Which is also a good filter for web searches to exclude a lot of garbage results (if the specific search makes sense for non-recent results)

Except many search engines have a recency bias.

A sane default previously; as news changes and the status quo also, but it makes you even more likely to encounter slop now.

Not sure how that changes the fact that you can filter by date range in searches where you don't actually need anything recent?

I think we are discussing the wrong problem here. I have no solution to offer, but I think the problem is not so much generated content, but the surroundings in which it can thrive and become the content you see everywhere.

If we hadn't removed the gatekeepers everywhere (and I know there are problems with them, too), then all that technology would not be able to do much harm.

It might also have to do with incentives. The incentives in our economy are not to help and advance society, the invisible hand nonwithstanding.

Why stop with traditionally published works? Before dead-internet-day, very-nearly all forms of writing were guaranteed to be hand crafted, organic, and made with 100% Natural Intelligence.

The artificial stuff often has an odd taste, but boy it sure is quick and convenient.

Don't you remember the endless SEO spam that swamped the Net even before GPT, allegedly written by real humans?

You joke, but I bet every person in this forum, when presented the choice between a bot-filled forum and a guaranteed human-only* forum, they'd go with the latter.

* this is a hypothetical scenario. I don't know any guaranteed human-only digital forums.

I converse enough with LLMs for research at this point where I feel I have a good enough structure to hop on/off them to primary sources and stuff, so I don't get annoyed with them too easily.

Whereas I haven't seriously reflected on my social media consumption habits for over 15 years, and over the years I'm getting more and more annoyed at social media.

Not to be a bit misanthropic, but there's something seriously wrong with my social media usage, especially when I know there's a real human on the other side, combined with ever increasing annoyance towards commenters and just the feelings I get after reading social media.

It may be dopamine / self-help related, but no actually, I think all of that is part of the issue (discovered that in high school when it was taking off). Something about the way I'm fundamentally interacting with the medium seems so horrible and icky the more I mature.

I agree with you, but as to your addendum:

Niche hobbyist forums are still safe, for now. There's just not enough commercial interest in petroleum lantern restoration to make it worth anyone's time to poison this particular well.

Even some larger niche hobbies like the saltwater aquarium community seemspretty safe for now (though it also helps that many forums have members who visit each other to trade corals and admire each others tanks).

On the contrary! The dead-day theorem established earlier states that an 11/22 date filter is a necessary condition for verifiable human-only content, when filtered by content-creation date.

A weaker theorem can be postulated that any such filter provides a second order sufficient condition.

This means we can filter content by account creation date, for example, by hiding all posts and comments from accounts created after the digital death event. This won’t always guarantee human-only content but certainly more than otherwise.

But then we wouldn’t be having this most definitively human-to-human conversation, right?

It's not the launch of GPT, but probably about 4 or 4o that it really became solid. I also don't think video is there just yet, at least for video over 10 seconds.

Is it "solid" if people can read it and instantly know it's generated content?

No. But you can easily make and post content that is not easily detectable as generated.

You only notice plastic surgery when it's bad, but that doesn't mean all plastic surgery looks bad...

Who's "people"? The bottom X% (40%?) of the population is already falling for AI slop video scams, but before that, they were also falling for pig butchering and nigerian prince scams, so the "average" person benchmark has already been passed for text, photos, videos, etc. For more astute consumers, video isn't there yet.

There's also the question of whether people are even trying to disguise AI content, and how effective that disguise is. Are you or I missing the AI-generated text that just has a veneer of disguise on it?

>Who's "people"?

If you follow this thread up you will see the context is 'people who want to read content written by humans.'

why does it matter when it "became solid?" there was plenty of slop generated with ChatGPT, that really was the turning point (because of public access)