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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Buzzfeed has been pumping out so much meaningless content that I doubt it changes much. They already scrape so much content from /r/askreddit that it might as well be automated already, now they can auto generate the fluff text between citations.
Blogs have been becoming less and less relevant to me over the years as companies shifted to creating content for the sake of traffic. Some tech blogs have some really interesting posts, hidden in a sea of glorified Getting Started tutorials.
Yeah that is a point that I wish more understood. Many companies think they're mining a new gold mine, but they're just positioning themselves as middlemen, opening up both to competition and being squeeze from their providers.
> “To be clear, we see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti said. [0]
Depends how the AI part is presented. Explicit or obscured? Upfront or shady?
For some people, that makes all the difference. I told my (non-technical) wife about ChatGPT when it came out, and she was revulsed. Not by the technology itself (which she couldn't care less about) but by its "feel".
When I prodded deeper, her revulsion came down to "I'd feel cheated if I realized I've been interacting with a machine masquerading as a human". Not the machine itself, but the successful masquerading.
I suspect she's not alone, and "being cheated" will be a visceral issue to a lot more people than the early money-grabbers and AI enthusiasts give credit for.
> Another correction suggests the AI tool plagiarized. “We’ve replaced phrases that were not entirely original,” according to the correction added to an article on how to close a bank account.
This is such a self-own to admit your content is so formulaic, a bot can automate writing it.
That investors responded positively goes to show you where generative AI is on the hype curve. The trough of disillusionment comes after we accept that if a bot can write it, it's commodity content.
Buzzfeed did win a Pulitzer for their series exposing the detention of Muslims in China. The potential is there, they just need to let their people do the work they are capable of.
Add this to the reasons for why I struggle to take the stock market seriously.
Can you make money off trading stocks? Absolutely. Can you successfully use the stock market as part of your retirement plan? Probably.
However, I don't "believe" in it. In no way is it operating on any intuitive sense of what would make a stock worth more than another. Today it seems entirely driven by keywords, inverted logic, and the intent to short. I don't see how artificially pumping up the market with institutionalized retirement plans helps either, besides to keep money out of the hands of the middle class and in those who can manipulate it. What's worse is stocks are becoming one of the few ways that said middle class can even get ahead; bonds have a very low yield and could even implode if the US dollar declines, inflation eats at savings, and wages struggle to keep up with said inflation.
Articles like this one are going to appear in (the equivalent of) textbooks in the future and people will look at it and wonder how we could not see what's coming for us.
On the bright side, I hope this is the beginning of the end for the flurry of bullshit on the internet. Not that there won't be plenty of bullshit to go around, as was the case pre-internet, but the combination of SEO and AI may turn into an ouroboros that consumes itself.
Though I think the ouroboros is supposed to represent the cycle of life, so maybe an "ant mill" is more analogous.
What exactly is the grievance here? Retirement plans aren't obligated to but any particular stock or index fund. You're lumping the entire market into one entity when in reality there are plenty of underperforming stocks that are very purposefully overlooked.
On one side, you have AI creating content, on the other, you have various bots scraping ("reading") that content... what do humans do now? And what is the added value of buzzfeed compared to just conversing with chatGPT?
Maybe humans can move to Gemini [1] while the AIs battle it out on the web. Just don't tell the marketing people.
Or, if we're lucky, the AI content generation marketers will all move to "Web3" with the blockchain proponents, where they can enjoy scamming each other, leaving the rest of us to use the regular old-fashioned web in peace.
Remember during the crypto boom and companies stock would pop on PR that they were accepting crypto payments. There were even companies that were wrongly attributed to having moved into the crypto space and still got the pop.
This is very interesting in that many journals/blogs/news sites have made strong pushes to unionize in recent years. Technology is now giving them another shot with new AI tech. How will these powerful unions respond?
The news part for me is that they actually had humans producing all those lists. You don't even need AI to make those things. It seems like the appropriate thing for them to do.
[+] [-] Kaotique|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buran77|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] PurpleRamen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckylion|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ergonaught|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] likeabbas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] NaN1352|3 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeydust|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeeblack|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sfmike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loudmax|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryyr|3 years ago|reply
on the content side of things i don't think people will notice
[+] [-] consumer451|3 years ago|reply
Argument being that this could be related more to the fact Facebook will pay BuzzFeed for content.
https://old.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/10m0731/buzzfeed...
[+] [-] senttoschool|3 years ago|reply
If it uses AI to create content, it'll go bankrupt pretty fast.
Why? Because Buzzfeed has no proprietary AI content creation tech that others can't easily replicate.
[+] [-] ClikeX|3 years ago|reply
Blogs have been becoming less and less relevant to me over the years as companies shifted to creating content for the sake of traffic. Some tech blogs have some really interesting posts, hidden in a sea of glorified Getting Started tutorials.
[+] [-] avereveard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfmike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdunce|3 years ago|reply
> write a buzzfeed style headline
"7 Mind-Blowing Reasons Why You Should Start Wearing Your Socks Inside Out"
[+] [-] petepete|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
[+] [-] Radim|3 years ago|reply
Depends how the AI part is presented. Explicit or obscured? Upfront or shady?
For some people, that makes all the difference. I told my (non-technical) wife about ChatGPT when it came out, and she was revulsed. Not by the technology itself (which she couldn't care less about) but by its "feel".
When I prodded deeper, her revulsion came down to "I'd feel cheated if I realized I've been interacting with a machine masquerading as a human". Not the machine itself, but the successful masquerading.
I suspect she's not alone, and "being cheated" will be a visceral issue to a lot more people than the early money-grabbers and AI enthusiasts give credit for.
> Another correction suggests the AI tool plagiarized. “We’ve replaced phrases that were not entirely original,” according to the correction added to an article on how to close a bank account.
Yeah, right.
[0] from the linked CNET piece https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/25/tech/cnet-ai-tool-news-st...
[+] [-] a13o|3 years ago|reply
That investors responded positively goes to show you where generative AI is on the hype curve. The trough of disillusionment comes after we accept that if a bot can write it, it's commodity content.
[+] [-] spaceman_2020|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
Hah, who am I kidding. Probably will get rid of that if AI content generates the money.
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
Can you make money off trading stocks? Absolutely. Can you successfully use the stock market as part of your retirement plan? Probably.
However, I don't "believe" in it. In no way is it operating on any intuitive sense of what would make a stock worth more than another. Today it seems entirely driven by keywords, inverted logic, and the intent to short. I don't see how artificially pumping up the market with institutionalized retirement plans helps either, besides to keep money out of the hands of the middle class and in those who can manipulate it. What's worse is stocks are becoming one of the few ways that said middle class can even get ahead; bonds have a very low yield and could even implode if the US dollar declines, inflation eats at savings, and wages struggle to keep up with said inflation.
Articles like this one are going to appear in (the equivalent of) textbooks in the future and people will look at it and wonder how we could not see what's coming for us.
On the bright side, I hope this is the beginning of the end for the flurry of bullshit on the internet. Not that there won't be plenty of bullshit to go around, as was the case pre-internet, but the combination of SEO and AI may turn into an ouroboros that consumes itself.
Though I think the ouroboros is supposed to represent the cycle of life, so maybe an "ant mill" is more analogous.
[+] [-] hfdkdfheh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
On one side, you have AI creating content, on the other, you have various bots scraping ("reading") that content... what do humans do now? And what is the added value of buzzfeed compared to just conversing with chatGPT?
[+] [-] taylorius|3 years ago|reply
Block the whole consarned shit-circus, and go and do something worthwhile instead?
[+] [-] ptx|3 years ago|reply
Or, if we're lucky, the AI content generation marketers will all move to "Web3" with the blockchain proponents, where they can enjoy scamming each other, leaving the rest of us to use the regular old-fashioned web in peace.
[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
[+] [-] dazc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClikeX|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SentientAtom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giarc|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if ChatGPT or AI is next.
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtode|3 years ago|reply
Wall Street: (sound of stampeding powerties)
[+] [-] stuntkite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frummy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rationalist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClikeX|3 years ago|reply