So what's the solution? I imagine the right one isn't specific to fan wikis. We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written. Who is building this? How will it work?
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
There's already people kinda living like this. Fentanyl is abused because of the intense euphoria the users experience. As tech improves the downsides will go away and the highs will get even more powerful.
You can still hitch a ride on a pearling lugger to the horizontal falls and shoot them with a homemade sea kayak in real life .. and as yet there's no VR / AR plugin for that in the digital world - at least not one with real whirlpool stoppers, salt water crocodiles, and warm equatorial water sharks.
> We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written.
I don't think the boundary should live at human-written or AI-written, it should just be factual.
This weekend I was playing Stalker 2 and got frustrated that the trader prices in the game seem nonsensical. I spent a lot of time trying to research the mechanic but most guides and some wikis are outright wrong. They either buy into the games marketing or just assume mechanics work as expected.
So what I did was I let Claude read through my game files. 5 minutes later I ended up with a document that very concretely explains all the factors that influence trader prices with references to the game scripts to back it up.
My point is that having AI write game wikis is fine, as long as the information is verifiably correct.
Even if you could come up with a perfect vetting process and create a site with only 100% factual content, wouldn’t the scrapers and trainers just gobble it up and make their own sites, ad-filled and ranked higher in search results and AI responses?
I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to just see an annotation, a sort of glow around the content that has verified human signatures. Or maybe we go full dark-forest and configure the browsers to only render content that has a trusted signature.
Right, for that we need different domains of trust. Like maybe my commentary on current events is trash but I can be trusted to give good plumbing advice. So people who know this about me can trust some of my content but not the rest, which causes it to be seen/hidden by the people who only trust me transitively through them.
The architects of the original web gave up on the trustworthiness problem pretty early. All we got is : "is this server lying about its name?". We're going to have to pick that problem back up and bake solutions to it into our browsers. Except instead of attestations about server names, I'll be about the content. Was it made by somebody who is known to be sloppy with AI? Or maybe they're the sort that would put out content that doesn't disclose that its secretly an ad.
People have been gossiping this sort of stuff about each other for a very long time. If were gonna have a useful web again, we'll need to find a way to scale that capability.
Maybe for high-stakes things, serious journalism or closer interactions, but most of the time in the Internet we just consume content by unknown people and we don't stop to check their trustworthiness. In the OP's context (game wikis) you're probably not going to know the people signing the wiki's content.
Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour instead of automated systems (so-called "soft security" https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ).
We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written
It needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.
I imagine with a fan wiki (or company docs in my experience) no one bothers to put the effort in. That's probably because the rewards are for writing the content, and there's absolutely no reward for checking it's correct.
I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.
I don't think there is a solution. The internet as we knew it is over, I give it 5 more years before it becomes borderline impossible to find new human-created content on it.
We can't reliably detect AI text, and they are getting better at producing plausible humanlike text (albeit still with flaws and mistakes). I do expect them to become impossible for humans to detect when the companies put effort into that (so far they've been focussed on other domains like dev or maths).
I'm afraid your dystopian future where the zone is flooded with shit and nobody can trust anything seems eminently plausible, partly because the internet was built without identity.
I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers. We'll probably need that anyway for other reasons.
It's not a trivial problem. Websites like this could require webauthn tied to a hardware identifier of their choice (like a fingerprint or faceid) - I'm not sure if webauthn provides that level of detail to providers (which method was used), and how secure that attestation is. Of course that's not going to be popular but it might be the lesser of two evils.
> I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers.
That's what surveillance-capitalism wants, but what regular people need is something which is easier to supply and less likely to be turned against them: A lesser proof of "I invested enough time/effort/money into this identity that I'll be hurt if its reputation craters".
Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human. Identity is vitally important for us, the end users interacting with each other. Far more important than it is for nation states and companies, who have always had ways to track us and care more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.
I'm not sure I share your concern about surveillance capitalism - that ship sailed long ago - you are stored in many nation-state and corporate databases under all the aliases, phone numbers, IPs you've ever used. I sincerely doubt your opsec has always been even near good enough to evade this surveillance, it's a little late to start worrying about it now, particularly when there are other concerns.
I'd be more concerned about billionaires spending on bots impersonating humans to sway elections in my local state than a nation state snooping on forum comments and linking them with something else.
Proof of identity is badly needed in order to use the online spaces we've come to know and trust, and time is running out.
Unfortunately it's worse than the problem with email, and it's also adding to the problems of email, but making it very cheap to send infinite unique and persuasive messages.
It is expensive! It's so expensive it's cannibalizing all other non AI consumers of high end chip dies, and forcing entire countries to redesign their power grids.
I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.
None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
I think fundamentally you are right. People or AI will generate artifacts of value and a system will evlove to find that value. Partially because there will likely be a financial incentive to do so.
We are no longer on a web that assumed humans first.
LLMs can shitpost like the best of us. I’ve had to point out content was AI generated so many times that its futility is apparent.
Consumers have more to consume.
A new category of producers can provide.
If the content produced is close enough to the real thing, is cheaper, then that’s enough to change consumption patterns.
You would need to identify some attribute of content that cannot be replicated at scale, for the old system to persist.
Currently the average output of an LLM matches the average output of an online conversation. It’s only when it’s pushed or put in front of an expert in a domain that its weaknesses are apparent.
Unless everyone becomes an expert, I’ll output is a good enough substitute.
I know the steel made before this particular year is look after because was not affected or build during periods of radiation, and that gives it qualities sought after.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
I believe someone created a website specifically for that purpose with regards to LLMs: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ (not mine, nor can I remember who shared it on HN)
Are you willing to share that? I didn't have the space at the time to download the entirety of Wikipedia (though I think I have an old copy of Wikipedia sans images floating around somewhere).
It does not really matter if they give a shit or not. What matters is that they virtue signal it and thus propagate it by making others to do the same...
Wait until you have to audit your average codebase post-AI.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
There are at least different kinds of messes, and the new kind may offer different challenges which may eventually require different (easier? harder? invented-yet?) techniques than the ones we're used-to.
The problem I'm already having with LLMs (in miniature) is code/comments/docs where I don't know whether it's someone's intent or whether its un-reviewed LLM babble. That creates a continual stumbling block for figuring out whether the thing should be the way it is, or whether I'm looking at an unusually-coherent error.
Take the exact same messy pile of bytes but promise: "Everything in this made sense to a human at some point in the process", and that changes how one approaches the problem.
Before code would be intentionally a certain way, done as a known compromise that's less than ideal, or the developer flubbed in some way. Using commit comments and other surrounding details you might be able to identify which in many cases which could guide your next steps. I don't think you can do that with an LLM's output.
So this is why we are seeing all these CVE's and vulnerability disclosures? Because of the careful curation? Feels to me it is more like ignorance is bliss.
Those bugs (assuming validity) were there in spite of the careful curation. People tend to do what they can to the best of their abilities. Before compilers did much in terms of static checking a lot more errors made it into production than today. Better tools -> better code.
Whether AI written code is going to be better in the longer term remains to be seen. With what I've looked at so far I'm not super optimistic about this.
It was just 5 minutes ago that I prevented a Claude PR from introducing an incredibly obvious RCE bug into a codebase I maintain. The LLMs are no better than the people driving them. But those people spew out more code than ever before.
I've seen a couple of these in search results while looking for info about more niche games and at first I thought they were fan made but like the article mentions they're not actually wikis, nor do they contain accurate information.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
I think there are people who just assume there's money to be made if you're pushing the sloppified tomorrow hard, and no time to stop and think about why.
Maybe there are other people selling the tools, who try to convince the former people that what they're doing is smart and profit will roll in any day now.
Anyway it would be a mistake to think something is profitable just because someone bets on it.
In this new era it is almost zero effort to stand up a convincing website on any topic, which is mostly correct, but riddled with small confabulations and errors. It can take typing one sentence (even with grammatical errors) to do so, the bar is now zero for creating plausible 'content' and flooding the internet with it. As the article notes bad actors, but also people who have good intentions, are flooding the zone with slop.
If it was all clearly completely incorrect, it wouldn't be such a huge problem, but it is plausible and hard for humans to detect in a short time unless it is long form text.
Even search providers are giving us this new kind of generated result at the top of their results, which most people will be using blindly to verify answers. So it's turtles all the way down.
If you're not a domain expert you have no idea which things are right and which are wrong so it's very hard to determine the truth or trust results.
To top all that, LLMs are being trained on this new untrustworthy data without differentiating it from older data, and trained by other LLM instances in a sort of recursive loop to improve performance on very narrow goals. What could possibly go wrong!
I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.
For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.
On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.
On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.
YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.
Have you tried going to a library or a bookstore? Or even Amazon, since the return policy is excellent. Books are still a reliable resource for anything that hasn’t changed in the last 5 years (since there will be a pre-LLM text). Fortunately that includes loads of DIY tasks.
Don’t get me started on Google’s propensity to show a full page of unwanted shopping results now without any way to show websites unless you turn verbatim on. “Brand picks” what garbage.
Thank you for mentioning DDG - I don’t know what it is about their search algos but whenever I tried switching I found I got far less helpful results compared to Google. Like at least half the first results were total slop fest unusable.
DDG has become so unusable because of AI word vomit sites that I'm finally seriously considering the paid search engine that HN loves... Kagi, I think?
On the other hand, frontier LLMs are extremely good at getting super accurate info from games. They’ll happily disassemble the actual game binary to get to the bottom of certain game mechanics, including ones not obvious in the game itself, without even an explicit prompt to do so; I can merely ask questions about certain mechanics. That’s way better than often guessed (and guessed wrong) mechanics commonly found in game wikis. I’ve observed this over and over again when vibe coding some helper tools for some games I’m playing; I used to build these for wider communities and got some recognition for them, now I can do what I used to finish in 100 hours in like half an hour of prompting. I no longer share them though.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
I fully agree! I have done a few game decomps and some deep RE passes on other games, and that uncovers a lot of details that game wikis/discords/forums get wrong or just don't mention, going as deep as undocumented mechanics that change the online gameplay. It's only a matter of having the LLMs properly reverse engineer the games instead of relying on other players' info, lossy wikis, or game manuals.
By the way, since fandom and fextralife were already such a huge blight on the concept of wiki, for a while people have been making solutions that might incidentally also help with AI slop wikis. For instance, https://getindie.wiki/
LLMs have created a new problem. Previously it was a lot of effort to create a bad wiki with unreliable information that looked plausible. Now you can generate one with thousands of pages and correct grammar and spelling (or not if you prefer) in an instant.
So what's the solution? I imagine the right one isn't specific to fan wikis. We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written. Who is building this? How will it work?
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1395152040389713922
FYI, that tweet is not visible without an X account. You may want to consider an alternative link or at least a description of what's about.
replace x. with tw1tter.
That comic is considered sensitive? By whom? The AI overlords?
That link prompts for a signup.
god that comic hits so hard. what a horrible world we are building.
There's already people kinda living like this. Fentanyl is abused because of the intense euphoria the users experience. As tech improves the downsides will go away and the highs will get even more powerful.
You can still hitch a ride on a pearling lugger to the horizontal falls and shoot them with a homemade sea kayak in real life .. and as yet there's no VR / AR plugin for that in the digital world - at least not one with real whirlpool stoppers, salt water crocodiles, and warm equatorial water sharks.
> We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written.
I don't think the boundary should live at human-written or AI-written, it should just be factual.
This weekend I was playing Stalker 2 and got frustrated that the trader prices in the game seem nonsensical. I spent a lot of time trying to research the mechanic but most guides and some wikis are outright wrong. They either buy into the games marketing or just assume mechanics work as expected.
So what I did was I let Claude read through my game files. 5 minutes later I ended up with a document that very concretely explains all the factors that influence trader prices with references to the game scripts to back it up.
My point is that having AI write game wikis is fine, as long as the information is verifiably correct.
This story seems to be missing the part where someone verified any of the document is correct.
Even if you could come up with a perfect vetting process and create a site with only 100% factual content, wouldn’t the scrapers and trainers just gobble it up and make their own sites, ad-filled and ranked higher in search results and AI responses?
Maybe but at least we fans who know would know…
In some ways that’s the web, everyone posts their stuff. Or at least it was.
I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to just see an annotation, a sort of glow around the content that has verified human signatures. Or maybe we go full dark-forest and configure the browsers to only render content that has a trusted signature.
The problem is that the majority of the time, the one ultimately trying to dupe you is not the AI model, but the person who handles it.
In other words, signatures don't address the fact that a human can ask an AI model for content and then sign it to pass it as their own.
Right, for that we need different domains of trust. Like maybe my commentary on current events is trash but I can be trusted to give good plumbing advice. So people who know this about me can trust some of my content but not the rest, which causes it to be seen/hidden by the people who only trust me transitively through them.
The architects of the original web gave up on the trustworthiness problem pretty early. All we got is : "is this server lying about its name?". We're going to have to pick that problem back up and bake solutions to it into our browsers. Except instead of attestations about server names, I'll be about the content. Was it made by somebody who is known to be sloppy with AI? Or maybe they're the sort that would put out content that doesn't disclose that its secretly an ad.
People have been gossiping this sort of stuff about each other for a very long time. If were gonna have a useful web again, we'll need to find a way to scale that capability.
Isn't that an enormous risk though? As soon as such abuse becomes known, that individual will never be trusted again.
Maybe for high-stakes things, serious journalism or closer interactions, but most of the time in the Internet we just consume content by unknown people and we don't stop to check their trustworthiness. In the OP's context (game wikis) you're probably not going to know the people signing the wiki's content.
unfortunately this would lead to more innocents getting coerced into various schemes, or simply their signature stolen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
https://xkcd.com/538/
[bell ring] What is PGP?
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Wikipedia is mostly going in the direction of just having very strict rules enforced via human review. If you get caught using LLMs and refuse to stop, you get banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_wit...
I think its working so far.
Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour instead of automated systems (so-called "soft security" https://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ).
We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written
It needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.
I imagine with a fan wiki (or company docs in my experience) no one bothers to put the effort in. That's probably because the rewards are for writing the content, and there's absolutely no reward for checking it's correct.
I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.
I don't think there is a solution. The internet as we knew it is over, I give it 5 more years before it becomes borderline impossible to find new human-created content on it.
Its really just the web that has this problem. The internet is OK, and we can build a new web for it.
>a new web for it.
Incentives will make sure that this new web will become the old one given enough time.
Instant information was always a mistake. I hope we will go back to libraries. Time has come to preserve the paper books.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthro...
We can't reliably detect AI text, and they are getting better at producing plausible humanlike text (albeit still with flaws and mistakes). I do expect them to become impossible for humans to detect when the companies put effort into that (so far they've been focussed on other domains like dev or maths).
I'm afraid your dystopian future where the zone is flooded with shit and nobody can trust anything seems eminently plausible, partly because the internet was built without identity.
I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers. We'll probably need that anyway for other reasons.
It's not a trivial problem. Websites like this could require webauthn tied to a hardware identifier of their choice (like a fingerprint or faceid) - I'm not sure if webauthn provides that level of detail to providers (which method was used), and how secure that attestation is. Of course that's not going to be popular but it might be the lesser of two evils.
> I think to solve this you'd have to have strong proofs of identity locked to biometric identifiers.
That's what surveillance-capitalism wants, but what regular people need is something which is easier to supply and less likely to be turned against them: A lesser proof of "I invested enough time/effort/money into this identity that I'll be hurt if its reputation craters".
Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human. Identity is vitally important for us, the end users interacting with each other. Far more important than it is for nation states and companies, who have always had ways to track us and care more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.
I'm not sure I share your concern about surveillance capitalism - that ship sailed long ago - you are stored in many nation-state and corporate databases under all the aliases, phone numbers, IPs you've ever used. I sincerely doubt your opsec has always been even near good enough to evade this surveillance, it's a little late to start worrying about it now, particularly when there are other concerns.
I'd be more concerned about billionaires spending on bots impersonating humans to sway elections in my local state than a nation state snooping on forum comments and linking them with something else.
Proof of identity is badly needed in order to use the online spaces we've come to know and trust, and time is running out.
Well, surveillance capitalism now has a killer app.
Utilizing terms like surveillance capitalism, doesn’t serve as a useful deterrent, because the underlying system has changed.
Previously Bots were piloted to be marginally effective at appearing to be normal users. With LLMs, that’s basically out of the window.
At this point your false positive detection rate is going to start hitting human users.
Users are also going to accept AI content. Simply because their feeds are going to provide it to them.
It’s cheap, and it achieves the same dopamine hits that human interaction will achieve.
Unless you are knowledgeable in a field, you wouldn’t be able to make out if something is off.
The most likely positive outcome is we see bots that take on bridging roles in conversations.
The question I would ask is why would and who would, pay to verify a user is human ?
Make the use of AI expensive. This is the same problem we have with email
Unfortunately it's worse than the problem with email, and it's also adding to the problems of email, but making it very cheap to send infinite unique and persuasive messages.
It is expensive! It's so expensive it's cannibalizing all other non AI consumers of high end chip dies, and forcing entire countries to redesign their power grids.
Expensive for the user. Right now you can easily use AI without paying anything
I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.
Case in point: the proliferation of furcons.
Scientific articles: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-m... (although this is an old one)
None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
I mean I think with the wiki example.. it likely will be "Atra play the game and fix any information that isn't correct" or "read the game files and correct the inforamtion. That is assuming the person wants accurate information.
I think fundamentally you are right. People or AI will generate artifacts of value and a system will evlove to find that value. Partially because there will likely be a financial incentive to do so.
Yes.
We are no longer on a web that assumed humans first.
LLMs can shitpost like the best of us. I’ve had to point out content was AI generated so many times that its futility is apparent.
Consumers have more to consume.
A new category of producers can provide.
If the content produced is close enough to the real thing, is cheaper, then that’s enough to change consumption patterns.
You would need to identify some attribute of content that cannot be replicated at scale, for the old system to persist.
Currently the average output of an LLM matches the average output of an online conversation. It’s only when it’s pushed or put in front of an expert in a domain that its weaknesses are apparent.
Unless everyone becomes an expert, I’ll output is a good enough substitute.
> So what's the solution?
There is no solution (though there will be plenty of grifters trying to sell one).
The open internet we currently know will be lost to mountains of slop just like usenet and email were even prior to the AI era.
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I know the steel made before this particular year is look after because was not affected or build during periods of radiation, and that gives it qualities sought after.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
In case anyone isn't familiar with that type of steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
Similarly, radioactive signatures are used to identify modern forgeries of classic oil paintings!
I believe someone created a website specifically for that purpose with regards to LLMs: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ (not mine, nor can I remember who shared it on HN)
And of course they had to use high-background steel to build this site.
You know it’s not gonna be updated, because it was created on a whim and the author has already moved onto 79 other projects since.
Are you willing to share that? I didn't have the space at the time to download the entirety of Wikipedia (though I think I have an old copy of Wikipedia sans images floating around somewhere).
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corporations do not and can not give a shit about wokeness or grievances
It does not really matter if they give a shit or not. What matters is that they virtue signal it and thus propagate it by making others to do the same...
So now it is grass root movement? Gamers are asking for more woke games, and sales are sky rocketing...
Wait until you have to audit your average codebase post-AI.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
I’m not sure I’d call most enterprise code repositories, carefully curated. I think lava flow is way more standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)
There are at least different kinds of messes, and the new kind may offer different challenges which may eventually require different (easier? harder? invented-yet?) techniques than the ones we're used-to.
The problem I'm already having with LLMs (in miniature) is code/comments/docs where I don't know whether it's someone's intent or whether its un-reviewed LLM babble. That creates a continual stumbling block for figuring out whether the thing should be the way it is, or whether I'm looking at an unusually-coherent error.
Take the exact same messy pile of bytes but promise: "Everything in this made sense to a human at some point in the process", and that changes how one approaches the problem.
Before code would be intentionally a certain way, done as a known compromise that's less than ideal, or the developer flubbed in some way. Using commit comments and other surrounding details you might be able to identify which in many cases which could guide your next steps. I don't think you can do that with an LLM's output.
So this is why we are seeing all these CVE's and vulnerability disclosures? Because of the careful curation? Feels to me it is more like ignorance is bliss.
Those bugs (assuming validity) were there in spite of the careful curation. People tend to do what they can to the best of their abilities. Before compilers did much in terms of static checking a lot more errors made it into production than today. Better tools -> better code.
Whether AI written code is going to be better in the longer term remains to be seen. With what I've looked at so far I'm not super optimistic about this.
LLMs reliably avoid whole categories of bugs, some of them the most serious offenders in terms of impact.
To me it has become clear that LLMs will, on average, improve the code quality by a lot.
It was just 5 minutes ago that I prevented a Claude PR from introducing an incredibly obvious RCE bug into a codebase I maintain. The LLMs are no better than the people driving them. But those people spew out more code than ever before.
Better than what? 99% of stuff produced by humans is a garbage. Arguing about "abilities" or compilers does not change that.
Even here we see the AI bit rot - we're getting CVE's and vulnerability disclosures for imaginary issues.
Post-AI?
I've seen a couple of these in search results while looking for info about more niche games and at first I thought they were fan made but like the article mentions they're not actually wikis, nor do they contain accurate information.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
I think there are people who just assume there's money to be made if you're pushing the sloppified tomorrow hard, and no time to stop and think about why.
Maybe there are other people selling the tools, who try to convince the former people that what they're doing is smart and profit will roll in any day now.
Anyway it would be a mistake to think something is profitable just because someone bets on it.
In this new era it is almost zero effort to stand up a convincing website on any topic, which is mostly correct, but riddled with small confabulations and errors. It can take typing one sentence (even with grammatical errors) to do so, the bar is now zero for creating plausible 'content' and flooding the internet with it. As the article notes bad actors, but also people who have good intentions, are flooding the zone with slop.
If it was all clearly completely incorrect, it wouldn't be such a huge problem, but it is plausible and hard for humans to detect in a short time unless it is long form text.
Even search providers are giving us this new kind of generated result at the top of their results, which most people will be using blindly to verify answers. So it's turtles all the way down.
If you're not a domain expert you have no idea which things are right and which are wrong so it's very hard to determine the truth or trust results.
To top all that, LLMs are being trained on this new untrustworthy data without differentiating it from older data, and trained by other LLM instances in a sort of recursive loop to improve performance on very narrow goals. What could possibly go wrong!
I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.
For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.
On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.
On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.
YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.
Have you tried going to a library or a bookstore? Or even Amazon, since the return policy is excellent. Books are still a reliable resource for anything that hasn’t changed in the last 5 years (since there will be a pre-LLM text). Fortunately that includes loads of DIY tasks.
Don’t get me started on Google’s propensity to show a full page of unwanted shopping results now without any way to show websites unless you turn verbatim on. “Brand picks” what garbage.
Actually, yes! Books are great - although building code has changed a surprising amount in the last 10 or 15 years.
Thank you for mentioning DDG - I don’t know what it is about their search algos but whenever I tried switching I found I got far less helpful results compared to Google. Like at least half the first results were total slop fest unusable.
DDG has become so unusable because of AI word vomit sites that I'm finally seriously considering the paid search engine that HN loves... Kagi, I think?
On the other hand, frontier LLMs are extremely good at getting super accurate info from games. They’ll happily disassemble the actual game binary to get to the bottom of certain game mechanics, including ones not obvious in the game itself, without even an explicit prompt to do so; I can merely ask questions about certain mechanics. That’s way better than often guessed (and guessed wrong) mechanics commonly found in game wikis. I’ve observed this over and over again when vibe coding some helper tools for some games I’m playing; I used to build these for wider communities and got some recognition for them, now I can do what I used to finish in 100 hours in like half an hour of prompting. I no longer share them though.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
I fully agree! I have done a few game decomps and some deep RE passes on other games, and that uncovers a lot of details that game wikis/discords/forums get wrong or just don't mention, going as deep as undocumented mechanics that change the online gameplay. It's only a matter of having the LLMs properly reverse engineer the games instead of relying on other players' info, lossy wikis, or game manuals.
I've pulled loot spawn formulas this way a couple of times, stuff that Reddit had been debating for years and still getting wrong
By the way, since fandom and fextralife were already such a huge blight on the concept of wiki, for a while people have been making solutions that might incidentally also help with AI slop wikis. For instance, https://getindie.wiki/
Fandom (ex-Wikia) has been a dumpster fire since day one.
As witness the choice to squat on the name "Fandom" when they were notoriously averse to treating fandoms reasonably.
fan-Dom
Don't forget f*xtralife
> Attempts to reach GameDB for comment via their public contact email resulted in an error, stating "the remote server is misconfigured".
this is such an emblematic thing for the slop peddlers
well it's because the AIs are trained on what they find online. And what they find online is now ai generated bullshit.
> ... I put the question into Google and clicked the first result: the Nighthawks Wiki.
The problem here is Google. Bad websites have always been around.
LLMs have created a new problem. Previously it was a lot of effort to create a bad wiki with unreliable information that looked plausible. Now you can generate one with thousands of pages and correct grammar and spelling (or not if you prefer) in an instant.
People talk about their being a market for google without the AI features, but i think the real market would be google that filters out slop results.
Bonus points for also filtering out paywalls.
I'm tired of search results being useless. The signal to noise ratio on internet search is much worse now a days.
oh no, now gamers might have to actually play the game
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