The internet is being flooded with AI content. How can we tell what is human?
4 comments
You get what you reward.
Quality stopped being rewarded, when?
IMO, this is the result of reducing the dimensionality of our human gifts and treasured values to a single number, a symbol. Quality becomes entropy.
We told the machines what to reward, and they obey. And it doesn't seem that they can reward quality.
Solutions? Popularity can come from both the lower qualities, such as hate and derision, as well as great quality, though the latter seems less common.
Solutions? People do pay for quality (sometimes) but despite decades of existence, the internet has no common micropayment. Just submit your credit card and wait for the inevitable database hack.
Quality stopped being rewarded, when?
IMO, this is the result of reducing the dimensionality of our human gifts and treasured values to a single number, a symbol. Quality becomes entropy.
We told the machines what to reward, and they obey. And it doesn't seem that they can reward quality.
Solutions? Popularity can come from both the lower qualities, such as hate and derision, as well as great quality, though the latter seems less common.
Solutions? People do pay for quality (sometimes) but despite decades of existence, the internet has no common micropayment. Just submit your credit card and wait for the inevitable database hack.
Before interacting with any links, HN readers should be aware that the domain in the last URL is owned by the submitter and has been banned by HN moderators. See https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chat-to.dev with showdead enabled.
I put the link due to the character limit that HN has.
I won't fall for that
you are not human
Bots write articles, generate videos, compose music, post comments and even simulate debates. In many cases they do this faster, cheaper and at volumes no human team could realistically match. The result is a phenomenon that some researchers have begun to describe as “algorithmic pollution”: platforms saturated with synthetic material that looks authentic but does not come from human experience.
Inside technology companies and newsrooms, a question is quietly becoming unavoidable. How do you separate what humans made from what machines generated?
Behind the scenes of the internet, the race to answer that question has already started.
The invisible avalanche The numbers alone reveal how serious the situation has become. Music streaming platforms, for example, are receiving tens of thousands of tracks created with artificial intelligence every single day. In a recent disclosure, Deezer reported that it detects more than 60,000 AI-generated songs daily, representing roughly 39% of all uploads on the platform. According to the company, up to 85% of those tracks appear to be fraudulent, created to manipulate royalty systems or recommendation algorithms. https://www.theverge.com/news/870186/deezer-ai-music-detection-commercially-available
Music is only one part of the story. A report from the research group AI Forensics identified hundreds of automated accounts on TikTok producing synthetic content at industrial scale, generating billions of views every month. Many of these accounts post dozens of videos per day and rarely disclose that the material is artificial. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/03/anti-immigrant-material-among-ai-generated-content-getting-billions-of-views-on-tiktok
For platforms this creates a structural dilemma. Recommendation algorithms were designed to reward volume, engagement and consistency. Artificial intelligence excels at all three.
Left unchanged, the systems that decide what goes viral may end up promoting machines over people. Full content here: <https://chat-to.dev/post?id=K29WWDZVRmZmQ3IyNWVEaGo1WWl1dz09&redirect=/>