by gwern | 2025-04-21 18:06:11+00:00
Let me give you an example I just ran into now which illustrates why #1 is so pernicious.

I was just linked, by an intelligent, educated, skeptical person who regularly uses AI generative tools, to an interesting report on the darknet markets (which I used to be an expert on): https://tornews.org/legendary-darknet-vendor-crimsonlotus-ta... I was not familiar with this site, but I figured it was probably one of many successors to DeepDotWeb, and I've been out of the scene for a long time and wouldn't know about it; but I eventually realized, after several minutes of reading and then checking, that this was an AI slop website. This is because 'Obsidian Bay' doesn't appear to be real, the photo is obviously AI-generated, and the closing commentary by 'Ella Vargas, darknet researcher at the Cyber Crimes Institute' appears to be a fake person at a non-existent organization. Is anything in the article real? Probably not.

Ahhhhh, but you say you don't care about it being real, you say you only care about the prompt - in which case you're fine: some things in it are old events relabeled. (eg. there really was a large darknet market which was famous and had eluded LE and was taken down in a global operation in part due to packet timing attacks! You did learn something true from that accurate prompt/input yielding that slop output! It was just called 'Silk Road 2' and that happened over a decade ago.) So, I guess you have no issue with tornews.org. Maybe you should subscribe. All these articles sound quite exciting and there's a lot of them...

Personally, I think it's a bad site. I could have fallen for it - I simply got lucky that this one was so easy to note the style, factcheck, and debunk. For example, I could have instead read https://tornews.org/massive-dark-web-drug-operation-busted-i... : if you read this, this sounds very plausible and exciting, and it doesn't immediately come off as AI slop because it is so detailed and doesn't sound too much like 4o.

This, it turns out, is because it's based on a real bust: https://www.suffolkcountyda.org/suffolk-county-district-atto... https://www.newsday.com/long-island/fentanyl-bust-suffolk-k7... Heavily rewritten to obscure the sources being plagiarized. How much of it is real? Well, the assertions I spotchecked seemed to be real (ie. copied without too much distortion from the police press conference)... but I have no idea about the rest of it, and this article lends credibility to the other articles.

(Why does this week-old site exist at all and even has a Twitter account? https://x.com/tornews_org It's almost certainly either for the affiliate marketing revenue, in the best-case scenario, or is a phishing scam, in the worst-case scenario. Since it's so young and so reliant on fake content, likely the latter. I didn't check any of the onion links they so helpfully provide, but even if they are all legit right now, that simply means they are not yet scamming. To pay for the AI and domain name and labor here, you only need to phish one DNM user who will deposit a few hundred dollars of cryptocurrency. And this site has already started to pollute Google with its 'facts'.)