7 ms·

Tell HN: Seeing an HN ad for YC company that portends AI-powered blogspam

73 points by dwohnitmok 4y ago

I just saw the following ad on HN. > Contentedge (YC W17) is hiring to build AI content writing software for SEO From its landing page there's the following sentence: > Instantly create briefs or text that’s modeled after high-ranking content and sounds human-made. This kind of service seems specifically designed to drown the Internet in blogspam, even more so than it already is, and hence worries me. I know it was inevitable given the rise of convincing AI text generation and sure if one company doesn't do it another will (and no doubt there are already those that do), but please Contentedge, reconsider if this is truly the product you want to create for this world.

ryanb 4y ago
Hey folks, CEO/Founder of Contentedge here - you have it totally wrong. :) It seems like you equate SEO with blogspam, which is just false! We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people. Google is the gateway to the internet. I don’t view it as gaming the system; we’re trying to empower smaller businesses and writers to get found. Give Contentedge a try and see if we're just building a spam machine like you contend! (no credit card required) https://secure.contentedge.com/users/signup/free https://secure.contentedge.com/users/signup/free
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  SEO garbage is destroying the internet and google's complicity or indifference is forcing even legitimate content creators to turn their pages into mountains of meaningless duck speak that makes you feel like you're having an anuerism just long enough for the visit to count as a view rather than a bounce.
- Justin_K 4y ago
  Hi Ryan - I created an account to give your free trial a shot.... it required me to enter a credit card ... which I reluctantly did. Now I am going to cancel and it won't let me. It asks for my password, which I don't have, because I created my account with SSO. There is no support menu / phone / email anything to request help. What kind of half baked crap is this?
  - ryanb 4y ago
    Sorry about that - not sure what happened here. Sent you an e-mail so we can resolve this for you.
- blep_ 4y ago
  Blogspam is a subset of SEO, for sure. This comment does nothing to convince me that it isn't the subset you're targeting, because that last sentence sounds a lot like you're describing blogspam. (parent comment was edited after I wrote this, read "last sentence" as referring to the paragraph beginning with "We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people.")
- saaaaaam 4y ago
  Are Shutterstock, Zapier and Airbnb really using your product? If so, in what context? I’d love to see some examples.
  - nxmnxm99 4y ago
    Highly, highly doubt it
    - saaaaaam 4y ago
      You are a clearly a very cynical person! €:
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  I clicked through to your website and I didn't sign up, but I did watch the video on the front page. What's the intended usecase for creating AI content other than blogspam-style bait and switch? Shouldn't these businesses already have content of their own? It would make more sense to me if your product was aimed at helping websites SEO-optimize the content they already have, as I can't see how a human would ever find your AI-written content useful.
- nxmnxm99 4y ago
  There are a thousand services exactly like yours trying to get rich by letting people generate spam with GPT-3 I’m frankly shocked you’re YC funded…. I’m guessing a pivot from what they originally funded you for
  - ryanb 4y ago
    Thanks for the kind words!
    - nxmnxm99 4y ago
      You should feel bad about your life choices.
- junofan 4y ago
  Totally wrong? Geez, no thank you.
willio58 4y ago
AI generated content is only as successful as the content it generates. If you were to read some content that's useful to you, does it matter the source? If the content generated by this platform is just "spam", then wouldn't it fail on its own without the need for an HN brigade against them? I get that google is increasingly being degraded by SEO content, but that's a problem with google, not this site allowing users to use AI generated content as a writing tool.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > If you were to read some content that's useful to you, does it matter the source? The problem I have with this is that it presumes knowledge on the part of the reader. The AI will frequently produce wrong content that I incorrectly believe was valuable to me. The AI will frequently omit important things an actual human expert would not have. It will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trustworthy and non-trustworthy content.
- ryanb 4y ago
  I agree 100%!
  - dwohnitmok 4y ago
    I want to preface this that I think the work your company does is important. SEO is much like advertising and marketing in that it often gets a bad rap by techies, but they are nonetheless important because otherwise one is strongly handicapped when it comes to developing and selling a product. Nonetheless there are degrees to this and pushing a set of features designed to automatically generate text that closely mimics what other high-ranking content looks like has an outsize impact on the quality of the "commons": in this case Google or any other index of internet content. As other commentators have pointed out, the current state of AI means that while the style of the text is likely to be in line with other content, the actual content of the text may be either useless or actively wrong. Given the prevalence of such articles already in search results, it is unlikely that the normal mechanism of human perusal of search results will be an effective quality filter. It is true that, as I allude to, such articles already exist and in this sense Contentedge is not enabling a novel new harm per se. However, it drastically changes the ease of doing so, and doing the same thing, just at a larger scale and higher efficiency, given sufficiently big values of "larger" and "higher" can have a qualitative impact on the harm rendered.
nxmnxm99 4y ago
So many of these garbage products out like copy.ai and Jarvis. As if the internet didn’t have enough spam.
terrycody 4y ago
In fact, there are already a ton of AI websites jammed into the Google results now, they get huge millions of traffics per month, most people don't aware of this yet. That being said, Contentedge is lag behind those even if they do similar things. Most those sites trained with GPT-3 model.
zeruch 4y ago
This is the kind of tech I'd love to see regulated and/or Google-nuked into oblivion. "reconsider if this is truly the product you want to create for this world" If they were self-serving and crass enough to start the idea, they'll only 'reconsider' if it fails an A-round.
classified 4y ago
I saw it too, but now I can't seem to find it any more. It magically disappeared. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that YC actually gives money to a company like that.
midenginedcoupe 4y ago
This is like shitting in the swimming pool and asking search engines to just navigate around the floaters :( But hey, potential future returns for me are better than making everyone else's experience on the internet worse, right?
- tempodox 4y ago
  Except that they want search engines to show it and not navigate around it.

73 points by dwohnitmok 4y ago

ryanb 4y ago

Hey folks, CEO/Founder of Contentedge here - you have it totally wrong. :) It seems like you equate SEO with blogspam, which is just false! We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people. Google is the gateway to the internet. I don’t view it as gaming the system; we’re trying to empower smaller businesses and writers to get found. Give Contentedge a try and see if we're just building a spam machine like you contend! (no credit card required) https://secure.contentedge.com/users/signup/free https://secure.contentedge.com/users/signup/free

Schroedingersat 4y ago
SEO garbage is destroying the internet and google's complicity or indifference is forcing even legitimate content creators to turn their pages into mountains of meaningless duck speak that makes you feel like you're having an anuerism just long enough for the visit to count as a view rather than a bounce.
Justin_K 4y ago
Hi Ryan - I created an account to give your free trial a shot.... it required me to enter a credit card ... which I reluctantly did. Now I am going to cancel and it won't let me. It asks for my password, which I don't have, because I created my account with SSO. There is no support menu / phone / email anything to request help. What kind of half baked crap is this?
- ryanb 4y ago
  Sorry about that - not sure what happened here. Sent you an e-mail so we can resolve this for you.
blep_ 4y ago
Blogspam is a subset of SEO, for sure. This comment does nothing to convince me that it isn't the subset you're targeting, because that last sentence sounds a lot like you're describing blogspam. (parent comment was edited after I wrote this, read "last sentence" as referring to the paragraph beginning with "We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people.")
saaaaaam 4y ago
Are Shutterstock, Zapier and Airbnb really using your product? If so, in what context? I’d love to see some examples.
- nxmnxm99 4y ago
  Highly, highly doubt it
  - saaaaaam 4y ago
    You are a clearly a very cynical person! €:
cmeacham98 4y ago
I clicked through to your website and I didn't sign up, but I did watch the video on the front page. What's the intended usecase for creating AI content other than blogspam-style bait and switch? Shouldn't these businesses already have content of their own? It would make more sense to me if your product was aimed at helping websites SEO-optimize the content they already have, as I can't see how a human would ever find your AI-written content useful.
nxmnxm99 4y ago
There are a thousand services exactly like yours trying to get rich by letting people generate spam with GPT-3 I’m frankly shocked you’re YC funded…. I’m guessing a pivot from what they originally funded you for
- ryanb 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words!
  - nxmnxm99 4y ago
    You should feel bad about your life choices.
junofan 4y ago
Totally wrong? Geez, no thank you.

willio58 4y ago

AI generated content is only as successful as the content it generates. If you were to read some content that's useful to you, does it matter the source? If the content generated by this platform is just "spam", then wouldn't it fail on its own without the need for an HN brigade against them? I get that google is increasingly being degraded by SEO content, but that's a problem with google, not this site allowing users to use AI generated content as a writing tool.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
> If you were to read some content that's useful to you, does it matter the source? The problem I have with this is that it presumes knowledge on the part of the reader. The AI will frequently produce wrong content that I incorrectly believe was valuable to me. The AI will frequently omit important things an actual human expert would not have. It will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trustworthy and non-trustworthy content.
ryanb 4y ago
I agree 100%!
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  I want to preface this that I think the work your company does is important. SEO is much like advertising and marketing in that it often gets a bad rap by techies, but they are nonetheless important because otherwise one is strongly handicapped when it comes to developing and selling a product. Nonetheless there are degrees to this and pushing a set of features designed to automatically generate text that closely mimics what other high-ranking content looks like has an outsize impact on the quality of the "commons": in this case Google or any other index of internet content. As other commentators have pointed out, the current state of AI means that while the style of the text is likely to be in line with other content, the actual content of the text may be either useless or actively wrong. Given the prevalence of such articles already in search results, it is unlikely that the normal mechanism of human perusal of search results will be an effective quality filter. It is true that, as I allude to, such articles already exist and in this sense Contentedge is not enabling a novel new harm per se. However, it drastically changes the ease of doing so, and doing the same thing, just at a larger scale and higher efficiency, given sufficiently big values of "larger" and "higher" can have a qualitative impact on the harm rendered.

nxmnxm99 4y ago

So many of these garbage products out like copy.ai and Jarvis. As if the internet didn’t have enough spam.

terrycody 4y ago

In fact, there are already a ton of AI websites jammed into the Google results now, they get huge millions of traffics per month, most people don't aware of this yet. That being said, Contentedge is lag behind those even if they do similar things. Most those sites trained with GPT-3 model.

zeruch 4y ago

This is the kind of tech I'd love to see regulated and/or Google-nuked into oblivion. "reconsider if this is truly the product you want to create for this world" If they were self-serving and crass enough to start the idea, they'll only 'reconsider' if it fails an A-round.

classified 4y ago

I saw it too, but now I can't seem to find it any more. It magically disappeared. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that YC actually gives money to a company like that.

midenginedcoupe 4y ago

This is like shitting in the swimming pool and asking search engines to just navigate around the floaters :( But hey, potential future returns for me are better than making everyone else's experience on the internet worse, right?

tempodox 4y ago
Except that they want search engines to show it and not navigate around it.