Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or Dodge In Hell" has a subplot driven by a news-story-generating AI run amok. The AI uses reader engagement as the metric (along with really great natural-language stuff). But it doesn't have any truth metric. So, at the time of the book, the widely believed AI's stories have constructed an alternate reality for many people, reinforcing the present polarization of media in the US.
That presents quite a threat profile. It's far more pernicious than SEO script kiddles doing whatever passes for keyword stuffing in 2022.
I hope the search crawler folks at Google are working hard to detect that sort of thing and prevent it from getting into indexes. Let's hope Neal Stephenson isn't as right about that threat as Arthur C. Clarke was about geosynchronous communications satellites.
That's basically what the Q larp, or realrawnews, is already doing today. If it's profitable to do, it doesn't take a rogue AI to make up nonsense and spread it to the masses.
That presents quite a threat profile. It's far more pernicious than SEO script kiddles doing whatever passes for keyword stuffing in 2022.
I hope the search crawler folks at Google are working hard to detect that sort of thing and prevent it from getting into indexes. Let's hope Neal Stephenson isn't as right about that threat as Arthur C. Clarke was about geosynchronous communications satellites.