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title: One Author
date: February 10, 2023 11:51
---
<p>
Microsoft just <a href='https://news.microsoft.com/the-new-Bing/'>announced</a>
their ChatGPT-powered Bing experience. While Google is worried and scrambling to
catch up on the new space race, we as humans have even more important things to
worry about than our bottom line.
</p>
<p>
From a purely technological perspective, these AI developments look incredible.
We're getting to the point where computer assistants we know from sci-fi films
are becoming an every day reality.
</p>
<p>
But what are the wider implications of this?
</p>
<p>
There's tons of potential societal outcomes this could lead to, starting with
kids a few years from now wondering why Tony Stark is the only character with an
all-knowing AI assistant in Iron Man, all the way to a full singularity event.
For this article, I'll focus on just one aspect: Internet content.
</p>
<h3>AI content on the web</h3>
<p>
For some time already, there's been a ton of AI-composed or -aided "content" on
the web. You may have heard others (e.g.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8P6MTOQlyk">
Luke Smith</a>, <a href="https://jacobwsmith.xyz/stories/human_writing.html">
Jacob Smith</a>; no relation between the two as far as I'm aware) complaining
about the generic SEO garbage sites that just produce tons of generic,
search-engine friendly articles on commonly searched topics, just to farm clicks
and ad views.
</p>
<p>
More recently, as various advanced language models started being published,
people started speculating that eventually AI will start replacing even the
higher-class content. YouTuber penguinz0
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iQ8RXhkNwQ"> claims </a> that, in his
opinion, a bit of playing around with ChatGPT produced a better game review than
a popular game journalism website. BuzzFeed
<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/our-way-forward">
openly stated
</a> that they will start publishing AI generated articles.
</p>
<h3>One author</h3>
<p>
While people have been suspecting that <i>eventually</i> more and more content will
be generated, Microsoft is now straight up recommending you do it <i>now</i> (see
minute 37:30 of the press conference, linked above).
</p>
<p>
Composing individual social media posts might not seem like that big of a
deal. But it is if you take into account how media builds upon itself. Much
content is created by citing, commenting on, being inspired by other content.
And AI is itself specifically suited to quickly generating this sort of
derivative material. As the density of AI generated content increases, its
<i>rate of increase</i> will start to grow non-linearly.
</p>
<p>
Just imagine. A Wikipedia article cites that so-and-so said something on
Twitter. That The Guardian reported that this or that happened. A leaked email
from so-and-so revealed that... But all those sources were written by AI. And
maybe the article itself was composed with the help of Bing's compose
functionality?
</p>
<p>
Then you search for something relevant and the Bing bot reads the article and
provides you an answer based on it. Maybe you're smart enough to double check
there are "real" sources to corroborate the bot's answers and it's not something
it made up, so you find the Wikipedia article yourself, full of external
citations, and are satisfied.
</p>
<p>
But fool you are, the internet has one author.
</p>
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