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Fuck AI @lemmy.world

sauerkrautsaul @lemmus.org

2d ago

Fucking seriously ruining the general web in terms of looking up information.

Look at this shit (first paragraph of body of article):

"Automatic watches are admired for their intricate mechanics and timeless appeal, but even the finest timepieces can sometimes run fast or slow. If you’ve noticed your automatic watch gaining or losing time, you’re not."

First search result on DDG. Thank you, automatic watch expert and real person Hnin Oo Thazin. We may need a whole ass new internet.

https://mtscwatch.com/blog/why-your-automatic-watch-runs-fast-or-slow-and-how-to-fix-it

65 comments

This existed before LLMs grew popular. It’s sweatshop written filler, to game Google’s algorithm since it ranks long answers higher.
Unfortunately, this SEO “style” with giant padded answers may be why newer LLMs write the way they do, as they were trained on it.
- yeah that all makes sense
  It is an interesting question why explanatory and instruction-type websites all seem similar. In this article we will take a deep dive on how this came to be the case.
I read an interesting analogy recently:
Imagine the world before cars. Now imagine an American company suddenly releasing 100 billion cars all over the world for everyone to drive. There are no roads, signs, lights, rules, laws or pedestrian crossings.
That's kind of the situation with AI now.
Whenever I need to look up general information, I filter to only show pages from before 2022. It removes the AI trash instantly.
Most general topics haven't changed appreciably in the past 3 years.
- thats great, the internet ended as a way to research a topic 3 years ago :(
  
  Books are being written with AI. Legislation is being written with AI. Lawyer arguments are being written with AI. Scholarly research is being written with AI.
  Pretty sure it's not just the internet.
- I imagine a future where children speak of the "before times" and how when there was information on a thing called "paper" and how it wasn't created by slop generators.
It was happening well before AI with shitty content-scraping “solution” sites. Some even put [SOLVED] in the page title. AI is just a compounding problem.
- Yes, and AI was trained on all of that garbage. It's like they took all the problems we had before and bred them together.
- Why your watch runs slow (2025 updated)
- while I dislike that youre asking we constrict our collective digital sphincter in order to take less of a massive diarrhea shit on everything that AI is and represents, you've got a point
Super ironic how unaware you are.
You're ruining lemmy by posting screenshots of headlines. GET OUT.
- l linked to the article. I also copied some of the copy as well. I posed a screen shot of the part that I wanted to share, meaning the visual bit that I intended other people to see as part of my post.
  I looked at your comments, and not all, but in many of them you just kinda insult people and insinuate that you're smarter than everyone else. If you want to spend your time doing that, thats your prerogative and everything of course, but I'd ask you to ask yourself if anyone is going to take the points you're making when you come off like a prick
- its not a headline my guy, its a slop farm website posing as a blog. whats your deal?
- GeT oOouUt
- Because it unnecessarily increases hosting costs which may put the community in peril?
  
  Is that why university students shouldn't be using AI?
- Those names sound plausible in the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy
  
  and now the comment is deleted. sehr conspiracy feely
Reported to SlopStop.
As someone who actually knows a thing or two about automatic watches, I decided to give it a read. While the info is actually not as awful as I thought (no hallucinations surprisingly), I still would not recommend it as a guide, even if it were written by a human. Especially this part:
2. Demagnetize:
\ If your watch suddenly starts running fast, have it demagnetized.
While, yes, a magnetized movement will cause it to suddenly run fast, demagnetizing a movement isn’t completely harmless. If you’re wrong and the movement isn’t magnetized and instead a different type of damage, attempting to demagnetize it will actually magnetize it, and the combination of a magnetized movement plus whatever other damage caused the movement to run fast suddenly could be far worse. I think an added disclaimer would be helpful here. There are ways to test if a movement is magnetized, that should be mentioned. Blanket recommending demagnetizing a movement without a disclaimer is dangerous. I know this is written by AI and not a human but that part really bugged me.
- Considering you gave the article a high factuality rating, may it be supervised AI output?
  
  I mean, it’s still missing a bunch of important info, it’s just that it’s not saying anything incorrect necessarily. In general anyway I’d just always steer clear of LLMs though regardless of the situation.
- well thats the thing, its crap written by an LLM. I read the first paragraph then went and found an article written by a person, but Id say a good percentage of people would read the whole damn thing and take it as fact.
  personally ive always objected to the term hallucination for these LLMs fucking up. its not hallucinating, its shitty computer code outputting shitty output
  for what its worth, I just needed to manually wind my watch a bunch. I just had it bequeathed to me and didnt know anything about them. keeping time now of course
As opposed to a manual watch that I have to advance every second?
(yes yes I'm sure they're referring to a watch you don't have to wind but like, who has ever referred to anything as an "automatic watch"?)
- Everybody says automatic watch. Like literally everyone from common consumers straight down the line to horologists.
- This is to differentiate watches you have to wind. It's automatic winding rather than manual winding. It's lingo that has stuck around since watches became a common item. All watches were manual winding at first. Then the automatic winding watches came out. Then the quartz battery. We still have all these types of watches but to differentiate they're called quartz, automatic, manual.
- yeah so thats just what they're called. its the parlance for a watch that winds itself. you used to have to wind them every day of course, then these came along and "automatic winding watch", shortened to "automatic" has always been the term industry and marketing have used. sometimes they are called self-winding, but Ive heard "automatic" nearly every time. there's also quartz movement, which uses a battery
I don't think we can overestimate the impact this "knowledge collapse" will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn't it....
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don't care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
- This is why I hasted my self hosted adventure. I have to selfhost before everything go to crap
  
  And the craziest thing, is that I got ads in my servers logs. Some company think it is a good thing to advertise in http headers and cookies while scanning all ports
- and "sobering" is literally the last fucking thing I need to be happening to me in 2025
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
- Unfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
  
  Who doesn’t love a bit of Botulism? Really helps with that post-holiday diet.
  
  Can't speak for canning, but for the recipes in particular, I was really shocked at the state of things the first time I looked at a recipe on an English website (not my first language).
  I only look at recipes in my native language, partly because of the fact that this bullshit is not yet generalised and a fair few website have them still in a good format.
  If that's not the case for you, maybe translating a foreign recipe would help? Don't know how long for though...
Between SEO garbage and AI slop the internet is fucked. As a 42 year old dude who fell in love with the internet and programming in the late 90's and made a good living at making websites up until about 5 years ago it really hurts. Nothing is left of what I loved about it. The giant conglomocorps have taken everything over and turned it all to shit. Oh well... Old man shakes fist at sky I guess...
- No no no no. We are legion. You are not alone. Let them have it. Here, have some popcorn while we watch our ship of Theseus go down in flames. Beautiful isn't it. Now, what would you like to build next? Imagine the possibilities!
  Same age, same story, same feeling. But somehow, I think we should cheer each others up.
  
  Can I join? I can't help with programming but I can bring pictures of cats...
  
  I am also this age feeling this exact way. We can start a club.
- ah, I think we just need to adapt. there has always been counter culture, and every opportunity to suck any culturally relevant thing dry will happen, as you've observed. so, new spaces need to be cultivated ya know? I think lemmy is one of em to a certain extent, although it is already a little under siege
We may need a whole ass new internet.
I'd be down if we left the clearweb to the corpos and moved all the human interaction to maybe something like Usenet or I2P.
I would say I'd even be down to learn Gopher protocol, but I looked up their website and they have their own memecoin, so I'm hesitant based off that alone. Even if they say it has no intrinsic value.
- https://geminiprotocol.net/ (has nothing to do whatsoever, and predates, the Google AI product with the same name)
  Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.
- You don’t think they wouldn’t ruin that too if that was by some miracle where all the human capital went?
  Their plan is to make your internet useless and your PC unaffordable so you have to subscribe to their AI and ask it everything; so they can know everything about you and get ahead of stories that make them look bad, from time to time maybe even kill people.
  You will own nothing, and they will force you to like it.
- perhaps we can just make Otherworld Wide Web and still use http and everything but its https://oww.funwebpage.net/ NO DUMB CORPO CRAPPE ALLOWED
We need a publicly funded and democratically controlled search engine. As long as there's a profit motive, enshitification will follow.
- I've long said we need a return to how search engines worked pre-google. In the mid-90s, sites like Altavista and Yahoo! made site owners add their sites manually, and you had to choose what category to put them in, and they'd be vetted by a human to make sure it was what it said it was.
- ok lets do it. do you know anything about compuders?
  
  "Publicly funded" as in government funded, like the Post Office.
  ... in fact, in the US it should literally be run by the Post Office.
Why LLMs exist and how to delete them?
So I have noticed a new trend of websites hitting the top of the search results on duck duck go.
The website is always 3 names in a row or more like 3 random words, pretending to a be a blog writing about something.
Then it is usually a bullshit paragraph and then a bunch of seemingly unrelated affiliate links because it is just grabbing anything barely related to what you originally searched for.
Seriously hampered my ability to find out anything about the bread maker I was looking at other than the cost of replacement parts.
Search engines have been made a joke.
That article is remarkably concise though. I usually get those that start at Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, eventually reach the invention of watches and never get to the point of automatic watches and their issues (or whatever specific problem I searched for).
Ironically enough using AI for searching actually spares me wading through slop at the moment.
- I think your expectations have been ruined by AI sloup already if you think that is concise. although to be fair you did not define your relative threshold for the definition/conditions of remarkable lol
  
  You should read past my 1st sentence. You missed the 2nd:
  I usually get those that start at Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, eventually reach the invention of watches and never get to the point of automatic watches and their issues (or whatever specific problem I searched for).
  I meant that article is remarkably concise FOR AI SLOP.
I’ve said it before, but a whitelist search engine would be preferable for information. Immediately disregarding any website created after 2023 seems like a decent start.
This is one of the reasons I switched to Startpage and asked it to hide any AI results.
- will investigate

65 comments