Seems like a lot of entities are "quietly" doing things these days. The llm-ification of every piece of text on the internet is driving me crazy

AI is such garbage. You can't use it for anything.

Yeah, the internet seems like a big poison pill. Training on the whole internet feels like citing the National Enquirer (or the Daily Mail?) for a school essay.

Having an archive of "curated" training data seems like it is going to be important. Otherwise you need "AS" (artificial skepticism) introduced into future models. ("But I read it on the internet!", ha ha.)

Or perhaps there are ways to bucket training data such that the model is aware of which data leans factual (quantifiable) and which data leans opinion (fuzzy, qualifiable?).

(I recently asked Claude about the existence of ball lightning, spontaneous human combustion. I got replies that ultimately did not leave me satisfied. It's probably just as well that I read this article though—I now have an even stronger degree of skepticism with regard to their replies—specifically, I suppose, with topics that are likely to be biased.)

(I'm not quite convinced from the article though that Google is "fighting back". In fact, this feels like another moment where a "player" could try to establish their LLM as more factual. Is that the row Grok is trying to hoe? Or is Grok just trying to be anti-woke?)

There should be some warning if some "fact" is only supported by one or very few obscure sources.

The strength of the sources should be clearly indicated in the answers to help users gauge how trustworthy the info is.

> I was able to demonstrate the problem by publishing a single article on my personal website about my hot-dog-eating prowess.

One blog post ... that's all it takes. i'm actually surprised it's that bad. i would have thought it'd take more effort, but i guess it could depend on some sort of purposeful weighting based on search rank during training?

> If a company or website is caught breaking the rules, it could be removed from or downranked in Google's search results. And if you're not on Google, it's like you don't exist.

> "You can give a company a penalty for their website," he says, "but there's nothing stopping them from paying 20 YouTube influencers to say their product is the best." And now, Google's AI is citing YouTube videos.

This makes me think of the stackoverflow seo spam problem we all had like 5 years ago. which ended up with spammers just constantly spinning up new sites all the time.

... the cat and mouse game is in full swing already.

I suspect it's because AI is specifically trained to be good at summarizing stuff, but the easiest way to check if it summarized something accurately is if the summary content matches/contains one or more specific claims from the source(s). With such a focus on accuracy and avoiding hallucination, they may have overfit on "repeat things you find verbatim when asked to summarize".

It's all over the place. It's the new SEO. Marketing scumbags don't care.

https://www.hubspot.com/aeo-grader

https://enterprise.semrush.com/solutions/ai-optimization/

They are applying the same spam policies they apply to search to AI crawlers.

It was SOOOOO successful with search, right?

Would love to read specific examples of "the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement", but the relevant link in the article currently goes to

file:///Users/GermaTW1/BBC%20Dropbox/Thomas%20Germain/A%20Downloads%20and%20Documents/2026/And%20there's%20evidence%20that%20AI%20tools%20are%20being%20manipulated%20on%20a%20wide%20scale.