recognize this site as trash, OpenAI will do as well.
> s/human/marketer/
I don't care where the bad data comes from. It's actually kinda good that some people will have a financial incentive to push it out and keep pushing.
> Bad for humans in general, good for hucksters and con artists. Net negative for humanity.
It's a sad state of affairs, but it's what has to be done. If we've got to burn the web down to save humanity from obsolescence, I'm for it.
The "net negative for humanity" was the attempt to build machines to replace human intellect. I'm not going to let any distaste for marketers or hucksters or con artists distract from that worse thing.
I'm very well aware of that. Unfortunately, this technology was invented, and the logic of our competitive society leaves little chance to contain it except scorched earth tactics.
In the long term, this is probably a real concern that they have to tackle. They'll have to move away from just classifying things as LLM generated or not, to attempting to judge the underlying quality, and that's not an easy problem.
I think you misunderstand me: I want people to shit in the sea until it stinks so bad that everyone gets out of the water.