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Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to ge

Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.

jsheard 3y ago
Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.
- HughParry 3y ago
  The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    While the Google Search people are scrambling to figure out how to sift through genAI slop, another team on the other side of the Google campus is building a platform for publishers to generate that slop. By joining the AI arms race they've put themselves in the awkward position of contributing to the problem that's killing their own core product. https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai/ https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...
    - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      Yup I saw the Google official YouTube channel comment on a seo channel saying these are good tips and the tips were basically let AI generate a bunch of content for you. Google is out of ideas and they are lost as a company. They will take a long time to die out but die out they will.
- mega_dean 3y ago
  A recent example of this was "theresawikiforthat", which generated sites like ocamlwiki.com and juliawiki.com that were full of very low-quality information. They are offline now, but the ocamlwiki was consistently toward the top of google search results for a while last year. Here are some threads from the ocaml/julia communities as they started to catch on: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    I would like to write a bot for these kinds of websites, but subvert the whole thing, have no ads, no waffle, high quality info. Get to the point as fast as possible.
- kibibu 3y ago
  I got a few hundred words into a product review the other day before I encountered "as of my knowledge cut off..." Shame on me for not noticing earlier, but I did expect a review site listed on page 1 of google to host actual reviews
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
Yes, historically people abuse tools for spam. And also golergka is still completely correct.
AbstractH24 3y ago
You speak of this like its something that is behind us. lol, thats funny.

jsheard 3y ago

Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.

HughParry 3y ago
The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.
- jsheard 3y ago
  While the Google Search people are scrambling to figure out how to sift through genAI slop, another team on the other side of the Google campus is building a platform for publishers to generate that slop. By joining the AI arms race they've put themselves in the awkward position of contributing to the problem that's killing their own core product. https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unreleased-gen-ai/ https://www.adweek.com/media/google-paying-publishers-unrele...
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Yup I saw the Google official YouTube channel comment on a seo channel saying these are good tips and the tips were basically let AI generate a bunch of content for you. Google is out of ideas and they are lost as a company. They will take a long time to die out but die out they will.
mega_dean 3y ago
A recent example of this was "theresawikiforthat", which generated sites like ocamlwiki.com and juliawiki.com that were full of very low-quality information. They are offline now, but the ocamlwiki was consistently toward the top of google search results for a while last year. Here are some threads from the ocaml/julia communities as they started to catch on: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/whats-up-with-ocamlwiki/13605 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/whats-the-juliawiki/109335
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I would like to write a bot for these kinds of websites, but subvert the whole thing, have no ads, no waffle, high quality info. Get to the point as fast as possible.
kibibu 3y ago
I got a few hundred words into a product review the other day before I encountered "as of my knowledge cut off..." Shame on me for not noticing earlier, but I did expect a review site listed on page 1 of google to host actual reviews

a_wild_dandan 3y ago

Yes, historically people abuse tools for spam. And also golergka is still completely correct.

AbstractH24 3y ago

You speak of this like its something that is behind us. lol, thats funny.