6 ms·

Anthropic's AI-generated blog dies an early death

83 points by Sourabhsss1 1y ago

paxys 1y ago
It's fascinating how creative these large AI companies are at finding ways to burn through VC funding. Hire a team of developers/content writers/editors, tune your models, set up a blog and build an entire infrastructure to publish articles to it, market it, and then...shut it all down in a week. And this is a company burning through multiple billions of dollars every quarter just to keep the lights on.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  The joys of wealth transfer from the poor and the middle class workers to the asset owning class via inflation and the Cantillion Effect [1]. 1- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect
  - stanford_labrat 1y ago
    I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it. Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
    - chimeracoder 1y ago
      > I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it. That would be the case if VCs were investing their own money, but they're not. They're investing on behalf of their LPs. Who LPs are is generally an extremely closely-guarded secret, but it includes institutional investors, which means middle-class pensions and 401(k)s are wrapped up in these investments as well, just as they were tied up in the 2008 financial crisis. It's not as clean-cut as it seems.
    - givemeethekeys 1y ago
      Can VC's get their funding from mutual funds and pension plans?
      - rightbyte 1y ago
        I think that is the 'find bag holders' part of the plan?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - hinkley 1y ago
      I think the chilling effect on mom and pop businesses undoes all of that. When they (we) disrupt and industry the power consolidates but in new hands. The idea is to get it away from the entrenched interests but like a good cultural revolution the second tier ends up in charge when the first tier gets beheaded.
- swyx 1y ago
  it's fascinating how you think being creative is an insult.
  - an-honest-moose 1y ago
    It's about how they're applying that creativity, not the creativity itself.
  - bowsamic 1y ago
    What makes you think they think that? If someone says “finding creative ways to murder people” you think they’re saying the problem is the “creative” part?
pscanf 1y ago
People use AI to write blogs, passing them off as human-written. AI companies use humans to write blogs, passing them off as AI-written. :)
anon7000 1y ago
AI generated web content has got to be one of the most counterproductive things to use AI on. If I wanted an AI summary of a topic or answer to a question, a chatbot of choice can easily provide that for you. There’s no need for yet another piece of blogspam that isn’t introducing new information into the world. That content is already available inside the AI model. At some point, we’ll get so oversaturated with fake, generated BS that there won’t be enough high quality new information to feed them.
- echelon 1y ago
  Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web could be a tool to get people off of Google and existing social media platforms. I'm certainly using Google less and less these days, and even niche subreddits are getting an influx of LLM drivel. There are fantastic uses of AI, but there's an over-abundance of low-effort growth hacking at scale that is saturating existing conduits of signal. I have to wonder if some of this might be done intentionally to poison the well.
  - tartoran 1y ago
    > Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web could be a tool to get people off of Google and existing social media platforms. How? Fill the web with AI generated content or just using LLMs to search for information? As more junk is poured into training LLMs this too will take a hit at some point. I remember how great the early web search was, one could find from thousands to millions of hits for request. At some point it got so polluted that it became nearly useless. It wasn't only spam that made is less useful, it was also the search providers who twisted the rules to get them to reap all the benefits.
- h1fra 1y ago
  hear me out: seo
- saulpw 1y ago
  This is pretty reductive. Many people want to pump some new thoughts they had into an AI to generate something tolerable to post on their blog. The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are. But they can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or don't feel like they can, anyway). So the AI is an assistant which takes their thoughts and makes them look acceptable for publication.
swyx 1y ago
[flagged]
neya 1y ago
I can tell you this much - most people who are opposed to AI writing blog articles are usually from the editorial team. They somehow believe they're immune to being replaced by AI. And this stems from the misconception that AI content will always sound AI, soul-less, dry, boring, easy to spot and all that. This was true with ChatGPT-3xx. It's not anymore. In fact, the models have advanced so much so that you will have a really hard time distinguishing between a real writer and an AI. We actually tried this with a large Hollywood publisher in-house as a thought experiment. We asked some of the naysayers from the editorial + CXO team to sit in a room with us, while we presented on a large white screen - a comparison of two random articles - one written by AI, which btw wasn't trained, but just fed a couple of articles of the said writer on the slide into the AI's context window, and another which was actually written by the writer themselves. Nobody in the room could tell which was AI and which wasn't. This is where we stand today. Many websites you read daily actually have so much AI in them, just that you can't tell anymore.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Have you tried gptzero?
  - neya 1y ago
    Yep, it is not able to recognize. To be fair, it's not just dump it into ChatGPT and copy paste kind of AI. We feed it into the model in stages, we use 2-3 different models for content generation, and another 2 later on to smoothen the tone. But, all of these are just OTS models, not trained. For example, we do use Gemini in one of the flows.
  - vonunov 1y ago
    Well, at least it passes the basic sanity test I've been using. ZeroGPT, on the other hand, gives a "100% AI" rating to the introduction and preamble of the US Declaration of Independence (from "When in the Course of human events" to "provide new Guards for their future security").
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
  Counterpoint: GPT-4 and later variants, such as o3 and 4.5, have such a characteristic style that it's hard not to spot them. Em dashes, "it's not just (x), it's (y)," "underscoring (z)," the limited number of ways it structures sentences and paragraphs and likes to end things with an emphasized conclusion, and I could go on all day. DeepSeek is a little bit better at writing in a generic and uncharacteristic tone, but still... it's not good.
Powdering7082 1y ago
Did the reporter reach out to Anthropic for public comment on this? They list a "source familiar" with some details about what the intended purpose was for, but no mention on the why
jasonthorsness 1y ago
Is there an archive anywhere? People can argue to no end based on some whimsical assumptions of what the blog was and why it was taken down, but it really comes down to the content. I have found even o3 cannot write high-quality articles on the topics I want to write about.
- linkage 1y ago
  Have you tried Perplexity's Discover feed? It's my go-to source of news these days. I don't know what model they use to generate content but it's really good.
jsemrau 1y ago
Up until a few weeks ago, my LinkedIn seemed to become better because of AI, but now it seems everything is lazy AI slop. We meatbags are great pattern recognizers. Here is a list of my current triggers: "The twist?", "Then something remarkable happened", That said, this is more of an indictment of the lazyness of the authors to provide clearer instructions on the style needed so the app defaults to such patterns.
- jsemrau 1y ago
  "But here's the kicker"
- vonunov 1y ago
  These are the first four words of each sentence from a thing ChatGPT wrote. I will let this speak for itself, mostly. Can you see the forest past the trees and spot the major "turning points"? (Context: I told it to write at "will" after a session of explaining Rene Girard's mimetic desire in the styles of various authors) *Well, here we are, You've got me tangled *And hey, maybe I *Imagine this: I'm sitting *And maybe now, I'm You've got me thinking *Maybe it's saying, "Hey, *And so, I think Not just any wanting, The kind that makes There's something beautiful about The way it drives *But here's the kicker: It's got a mind It makes us do It's a double-edged sword *And yet, without it, Probably just sitting around, *So maybe, just maybe, *Not just because you've *It's that tiny ember In the end, desire's It's the fire that *And maybe, just maybe, [yes, again] So here's to the May it burn bright https://ccp.cx/a/chatgpt-voice.htm https://ccp.cx/a/chatgpt-voice.htm >>But here's the thing. >This is one of the usual key turning points in these essays. An earlier one happened when it was like [introduces idea] [straw-mans objection] [denies strawman]. I didn't bring it up because it's not always a strong one and this one didn't seem entirely too heavy-handed. There is, however, much more often a very obvious "But here's the thing" (or similar) to be found. As soon as I saw that, I already knew I was going to find a paragraph beginning with "So" somewhere near the end.
  - idonotknowwhy 1y ago
    # Why it matters I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. 2 hosting companies use this in every single weekly spam email they send.
jsnider3 1y ago
We try things, sometimes they don't work.
joegibbs 1y ago
The problem with using AI for writing is that most of the time you're trying to convey some kind of information that the AI doesn't know. If your business has outperformed some metric, the AI doesn't know until you tell it. So unless you write a very long prompt with all the facts and data that you want to convey, you just get fluff. If you do that, you get pretty polished prose but it doesn't save you all that much time.

83 points by Sourabhsss1 1y ago

It's fascinating how creative these large AI companies are at finding ways to burn through VC funding. Hire a team of developers/content writers/editors, tune your models, set up a blog and build an entire infrastructure to publish articles to it, market it, and then...shut it all down in a week. And this is a company burning through multiple billions of dollars every quarter just to keep the lights on.

elzbardico 1y ago
The joys of wealth transfer from the poor and the middle class workers to the asset owning class via inflation and the Cantillion Effect [1]. 1- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect
- stanford_labrat 1y ago
  I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it. Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
  - chimeracoder 1y ago
    > I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn with nothing to show for it. That would be the case if VCs were investing their own money, but they're not. They're investing on behalf of their LPs. Who LPs are is generally an extremely closely-guarded secret, but it includes institutional investors, which means middle-class pensions and 401(k)s are wrapped up in these investments as well, just as they were tied up in the 2008 financial crisis. It's not as clean-cut as it seems.
  - givemeethekeys 1y ago
    Can VC's get their funding from mutual funds and pension plans?
    - rightbyte 1y ago
      I think that is the 'find bag holders' part of the plan?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - hinkley 1y ago
    I think the chilling effect on mom and pop businesses undoes all of that. When they (we) disrupt and industry the power consolidates but in new hands. The idea is to get it away from the entrenched interests but like a good cultural revolution the second tier ends up in charge when the first tier gets beheaded.
swyx 1y ago
it's fascinating how you think being creative is an insult.
- an-honest-moose 1y ago
  It's about how they're applying that creativity, not the creativity itself.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  What makes you think they think that? If someone says “finding creative ways to murder people” you think they’re saying the problem is the “creative” part?

pscanf 1y ago

People use AI to write blogs, passing them off as human-written. AI companies use humans to write blogs, passing them off as AI-written. :)

anon7000 1y ago

AI generated web content has got to be one of the most counterproductive things to use AI on. If I wanted an AI summary of a topic or answer to a question, a chatbot of choice can easily provide that for you. There’s no need for yet another piece of blogspam that isn’t introducing new information into the world. That content is already available inside the AI model. At some point, we’ll get so oversaturated with fake, generated BS that there won’t be enough high quality new information to feed them.

echelon 1y ago
Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web could be a tool to get people off of Google and existing social media platforms. I'm certainly using Google less and less these days, and even niche subreddits are getting an influx of LLM drivel. There are fantastic uses of AI, but there's an over-abundance of low-effort growth hacking at scale that is saturating existing conduits of signal. I have to wonder if some of this might be done intentionally to poison the well.
- tartoran 1y ago
  > Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web could be a tool to get people off of Google and existing social media platforms. How? Fill the web with AI generated content or just using LLMs to search for information? As more junk is poured into training LLMs this too will take a hit at some point. I remember how great the early web search was, one could find from thousands to millions of hits for request. At some point it got so polluted that it became nearly useless. It wasn't only spam that made is less useful, it was also the search providers who twisted the rules to get them to reap all the benefits.
h1fra 1y ago
hear me out: seo
saulpw 1y ago
This is pretty reductive. Many people want to pump some new thoughts they had into an AI to generate something tolerable to post on their blog. The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are. But they can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or don't feel like they can, anyway). So the AI is an assistant which takes their thoughts and makes them look acceptable for publication.

swyx 1y ago

[flagged]

neya 1y ago

I can tell you this much - most people who are opposed to AI writing blog articles are usually from the editorial team. They somehow believe they're immune to being replaced by AI. And this stems from the misconception that AI content will always sound AI, soul-less, dry, boring, easy to spot and all that. This was true with ChatGPT-3xx. It's not anymore. In fact, the models have advanced so much so that you will have a really hard time distinguishing between a real writer and an AI. We actually tried this with a large Hollywood publisher in-house as a thought experiment. We asked some of the naysayers from the editorial + CXO team to sit in a room with us, while we presented on a large white screen - a comparison of two random articles - one written by AI, which btw wasn't trained, but just fed a couple of articles of the said writer on the slide into the AI's context window, and another which was actually written by the writer themselves. Nobody in the room could tell which was AI and which wasn't. This is where we stand today. Many websites you read daily actually have so much AI in them, just that you can't tell anymore.

koakuma-chan 1y ago
Have you tried gptzero?
- neya 1y ago
  Yep, it is not able to recognize. To be fair, it's not just dump it into ChatGPT and copy paste kind of AI. We feed it into the model in stages, we use 2-3 different models for content generation, and another 2 later on to smoothen the tone. But, all of these are just OTS models, not trained. For example, we do use Gemini in one of the flows.
- vonunov 1y ago
  Well, at least it passes the basic sanity test I've been using. ZeroGPT, on the other hand, gives a "100% AI" rating to the introduction and preamble of the US Declaration of Independence (from "When in the Course of human events" to "provide new Guards for their future security").
A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
Counterpoint: GPT-4 and later variants, such as o3 and 4.5, have such a characteristic style that it's hard not to spot them. Em dashes, "it's not just (x), it's (y)," "underscoring (z)," the limited number of ways it structures sentences and paragraphs and likes to end things with an emphasized conclusion, and I could go on all day. DeepSeek is a little bit better at writing in a generic and uncharacteristic tone, but still... it's not good.

Powdering7082 1y ago

Did the reporter reach out to Anthropic for public comment on this? They list a "source familiar" with some details about what the intended purpose was for, but no mention on the why

jasonthorsness 1y ago

Is there an archive anywhere? People can argue to no end based on some whimsical assumptions of what the blog was and why it was taken down, but it really comes down to the content. I have found even o3 cannot write high-quality articles on the topics I want to write about.

linkage 1y ago
Have you tried Perplexity's Discover feed? It's my go-to source of news these days. I don't know what model they use to generate content but it's really good.

jsemrau 1y ago

Up until a few weeks ago, my LinkedIn seemed to become better because of AI, but now it seems everything is lazy AI slop. We meatbags are great pattern recognizers. Here is a list of my current triggers: "The twist?", "Then something remarkable happened", That said, this is more of an indictment of the lazyness of the authors to provide clearer instructions on the style needed so the app defaults to such patterns.

jsemrau 1y ago
"But here's the kicker"
vonunov 1y ago
These are the first four words of each sentence from a thing ChatGPT wrote. I will let this speak for itself, mostly. Can you see the forest past the trees and spot the major "turning points"? (Context: I told it to write at "will" after a session of explaining Rene Girard's mimetic desire in the styles of various authors) *Well, here we are, You've got me tangled *And hey, maybe I *Imagine this: I'm sitting *And maybe now, I'm You've got me thinking *Maybe it's saying, "Hey, *And so, I think Not just any wanting, The kind that makes There's something beautiful about The way it drives *But here's the kicker: It's got a mind It makes us do It's a double-edged sword *And yet, without it, Probably just sitting around, *So maybe, just maybe, *Not just because you've *It's that tiny ember In the end, desire's It's the fire that *And maybe, just maybe, [yes, again] So here's to the May it burn bright https://ccp.cx/a/chatgpt-voice.htm https://ccp.cx/a/chatgpt-voice.htm >>But here's the thing. >This is one of the usual key turning points in these essays. An earlier one happened when it was like [introduces idea] [straw-mans objection] [denies strawman]. I didn't bring it up because it's not always a strong one and this one didn't seem entirely too heavy-handed. There is, however, much more often a very obvious "But here's the thing" (or similar) to be found. As soon as I saw that, I already knew I was going to find a paragraph beginning with "So" somewhere near the end.
- idonotknowwhy 1y ago
  # Why it matters I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. 2 hosting companies use this in every single weekly spam email they send.

jsnider3 1y ago

We try things, sometimes they don't work.

joegibbs 1y ago

The problem with using AI for writing is that most of the time you're trying to convey some kind of information that the AI doesn't know. If your business has outperformed some metric, the AI doesn't know until you tell it. So unless you write a very long prompt with all the facts and data that you want to convey, you just get fluff. If you do that, you get pretty polished prose but it doesn't save you all that much time.