AI articles
2023-10-06
Recently I've started seeing articles which about half way through I realize were written by AI. The worst part is a lot of them tend to be guides, and present completely false information. Now, I may not write good articles myself, but using AI to write articles just seems despicable.
When I click on an article saying "How to do x", I expect the author to have at least a tiny idea of what x is. Despite great advancements in machine learning recently, machines still don't learn. To quote Sara Brown, "Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence, which is broadly defined as the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior." There's nothing intelligent about it. In ML the computer sees all the data abstractly, finding the best general one-fits-all solution to everything it's presented, and while this is good for "[imitating] human behavior", it means the machine has no idea of what x is.
There are infinite reasons why someone might write (or I suppose a more fitting word now, publish) an article: for fun, passion, insanity, but the most common one is definitely money. I think this claim can be supported by the hundreds of ads that appear when you click on any of the top 100 sites listed after googling a single thing. Anyways, this means when you (typically) click on an article, you agree to offer up some of your time (ad revenue) in exchange for information. While AI can provide correct information, there's no guaranty that any of it is remotely correct, especially when it comes to specific information. By creating the article with AI, the "author" here is shorting you on the deal.
It's honestly more annoying if the information is a bit correct (or at least appears a bit correct) as it leads you on. A few days ago I was reading an article on installing Windows 95 and didn't realize till I was half way down the page that it was AI generated. It's astonishing how many niche (and/or insane) topics can fall under the eye of these things. They must be generating the prompts for these articles with AI as well.
What happened to creating something of quality, something that someone could be somewhat proud of? These sites, they're practically scams. They profit off providing nothing. Even some of the nullist things on the internet, TikTok meme pages for instance, have some effort put into them. Along with that, they still do provide a service that some people want. But who, who wants to read AI generated articles (
