LLMs are here with us now. The other day I was doing some web searching, I had seen some worms I didn’t recognize and was trying to determine if they were like parasites or harmless or whatever. My first couple of searches turned up nothing but AI slop.
Slop is a term that’s come to mean that sort of generic, nonsensical, utterly unhelpful wall of text commonly generated by freebie LLMs like ChatGPT. Websites are being generated based on commonly searched terms and then filled with ads so that this slop creeps into web results and makes the owners of these, probably automatically generated websites a little money for each ad you see or click.
I don’t know what to do about it yet, but basically all search engines have become useless for actually finding genuine content that has any meaning or truth to it. It feels kind of like we’ve been transported back to the 90s, when content was hard to find and people made actual personal websites to share information.
Going forward, I think I’m going to take control of my search bar.
More to come…