AI generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent on the internet, making browsing the internet much more difficult.
One of the main functions of the internet and by extension search engines is to provide a way to browse for different sources or content until the user finds what they want.
“Using a search engine is the default method almost everyone uses to find information,” said senior Arush Kachru. “Since the search engines affect everyone, it is important that they make ethical decisions,”
Since the recent rise of the popularity and accessibility of generative AI tools, human generated content that appeared at the top of search results on search engines like Google has been replaced with AI generated content.
The problem with the AI generated content lies with the frequent falsities in the artificially generated content often called hallucinations, the subliminal advertising and the surface level information that most generative models have access to.
Model hallucination has been a persistent problem since artificial intelligence became mainstream, as its models will often confidently output content that is either slightly or majorly incorrect. Additionally, much of the artificial generated content is subtly advertising a product or service from the “author” of the article. Finally, generative models usually only have a shallow surface level of knowledge about any arbitrary content, meaning it isn’t truly useful for researching anything.
“While AI is really useful for certain things, I think it is very important that I know when I am getting an AI generated article or a human made article,” said senior Reetham Gubba.
As shown in this video, the front page of Google for an arbitrary search was almost entirely clearly generated by AI. This isn’t a problem unique to Google, the same results were found in both Bing and DuckDuckGo.
“Something most definitely needs to be done about the amount of AI generated content being shown on search engines,” said senior Arush Kachru.
This is a very concerning pattern. One of the principles that made the internet great was the ease of sharing information. Nowadays, even the AI overviews that show up at the top of search results will cite other AI generated articles.
There isn’t truly a solution for the generated content either. As long as companies and individuals are incentivized to put out low-quality artificially generated content, it will keep happening. One must just adjust to this new era of the internet.
