Posted on 12/06/2022 4:39:49 PM PST by FarCenter
COMMENT To see where this dumptruck is heading, let's first follow the trail of debris.
It's difficult to track back, but the impacts of internet content mills, which thrived until around 2010, are still readily visible.
The net effect of content generated at the rate of ten to thirty pieces daily on specialty topics — all at the hands of non-specialists via the guiding hand of Google Trends — led to an internet that, by 2010, was saturated with fluffy (if not nonsensical), keyword-stuffed articles that offered little in the way of usable info and in many cases, plenty of advice and information that was simply incorrect.
And because content mills naturally begat more content mills (and why not when worst-offender Associated Content sold to Yahoo! for $100 million), what happened next was inevitable. Those new content companies simply parroted what they found on bigger content mills, using the internet of the time as a training set, so to speak. The cycle of bad articles with little detail or worse, inaccurate detail, was repeated again and again until it became difficult to distinguish one article from the next unless it was found on one of a handful of edited, reputable sites.
The name of the game for these early content companies was sheer volume. Ad network (Google Adsense, etc.) revenues were already falling by 2005 but with thousands, if not millions of articles, each generating perhaps three cents per day, the money wasn't bad. For a content mill with 200,000 articles, that was a tidy $2 million business with ultra-low overhead. Hosting wasn't hugely expensive, web design was easy with open source CMS tools like Wordpress, Drupal, and others, and most important (and ultimately most disastrous) the bulk content could be bought for mere cents per article from offshore shops.
This model meant the internet was quickly flooded with badly written nonsense, much of which is still searchable in the original fornm or even more badly rehashed. Google had to start stepping up its game to filter around this and learn how to deliver quality in content versus the magical keyword blend that content mills could exploit.
The problems with content mills are clear, especially all these years later, but it was all at a human scale with the limitations of "slow" writers and keyword-stuffers. The future presents us with a new matter—one that could shatter how we use the internet for good.
...
This new business model is already unfurling. You've likely read plenty of articles that were generated by GPT or similar AI models. The reason you probably didn't notice is because they aren't bad. Well, you think they're not bad, but that's because you've been weaned on the Internet of Shit (IoS) the content mills brought about, which trained us to lower our expectations when it came to information consumption.
The problem is that these AI generated articles have to get their information from somewhere in enough volume to suitably churn out new info clones cloaked in slightly more eloquent language. And where do AI training algorithms get all of this? From the IoS, of course.
If we do more math, let's assume that 10 percent of IoS-derived training data contains factual errors. As AI trains, then retrains, and retrains, those errors mount. And mount. And multiply and within a decade of retraining on bad, weird, oddly worded, and increasingly incomprehensible data, we are left with a truly IoS.
And math is super important again—and so is volume.
A single content mill operator at the scale of Western Content Lord, for instance, can use free tools to generate content as fast as human operators can plug it in with a simple promping sentence. That same team of 100 workers can enter 300 pieces per day.
They don't write it, they just ask ChatGPT. They can ask it to keyword stuff it like a mofo and generate keywords too, for that matter. Eventually, that process of ChatGPT (as one of many examples) will have API hooks to publish output directly to WordPress or whatever CMS Content Lord chooses.
When that AI to CMS platform unification is complete, so is the circle: the Internet is just talking to itself.
Was this article created by a content mill using AI?
Beat me to it.
Are they talking about those Top Ten List channels? And those ones that give DIY advice that will kill you?
Oh yikes.
Dear Author,
Remove the beam from thine own eye.
Poor Doubledumber is gonna have a stroke…
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