"the future of the internet: a garbage dump"

This week in AI, brought to you by, “Is it too early to have a drink?” Great article by Erik Hoel called, “Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI”. Read the whole piece, it’s a real good account of what is happening to the internet right now in real time. I was looking for info on a new printer and the amount of AI trash is insane. Here are way to many pull quotes.

“The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it.

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What, exactly, are these “workbooks” for my book? AI pollution. Synthetic trash heaps floating in the online ocean. The authors aren’t real people, some asshole just fed the manuscript into an AI and didn’t check when it spit out nonsensical summaries. But it doesn’t matter, does it? A poor sod will click on the $9.99 purchase one day, and that’s all that’s needed for this scam to be profitable since the process is now entirely automatable and costs only a few cents.

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Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.

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This isn’t what everyone feared, which is AI replacing humans by being better—it’s replacing them because AI is so much cheaper. Sports Illustrated was not producing human-quality level content with these methods, but it was still profitable.

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All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care. “

This week in AI.

All AI news is bad news. That pretty much sums it up. I won’t even get into the video aspect yet, that will need it’s own post.

Instacart is using AI art. It's incredibly unappetizing.

“The text for the ingredients and instructions for the above recipes, meanwhile, is also generated by AI, as disclosed by Instacart itself: "This recipe is powered by the magic of AI, so that means it may not be perfect. Check temperatures, taste, and season as you go. Or totally switch things up — you're the head chef now. Consult product packaging to confirm any dietary or nutritional information which is provided here for convenience only. Make sure to follow recommended food safety guidelines."“

'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal

“The open-access paper explores the relationship between stem cells in mammalian testes and a signaling pathway responsible for mediating inflammation and cancer in cells. The paper’s written content does not appear to be bogus, but its most eye-popping aspects are not in the research itself. Rather, they are the inaccurate and grotesque depictions of rat testes, signaling pathways, and stem cells.

The AI-generated rat diagram depicts a rat (helpfully and correctly labeled) whose upper body is labeled as “senctolic stem cells.” What appears to be a very large rat penis is labeled “Dissilced,” with insets at right to highlight the “iollotte sserotgomar cell,” “dck,” and “Retat.” Hmm.”

Microsoft and OpenAI warn state-backed threat actors are using generative AI en masse to wage cyber attacks

Russian, North Korean, Iranian, and Chinese-backed threat actors are attempting to use generative AI to inform, enhance, and refine their attacks, according to a new threat report from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The group’s use of LLMs reflects the broader behaviors being used by cyber criminals according to analysts at Microsoft, and overlaps with threat actors tracked in other research such as Tortoiseshell, Imperial Kitten, and Yellow Liderc.

As well as using LLMs to enhance their phishing emails and scripting techniques, Crimson Sandstorm was observed using LLMs to assist in producing code to disable antivirus systems and delete files in a directory after exiting an application, all with the aim of evading anomaly detection.

Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?

The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is soluble in water. If it's carried by groundwater out into an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized. When that happens, it will fall out of the water as “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as 1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000 years because the ground's been frozen.”

We stumbled on another burn among the raking willow shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime covered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philosophy professor who was helping to sample fish and invertebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said.