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As someone in SEO, I've been pretty disgusted by the desire for site owners to want to use AI-generated content. There are various opinions on this, of course,

As someone in SEO, I've been pretty disgusted by the desire for site owners to want to use AI-generated content. There are various opinions on this, of course, but I got into SEO out of interest in the "organic web" vs. everything being driven by ads. Love the idea of having AI-Free declarations of content as it could / should help to differentiate organic content from generated content. It would be very interesting if companies and site owners wished to self-certify their site as organic with something like an /ai-free.txt.

dale_glass 4y ago
I don't see the point. There's lots of old content out there that won't get tagged, so lacking the tag doesn't mean it's AI generated. Meanwhile people abusing AI for profit (eg, generating AI driven blogs to stick ads on them) wouldn't want to tag their sites in a way that might get them ignored. And what are the consequences for lying?
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  It would basically depend on how serious the search engines are about wanting created vs. generated content. Generated content is ultimately going to be a regurgitation.
- westurner 4y ago
  Does use of a search engine violate the "No AI" covenant with oneself? Variation on the Turning Test: prove that it's not a human claiming to be a computer. Modeling premises and Meta-analysis are again necessary elements for critical reasoning about Sources and Methods and superpositions of Ignorance and Malice.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Maybe this could encourage the recreation of the original Yahoo! (If you don't remember, Yahoo! started out not as a search engine in the Google sense but as a collection of human curated links to websites about various topics)
    - daveguy 4y ago
      I consider Wikipedia to be a massive curated set of information. It also includes a lot of references and links to additional good information / source materials. Companies try to get spin added and it's usually very well controlled. I worry that a lot of ai generated dreck will seep into Wikipedia, but I am hopeful the moderation will continue to function well.
      - westurner 4y ago
        List of Web directories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories ; DMOZ FTW Distributed Version Control > Work model > Pull Request: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Pull_requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Pu... sindresorhus/awesome: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents bayandin/awesome-awesomeness: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness "Help compare Comment and Annotation services: moderation, spam, notifications, configurability" https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 Re: fact checks, schema.org/ClaimReview, W3C Verifiable Claims, W3C Verifiable News & Epistemology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140 W3C Web Annotations could contain (cryptographically-signed (optionally with a W3C DID)) Verifiable Claims; comments with signed Linked Data
password11 4y ago
>but I got into SEO out of interest in the "organic web" vs. everything being driven by ads. If the owner of an SEO site wants to use AI for "content generation", doesn't that mean they didn't care about the human-generated content in the first place? Seems like a choice between garbage and slightly more expensive garbage. What is interesting or organic about that? Back in the day, people used to put things on their websites because they cared about it and wanted to say it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- noduerme 4y ago
  I read this more as meaning that they work for a legitimate company or two that is trying to organically improve their search results without stooping to nasty tricks
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
    Yes, that is the intent
    - password11 4y ago
      But if said company doesn't care about the human-generated content quality in the first place (evidenced by the fact that they're willing to replace it with AI generation), how is that not also a "nasty trick" by your standard? At the end of the day they just want to optimize search results. And the Overton window of acceptability currently allows "human generated SEO content" but not "AI generated SEO content". It's just an arbitrary rule.
      - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
        I think the difference between created content vs. generated content is quite more than arbitrary. If the leading search engines truly don't care about the difference, I'd predict a future where you have more bifurcation between a human web and a bot-driven one.
capybara_2020 4y ago
Curious, isn't SEO the thing that ruined search to a big extent. A 1000 word article where the actual answer needs a fraction of that size. Or interesting content buried because it is not "SEO optimized". Or companies writing blog content and making it look helpful while actually shilling and highlighting their own product. Plus tons of other things. So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise?
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  There are various ways of looking at it and, of course, all sorts of people involved. My focus has always just been to encourage people to treat the search engines as an index that will pick up and rank quality content if you treat them that way. It still works very well today.
- dazc 4y ago
  > So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise? I once employed a journalist to write about the pros and cons of wedding insurance. Just to give you a clue how long ago this was, it was a unique article at the time. Many years years later, every article you will read about wedding insurance (there will be many thousands) is around 90% similar in style and content to the one I paid for. I dare say you could use any other topic as an example, one thoroughly researched original and many thousand similar copies. I can't see how ChatGPT is not going to make this situation much worse?
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    My guess is that ChatGPT is going to solve the SEO spam problem by changing the way we search for things. Instead of searching for webpages that have information about a topic, we're going to ask an AI. It'll tell you what the pros and cons of wedding insurance are, and because eventually it'll have access to your calendar, it'll tailor that answers to the specifics of the fact that you're having a destination wedding during monsoon season in the area. Once this kind of AI search becomes the default way we look for information, there won't be a point to creating SEO spam anymore. It'll create other problems, of course, but that's the way it goes with new technology.
dazc 4y ago
> 'It would be very interesting if companies and site owners wished to self-certify their site as organic with something like an /ai-free.txt.' I'm sure you can appreciate that such an initiative would be wholesale abused from day 1.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  As with anything in the industry, yes. But it would provide a basis for ranking penalties if the search engines cared about it.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    I'd bet money on it being an INVERSE signal.
megous 4y ago
Sure, let's just ignore the benefits of AI and pretend like it doesn't exist. That sounds like a great plan.
kurthr 4y ago
Don't worry, it won't be small shops doing it. It will be the majors, if that's where the money is. To quote Yan LeCun: Meta will be able to help small businesses promote themselves by automatically producing media that promote a brand, he offered. "There's something like 12 million shops that advertise on Facebook, and most of them are mom and pop shops, and they just don't have the resources to design a new, nicely designed ad," observed LeCun. "So for them, generative art could help a lot." https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-not-particularly-innovative-and-nothing-revolutionary-says-metas-chief-ai-scientist/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-not-particularly-in...
gingerlime 4y ago
What about AI-assisted writing? e.g. improving style, grammar, readability, making explanations clearer and better structured? especially for non-native writers this is a challenge and not many can hire an editor or even a proofreader. I wonder if such use gets “penalized” by search engines the same way AI-generated content might?
wizofaus 4y ago
How could it possibly help unless there were some independent verification mechanism though? If there's a motivation to lie about the content being "organically generated" because that's what search users prefer to find, then clearly people will. And it's hard to imagine what that verification process would look like given current technology.

dale_glass 4y ago

I don't see the point. There's lots of old content out there that won't get tagged, so lacking the tag doesn't mean it's AI generated. Meanwhile people abusing AI for profit (eg, generating AI driven blogs to stick ads on them) wouldn't want to tag their sites in a way that might get them ignored. And what are the consequences for lying?

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
It would basically depend on how serious the search engines are about wanting created vs. generated content. Generated content is ultimately going to be a regurgitation.
westurner 4y ago
Does use of a search engine violate the "No AI" covenant with oneself? Variation on the Turning Test: prove that it's not a human claiming to be a computer. Modeling premises and Meta-analysis are again necessary elements for critical reasoning about Sources and Methods and superpositions of Ignorance and Malice.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Maybe this could encourage the recreation of the original Yahoo! (If you don't remember, Yahoo! started out not as a search engine in the Google sense but as a collection of human curated links to websites about various topics)
  - daveguy 4y ago
    I consider Wikipedia to be a massive curated set of information. It also includes a lot of references and links to additional good information / source materials. Companies try to get spin added and it's usually very well controlled. I worry that a lot of ai generated dreck will seep into Wikipedia, but I am hopeful the moderation will continue to function well.
    - westurner 4y ago
      List of Web directories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories ; DMOZ FTW Distributed Version Control > Work model > Pull Request: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Pull_requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Pu... sindresorhus/awesome: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents bayandin/awesome-awesomeness: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness "Help compare Comment and Annotation services: moderation, spam, notifications, configurability" https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 Re: fact checks, schema.org/ClaimReview, W3C Verifiable Claims, W3C Verifiable News & Epistemology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140 W3C Web Annotations could contain (cryptographically-signed (optionally with a W3C DID)) Verifiable Claims; comments with signed Linked Data

password11 4y ago

>but I got into SEO out of interest in the "organic web" vs. everything being driven by ads. If the owner of an SEO site wants to use AI for "content generation", doesn't that mean they didn't care about the human-generated content in the first place? Seems like a choice between garbage and slightly more expensive garbage. What is interesting or organic about that? Back in the day, people used to put things on their websites because they cared about it and wanted to say it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noduerme 4y ago
I read this more as meaning that they work for a legitimate company or two that is trying to organically improve their search results without stooping to nasty tricks
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Yes, that is the intent
  - password11 4y ago
    But if said company doesn't care about the human-generated content quality in the first place (evidenced by the fact that they're willing to replace it with AI generation), how is that not also a "nasty trick" by your standard? At the end of the day they just want to optimize search results. And the Overton window of acceptability currently allows "human generated SEO content" but not "AI generated SEO content". It's just an arbitrary rule.
    - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      I think the difference between created content vs. generated content is quite more than arbitrary. If the leading search engines truly don't care about the difference, I'd predict a future where you have more bifurcation between a human web and a bot-driven one.

capybara_2020 4y ago

Curious, isn't SEO the thing that ruined search to a big extent. A 1000 word article where the actual answer needs a fraction of that size. Or interesting content buried because it is not "SEO optimized". Or companies writing blog content and making it look helpful while actually shilling and highlighting their own product. Plus tons of other things. So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise?

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
There are various ways of looking at it and, of course, all sorts of people involved. My focus has always just been to encourage people to treat the search engines as an index that will pick up and rank quality content if you treat them that way. It still works very well today.
dazc 4y ago
> So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise? I once employed a journalist to write about the pros and cons of wedding insurance. Just to give you a clue how long ago this was, it was a unique article at the time. Many years years later, every article you will read about wedding insurance (there will be many thousands) is around 90% similar in style and content to the one I paid for. I dare say you could use any other topic as an example, one thoroughly researched original and many thousand similar copies. I can't see how ChatGPT is not going to make this situation much worse?
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  My guess is that ChatGPT is going to solve the SEO spam problem by changing the way we search for things. Instead of searching for webpages that have information about a topic, we're going to ask an AI. It'll tell you what the pros and cons of wedding insurance are, and because eventually it'll have access to your calendar, it'll tailor that answers to the specifics of the fact that you're having a destination wedding during monsoon season in the area. Once this kind of AI search becomes the default way we look for information, there won't be a point to creating SEO spam anymore. It'll create other problems, of course, but that's the way it goes with new technology.

dazc 4y ago

> 'It would be very interesting if companies and site owners wished to self-certify their site as organic with something like an /ai-free.txt.' I'm sure you can appreciate that such an initiative would be wholesale abused from day 1.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
As with anything in the industry, yes. But it would provide a basis for ranking penalties if the search engines cared about it.
- TylerE 4y ago
  I'd bet money on it being an INVERSE signal.

megous 4y ago

Sure, let's just ignore the benefits of AI and pretend like it doesn't exist. That sounds like a great plan.

kurthr 4y ago

Don't worry, it won't be small shops doing it. It will be the majors, if that's where the money is. To quote Yan LeCun: Meta will be able to help small businesses promote themselves by automatically producing media that promote a brand, he offered. "There's something like 12 million shops that advertise on Facebook, and most of them are mom and pop shops, and they just don't have the resources to design a new, nicely designed ad," observed LeCun. "So for them, generative art could help a lot." https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-not-particularly-innovative-and-nothing-revolutionary-says-metas-chief-ai-scientist/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-not-particularly-in...

gingerlime 4y ago

What about AI-assisted writing? e.g. improving style, grammar, readability, making explanations clearer and better structured? especially for non-native writers this is a challenge and not many can hire an editor or even a proofreader. I wonder if such use gets “penalized” by search engines the same way AI-generated content might?

wizofaus 4y ago

How could it possibly help unless there were some independent verification mechanism though? If there's a motivation to lie about the content being "organically generated" because that's what search users prefer to find, then clearly people will. And it's hard to imagine what that verification process would look like given current technology.