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This could the beginning of the end for SEO content. The value of these companies will go up for now because of more content and therefor more engagement, but a

This could the beginning of the end for SEO content. The value of these companies will go up for now because of more content and therefor more engagement, but after the world is flooded with mass generated content the engagement will drop and content will eventually become worthless.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>and content will eventually become worthless Eventually? Are you saying Buzzfeed content is currently NOT worthless? "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." What does the online future look like? Drowning in mountains of AI generated garbage and AI based search engines who won't be able to differentiate between fake AI generated stuff and the truth, so we'll get garbage answers?
- whstl 4y ago
  Good questions there. I could agree that Buzzfeed content is perhaps worth very little or even nothing in the grand scheme of the internet, but it's at least a fun past-time to some people. SEO-driven marketing content, however, is worse than worthless: it produces negative value to the mankind. It pollutes Google searches, it distills knowledge even further, it is written by either robots or underpaid freelancers, and it drowns out the work written by professionals in the area.
luckylion 4y ago
Or rather, the end of the easy mode search engine. Google has been losing the fight against SEO for the past years. I'm not sure if they don't care (because ads bring in the money, not SERPs) or if they can't. Relying on PageRank / links (like they currently do as the super-dominating factor) doesn't work if larger sites will employ AI (like BuzzFeed). Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but I fed in text from a German public broadcaster into one of the "identify ChatGPT" things and it said it looked like ChatGPT. I doubt these technologically conservative editors are using ChatGPT to write official reports. Instead, they'd need to understand the topic at hand to judge whether a page is useful in answering the user's question. And at that point, they have an answering machine and no longer need to show search results.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  > Or rather, the end of the easy mode search engine. Google has been losing the fight against SEO for the past years. I'm not sure if they don't care (because ads bring in the money, not SERPs) or if they can't. It's probably that they can't. It's hard to evaluate content which you don't understand and when you have the whole world gaming against you. Likewise, it will be also interesting to see if AI really can change this, because the results so far were not gamed by SEO. At the end AI has the same problem to solve if it wants to replace search engines. The question is also how fast AIs can update their knowledge. Google Search can be blazing fast in delivering the newest results even for the most random topic. > Relying on PageRank / links (like they currently do as the super-dominating factor) doesn't work if larger sites will employ AI (like BuzzFeed). Aren't they doing more than this for some time now? Though, true that links alone are not very useful against Manipulations. Maybe letting AI curate the results will be the trick? Another problem might be that Google want's to stay simple and vague. Which is of course legit, as more information will give SEO more attack-surface. But maybe add a more complex interaction-mode for people who don't just search 2-3 words. A built-in ai-prompt which switches to some ChatGPT-Like response is an obvious google-style solution to battle against the new wave of competitors. > Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. Is this necessary? At the end, it's a matter of quality. If AI-Texts are high quality, delivering exactly what you want, why not? After all, the problem with spam today is the quality. Though, for this of course Google would need a kind of quality-check, which their own AI can deliver, maybe. > Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but I fed in text from a German public broadcaster into one of the "identify ChatGPT" things and it said it looked like ChatGPT. I doubt these technologically conservative editors are using ChatGPT to write official reports. But they usually use a very formalistic template-based style. Often it's even just copy & paste of paragraphs from different sources. So yes, news are already very AI-like today, even without AI involved. The human usually only brings in their skill in evaluating the content and composing them with matching parts. > Instead, they'd need to understand the topic at hand to judge whether a page is useful in answering the user's question. And at that point, they have an answering machine and no longer need to show search results. Yes, but people have not always questions to answer. And it's also a kind of trust-issue whether I want to see the original source, or some more context to the answer, or whether I blindly trust the answer from Google. I mean they already today have common Q&As in their search results, and you can see also where they are coming from. But often they don't quite satisfy my demand. Sometimes they are to short, sometimes they are plain out wrong. Sometimes they are just not what I search. Traditional search still has its place even with AI, until we reach the age of completely trustable strong AIs.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
As if Buzzfeed has today any label of quality... Well, ok, their Articles are quite good, they even got a Pulitzer IIRC. But overall, Buzzfeed is already a synonym for generic lifetime-wasting trash-content. I'd even say, an AI might actually improve the quality, bringing us a golden age of worthy trash. Because the dirty little secret at the end of all of this is: People like trash. Good Trash can be entertaining and supporting your procrastination. Sometimes it can even be informative, or at least giving you the impression.
- marban 4y ago
  Pulitzer => Buzzfeed News, not Buzzfeed.com
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    Yes, I don't use either of them. But there is a link to news on Buzzfeed.com, so I assume there is a certain level of mix between the different contents for the readers?
    - cormacrelf 4y ago
      As far as you can see from the outside there is zero correlation in either internal direction/editorial control or readership
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Well... "National Enquirer Now Legit, According to Pulitzer Prize Board" https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/national-enquirer-now-legit-pulitzer-prize-board/story?id=9887329 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/national-enquirer-now-l... "Shock! Horror! National Enquirer wins a Pulitzer. Not" https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/apr/13/shock-horror-national-enquirer-pulitzer https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/apr/13/shock-horror-n... Evidently, the Pulitzer has lost its way, much like the rest of Journalism.
    - rideontime 4y ago
buran77 4y ago
> The value of these companies will go up for now because Because they attach themselves to the "big thing" in tech right now. The "big thing" is a really big tide so the hope is that it will lift all boats. That's it, it doesn't have to actually do anything, just associating with this gives a good momentary boost. Used to be blockchain and NFTs until just recently. But some companies are not boats, they're stones on the bottom barely keeping their peak above water. Others are not even in the water but on the side of a hill far away, like the Long Island Blockchain. They still wave the "big thing" flag so some of its image will rub off on them even. Of course, unlike the the Long Island Blockchain these guys can actually generate content with AI but I don't think that's the endgame here. Doesn't take a genius to tell that hundreds of clones can now pop up and deliver perfect equivalence with little to no effort. So the goal is probably to pump and dump while there's still something to dump. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/10/investing/blockchain-long-island-insider-trading/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/10/investing/blockchain-long...
ergonaught 4y ago
SEO content is already "underperforming" unless you're in some kind of "niche" that filters you out of "participation" in the wider network, and those "just hasn't been hit yet". ex: some of my sites are effectively invisible on search engines unless the engine is "filtering" based tightly on my geographic location because the wider "content network" is simply flooded with noise, and that problem is worsening already.
csomar 4y ago
I had a discussion with a friend about this the other day. In the future, you’ll use an AI to write emails. The AI will learn about your style and then write targeted emails for your audience. Your audience, becoming tech savvy, will now use their own AI to answer your emails. We are going to end up with AIs talking to AIs. AIs writing content but also AI reading this same content and learning from it. Talk about the trading economy being a zero-sum game where people are moving tokens from one hand to another? Wait until you see the AI economy.
- DharmaPolice 4y ago
  Well, that's the sort of the personal digital assistant I actually want - something to manage my inbox/diary, respond to the trivial stuff (which is most things) and then escalate to me the things that are beyond it's scope (or things from experience it knows I want to see). Of course, I'll stop reading what my "assistant" has said on my behalf after the first week and it'll spiral out of control from there.
- pards 4y ago
  > The AI will learn about your style and then write targeted emails for your audience The AI will need a corpus of _your content_ to draw upon if it's to write in your style. One could feed it one's work inbox (presuming one's employer allows this) but new grads won't have the luxury of having once written corporate emails by hand.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Or, the sentiment is that they can shed a lot of unnecessary jobs and increase profit.
- hanselot 4y ago
  Based on their existing data only I would say LLM's from 3 years ago could already write better articles...
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Not if we can build AIs to do the engagement.
likeabbas 4y ago
Leads me to believe the world will need some kind of biometric cryptographic signatures for anything we do online to show it's being done by a real human. For example, your iPhone would need to run FaceID anytime you wanted to post to hacker news. Not sure that's a world I want to live in
- mmsc 4y ago
  >your iPhone would need to run FaceID anytime you wanted to post to hacker news You can already pay people to do things for you, using their "online identity". This will just continue that.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Hm. Biometric captchas. I wonder if that is feasible. Maybe the internet sends you a DNA sequence and you have to inject it, translate it and then image the folded protein (computers are ok at protein folding but not great yet)
  - likeabbas 4y ago
    I answered my idea in another thread. tl;dr Apple would be the certificate authority that can verify a public key came from an iPhone that had biometric authentication enabled, but apple won't tell the website who the user is.
- loudmax 4y ago
  When you put it that way it sounds like a nuisance, but surely that could be resolved through better UX engineering. Deciphering a captcha or staring at a camera each time you want to post are real annoyances and such a site probably wouldn't get much traction. But if the right infrastructure were in place, a lot of us would be happy to participate in a community where we're confident that everyone there is an actual person, not a spambot or a sock puppet. The right infrastructure here could a tall order, but I don't think this is an impossible problem.
  - likeabbas 4y ago
NaN1352 4y ago
Maybe I’m overdramatizing but as I see it, AI will accelerate the end of ALL shallow content. And maybe thas is a good thing. Maybe as a civilization, we need to come out of slumber, of drugging ourselves out day and night with endless tv series, super hero movies and so called "games" (about 90% of which are garbage and/or cookie clickers at their core). So it’s fascinating : our best shot at capitalism created all this technological innovation, but also so much parasitic, essentially pointless "work" where people toil away creating "content" and "entertainment" such as games, movies etc the majority of which is consumed in our "time off" to unwind and forget about "working" (I’m thinking in particular of the movie Kooyanisqatsi which illustrates this madness). We couldn’t imagine a different way of life - but the funny thing is, AI will help us come out of this slumber by making the majority of so called "entertainment" - which is garbage let’s face it (80/20 rule and all that) - pretty much obsolete as well as valueless. So this seems paradoxical but I believe the best thing about AI is it will free us and drive us towards real value and authenticity in our day to day relationships and expression. Gonna be a long road though…
- saurik 4y ago
  It might become "valueless"--in that anyone can make it for free--but would it ever become "obsolete"? How often has making something everyone wants cheaper--or free!--caused people to consume less of it?
loudmax 4y ago
I misread your first sentence as "This could be the beginning of the end for CEO content." A good CEO provides irreplaceable value, but there is a significant fraction of enterprises that would probably do just well if they were run by ChatGPT.
monkeydust 4y ago
This is all eventually going to lead to a flight to quality - might be time to start a blog (again!)
sfmike 4y ago
it could become higher engaged and converting as it will follow cialdini principles even stricter producing better quality content. Unless our minds start acting differently suddenly.
eloff 4y ago
It’s time for the next paradigm in search. In the beginning content was king until Google came along and discovered linking was a better signal of quality. Then people abused linking and technology for “understanding” content reached the point where that flipped again. Now where do we go? Back to linking?
ryyr 4y ago
yes but no, generated blurbs by the search engine itself to answer user searched questions (how average joe uses google) will kill seo; you can make a million generated articles but almost no one will read them if google provides the user with a generated answer conveniently without having to trawl several links. you get no ad revenue if you get no clicks on the content side of things i don't think people will notice
- ryyr 4y ago
  for example, i have no need for a sports app or website to check the box score of a game, i just type in the name of the team into google and it's there at the top of the page i don't think this is widely adopted though, most people i know are still married to the idea of having an app than using their mobile browser, it will take some time (or a stellar marketing campaign for the google and bing apps)
- vlovich123 4y ago
  So AI will summarize what other AI has written?
coffeeblack 4y ago
I disagree. Because AI content isn’t all the same. Take a ChatGPT algorithm and train it on funny texts v. train it on enraging texts, for example. The goal will be to train an AI that writes the most engaging and addictive content for the target audience.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>and content will eventually become worthless Eventually? Are you saying Buzzfeed content is currently NOT worthless? "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." What does the online future look like? Drowning in mountains of AI generated garbage and AI based search engines who won't be able to differentiate between fake AI generated stuff and the truth, so we'll get garbage answers?

whstl 4y ago
Good questions there. I could agree that Buzzfeed content is perhaps worth very little or even nothing in the grand scheme of the internet, but it's at least a fun past-time to some people. SEO-driven marketing content, however, is worse than worthless: it produces negative value to the mankind. It pollutes Google searches, it distills knowledge even further, it is written by either robots or underpaid freelancers, and it drowns out the work written by professionals in the area.

luckylion 4y ago

Or rather, the end of the easy mode search engine. Google has been losing the fight against SEO for the past years. I'm not sure if they don't care (because ads bring in the money, not SERPs) or if they can't. Relying on PageRank / links (like they currently do as the super-dominating factor) doesn't work if larger sites will employ AI (like BuzzFeed). Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but I fed in text from a German public broadcaster into one of the "identify ChatGPT" things and it said it looked like ChatGPT. I doubt these technologically conservative editors are using ChatGPT to write official reports. Instead, they'd need to understand the topic at hand to judge whether a page is useful in answering the user's question. And at that point, they have an answering machine and no longer need to show search results.

PurpleRamen 4y ago
> Or rather, the end of the easy mode search engine. Google has been losing the fight against SEO for the past years. I'm not sure if they don't care (because ads bring in the money, not SERPs) or if they can't. It's probably that they can't. It's hard to evaluate content which you don't understand and when you have the whole world gaming against you. Likewise, it will be also interesting to see if AI really can change this, because the results so far were not gamed by SEO. At the end AI has the same problem to solve if it wants to replace search engines. The question is also how fast AIs can update their knowledge. Google Search can be blazing fast in delivering the newest results even for the most random topic. > Relying on PageRank / links (like they currently do as the super-dominating factor) doesn't work if larger sites will employ AI (like BuzzFeed). Aren't they doing more than this for some time now? Though, true that links alone are not very useful against Manipulations. Maybe letting AI curate the results will be the trick? Another problem might be that Google want's to stay simple and vague. Which is of course legit, as more information will give SEO more attack-surface. But maybe add a more complex interaction-mode for people who don't just search 2-3 words. A built-in ai-prompt which switches to some ChatGPT-Like response is an obvious google-style solution to battle against the new wave of competitors. > Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. Is this necessary? At the end, it's a matter of quality. If AI-Texts are high quality, delivering exactly what you want, why not? After all, the problem with spam today is the quality. Though, for this of course Google would need a kind of quality-check, which their own AI can deliver, maybe. > Relying on their ability to tell apart AI and human generated texts? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but I fed in text from a German public broadcaster into one of the "identify ChatGPT" things and it said it looked like ChatGPT. I doubt these technologically conservative editors are using ChatGPT to write official reports. But they usually use a very formalistic template-based style. Often it's even just copy & paste of paragraphs from different sources. So yes, news are already very AI-like today, even without AI involved. The human usually only brings in their skill in evaluating the content and composing them with matching parts. > Instead, they'd need to understand the topic at hand to judge whether a page is useful in answering the user's question. And at that point, they have an answering machine and no longer need to show search results. Yes, but people have not always questions to answer. And it's also a kind of trust-issue whether I want to see the original source, or some more context to the answer, or whether I blindly trust the answer from Google. I mean they already today have common Q&As in their search results, and you can see also where they are coming from. But often they don't quite satisfy my demand. Sometimes they are to short, sometimes they are plain out wrong. Sometimes they are just not what I search. Traditional search still has its place even with AI, until we reach the age of completely trustable strong AIs.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

As if Buzzfeed has today any label of quality... Well, ok, their Articles are quite good, they even got a Pulitzer IIRC. But overall, Buzzfeed is already a synonym for generic lifetime-wasting trash-content. I'd even say, an AI might actually improve the quality, bringing us a golden age of worthy trash. Because the dirty little secret at the end of all of this is: People like trash. Good Trash can be entertaining and supporting your procrastination. Sometimes it can even be informative, or at least giving you the impression.

marban 4y ago
Pulitzer => Buzzfeed News, not Buzzfeed.com
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  Yes, I don't use either of them. But there is a link to news on Buzzfeed.com, so I assume there is a certain level of mix between the different contents for the readers?
  - cormacrelf 4y ago
    As far as you can see from the outside there is zero correlation in either internal direction/editorial control or readership
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Well... "National Enquirer Now Legit, According to Pulitzer Prize Board" https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/national-enquirer-now-legit-pulitzer-prize-board/story?id=9887329 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/national-enquirer-now-l... "Shock! Horror! National Enquirer wins a Pulitzer. Not" https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/apr/13/shock-horror-national-enquirer-pulitzer https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/apr/13/shock-horror-n... Evidently, the Pulitzer has lost its way, much like the rest of Journalism.
  - rideontime 4y ago

buran77 4y ago

> The value of these companies will go up for now because Because they attach themselves to the "big thing" in tech right now. The "big thing" is a really big tide so the hope is that it will lift all boats. That's it, it doesn't have to actually do anything, just associating with this gives a good momentary boost. Used to be blockchain and NFTs until just recently. But some companies are not boats, they're stones on the bottom barely keeping their peak above water. Others are not even in the water but on the side of a hill far away, like the Long Island Blockchain. They still wave the "big thing" flag so some of its image will rub off on them even. Of course, unlike the the Long Island Blockchain these guys can actually generate content with AI but I don't think that's the endgame here. Doesn't take a genius to tell that hundreds of clones can now pop up and deliver perfect equivalence with little to no effort. So the goal is probably to pump and dump while there's still something to dump. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/10/investing/blockchain-long-island-insider-trading/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/10/investing/blockchain-long...

ergonaught 4y ago

SEO content is already "underperforming" unless you're in some kind of "niche" that filters you out of "participation" in the wider network, and those "just hasn't been hit yet". ex: some of my sites are effectively invisible on search engines unless the engine is "filtering" based tightly on my geographic location because the wider "content network" is simply flooded with noise, and that problem is worsening already.

csomar 4y ago

I had a discussion with a friend about this the other day. In the future, you’ll use an AI to write emails. The AI will learn about your style and then write targeted emails for your audience. Your audience, becoming tech savvy, will now use their own AI to answer your emails. We are going to end up with AIs talking to AIs. AIs writing content but also AI reading this same content and learning from it. Talk about the trading economy being a zero-sum game where people are moving tokens from one hand to another? Wait until you see the AI economy.

DharmaPolice 4y ago
Well, that's the sort of the personal digital assistant I actually want - something to manage my inbox/diary, respond to the trivial stuff (which is most things) and then escalate to me the things that are beyond it's scope (or things from experience it knows I want to see). Of course, I'll stop reading what my "assistant" has said on my behalf after the first week and it'll spiral out of control from there.
pards 4y ago
> The AI will learn about your style and then write targeted emails for your audience The AI will need a corpus of _your content_ to draw upon if it's to write in your style. One could feed it one's work inbox (presuming one's employer allows this) but new grads won't have the luxury of having once written corporate emails by hand.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Or, the sentiment is that they can shed a lot of unnecessary jobs and increase profit.

hanselot 4y ago
Based on their existing data only I would say LLM's from 3 years ago could already write better articles...

matthewdgreen 4y ago

Not if we can build AIs to do the engagement.

likeabbas 4y ago

Leads me to believe the world will need some kind of biometric cryptographic signatures for anything we do online to show it's being done by a real human. For example, your iPhone would need to run FaceID anytime you wanted to post to hacker news. Not sure that's a world I want to live in

mmsc 4y ago
>your iPhone would need to run FaceID anytime you wanted to post to hacker news You can already pay people to do things for you, using their "online identity". This will just continue that.
foobarbecue 4y ago
Hm. Biometric captchas. I wonder if that is feasible. Maybe the internet sends you a DNA sequence and you have to inject it, translate it and then image the folded protein (computers are ok at protein folding but not great yet)
- likeabbas 4y ago
  I answered my idea in another thread. tl;dr Apple would be the certificate authority that can verify a public key came from an iPhone that had biometric authentication enabled, but apple won't tell the website who the user is.
loudmax 4y ago
When you put it that way it sounds like a nuisance, but surely that could be resolved through better UX engineering. Deciphering a captcha or staring at a camera each time you want to post are real annoyances and such a site probably wouldn't get much traction. But if the right infrastructure were in place, a lot of us would be happy to participate in a community where we're confident that everyone there is an actual person, not a spambot or a sock puppet. The right infrastructure here could a tall order, but I don't think this is an impossible problem.
- likeabbas 4y ago

NaN1352 4y ago

Maybe I’m overdramatizing but as I see it, AI will accelerate the end of ALL shallow content. And maybe thas is a good thing. Maybe as a civilization, we need to come out of slumber, of drugging ourselves out day and night with endless tv series, super hero movies and so called "games" (about 90% of which are garbage and/or cookie clickers at their core). So it’s fascinating : our best shot at capitalism created all this technological innovation, but also so much parasitic, essentially pointless "work" where people toil away creating "content" and "entertainment" such as games, movies etc the majority of which is consumed in our "time off" to unwind and forget about "working" (I’m thinking in particular of the movie Kooyanisqatsi which illustrates this madness). We couldn’t imagine a different way of life - but the funny thing is, AI will help us come out of this slumber by making the majority of so called "entertainment" - which is garbage let’s face it (80/20 rule and all that) - pretty much obsolete as well as valueless. So this seems paradoxical but I believe the best thing about AI is it will free us and drive us towards real value and authenticity in our day to day relationships and expression. Gonna be a long road though…

saurik 4y ago
It might become "valueless"--in that anyone can make it for free--but would it ever become "obsolete"? How often has making something everyone wants cheaper--or free!--caused people to consume less of it?

loudmax 4y ago

I misread your first sentence as "This could be the beginning of the end for CEO content." A good CEO provides irreplaceable value, but there is a significant fraction of enterprises that would probably do just well if they were run by ChatGPT.

monkeydust 4y ago

This is all eventually going to lead to a flight to quality - might be time to start a blog (again!)

sfmike 4y ago

it could become higher engaged and converting as it will follow cialdini principles even stricter producing better quality content. Unless our minds start acting differently suddenly.

eloff 4y ago

It’s time for the next paradigm in search. In the beginning content was king until Google came along and discovered linking was a better signal of quality. Then people abused linking and technology for “understanding” content reached the point where that flipped again. Now where do we go? Back to linking?

ryyr 4y ago

yes but no, generated blurbs by the search engine itself to answer user searched questions (how average joe uses google) will kill seo; you can make a million generated articles but almost no one will read them if google provides the user with a generated answer conveniently without having to trawl several links. you get no ad revenue if you get no clicks on the content side of things i don't think people will notice

ryyr 4y ago
for example, i have no need for a sports app or website to check the box score of a game, i just type in the name of the team into google and it's there at the top of the page i don't think this is widely adopted though, most people i know are still married to the idea of having an app than using their mobile browser, it will take some time (or a stellar marketing campaign for the google and bing apps)
vlovich123 4y ago
So AI will summarize what other AI has written?

coffeeblack 4y ago

I disagree. Because AI content isn’t all the same. Take a ChatGPT algorithm and train it on funny texts v. train it on enraging texts, for example. The goal will be to train an AI that writes the most engaging and addictive content for the target audience.