There are many issues around AI - including how we are allowing chat bots to do all the work for us:
Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part one: the dangers of chatgpt
It's leading to very bad quality stuff:
GPT-4 is getting worse and worse every single update - ChatGPT - OpenAI Developer Forum
Why is ChatGPT getting from bad to worst? - ChatGPT - OpenAI Developer Forum
And not only the open-source people are saying this:
Researchers Find That OpenAI ChatGPT Quality Has Worsened
In particular, there are growing concerns for the quality of what's being produced online:
ChatGPT vs Google Search: Why Google is not in trouble…yet! | by David Bartram - Shaw | Medium
Although it's been pointed out that things weren't great before:
Chat GPT is the birth of the real Web 3.0, and it's not going to be fun | Hacker News
But it looks as though it's going to get worse:
The danger of incorrect, but plausible looking content is that it can easily be mistaken for the truth. This is particularly concerning in our time, the age of the internet, where information is easily accessible and can be shared with a large audience in an extremely short amount of time. If incorrect information is shared and believed to be true, it can have serious consequences.ChatGPT Could Destroy The Internet As We Know It | by Rubén Romero | Predict | Medium
Let's look at recipies - and the ending to an excellent article by James Ball in the New European:
The issue, discovered by the writer Zoah Hedges-Stocks, is that a lot of recipe content on the internet is now written by low-quality bots that churn out any old regurgitated crap. What she had noticed was that alongside posts comparing the process of making fudge to making toffee, there were also posts comparing the process of fudge making to making “scrimgeour”, another apparent Scottish treat of which she had never heard.
What had happened was that AI had confused the use of the word “fudge” in different contexts – “Cornelius Fudge” is the name of the minister of magic in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, until he is replaced by the more malign “Rufus Scrimgeour”. There is no candy product called “scrimgeour”, but shoddy AIs collapsed the context gap and generated nonsense – now replicated across numerous sites (and referenced here, too). Other examples abound – X user Will Rayner noted that when looking up the weather recently he had seen errant sentences referring to characters from The Hunger Games and the video game Baldur’s Gate 3, both called “Gale”.
By far the most entertaining to date came from Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who had to apologise to a US court after citing non-existent cases that had been found for him (and not checked at all) by an AI assistant. It is generally bad form to do that in court.
Current generations of AI are already “trained”, and they were trained on internet content that is pre-AI. But keeping future generations of AI products current – and updating their features – will rely on scraping the internet as it is now.
The problem is that a growing share of the internet is either polluted by the lowest-quality AI content, and then in turn further confused by articles like this one (of which I predict there will be many more in years to come) trying to explain the mess, but strengthening the associations between the misleading words as we do.
That has the potential for a very dangerous cycle, in which ever-degrading inputs mean that AI’s outputs degrade even as the technology gets more clever, leading to a spiral of ever-worse content on the internet (a process dubbed “enshittification” by Cory Doctorow) and eventually the joy and creativity of the internet reduced to an algorithmic grey goo – information reduced to a mulch of wasted words.
Today it’s fudge and Harry Potter. It will be affecting news content in the very near future, if it isn’t already.
No one’s quite sure how significant a risk the grey goo outcome is, and there are no certain plans to prevent it. Media companies need to make sure we’re looking beyond our own backyards – as if we’re not, we might miss the disaster that takes us all out.
This is how the internet ends - The New European
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