Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

Much of the trash on the internet has nothing to do with AI, but instead is caused by using AdSense type funding. If you have a site and use revenue from ads as your funding, then the way to in increase your revenue is more show more ads.

So add more fluff, move the actual thing people are looking for to the bottom, etc. Oh and add controversy, "The only authentic". Then add sex - a suggestive photo.

The thing is that AI can now generate these sites for you so no need to do anything yourself.

Finally pay Google to feature your ad - I mean recipe - and do other stuff to ensure that real recipes do not steal your traffic. :-)

criddell · a year ago

Speaking of recipes, I just tried this on a page with a quiche recipe. The original page was pretty much a novella built around a recipe. OPs tool worked perfectly. Nicely done.

WillAdams · a year ago

There is a special-purpose tool for this:

https://www.justtherecipe.com/

which was mentioned here a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160959

otterley · a year ago

Paprika is a fantastic recipe filing app that distills bloated pages into just the facts.

Terretta · a year ago

Click to read more

alehlopeh · a year ago

Sure but that garbage is what AI have been trained on.

867-5309 · a year ago

eventually the internet will become nothing more than grey goo excreted by the end node of the gpt caterpillar

dboreham · a year ago

People love them some Faustian bargain.

bloomingkales · a year ago

Let’s also add the fact that most sites cannot afford AI.

lolinder · a year ago

Have you looked into OpenAI's GPT-4o pricing lately? They charge $10 for 1M output tokens, or 500k tokens for the price of a $5/mo VPS.

If we assume a generous 2 tokens per word on average (OpenAI suggests it's actually 3 tokens per 4 words), that's still 5 full 50k word novels worth of text every month for the price of a single DigitalOcean droplet.

One data-point, tested on a recipe website (https://prettysimplesweet.com/french-toast) and got what I was looking for without the fluff.

How about the ability parametrize with the target URL? Something like https://cut-the-crab.streamlit.app/[TARGET_URL] ?

sramam · a year ago

Isn't this shortsighted in the sense that it removes all incentive for the creators to create?

A pre-click quality signal is more interesting and fair I imagine. Though I don't know how one can build a solution that is not game-able.

Terretta · a year ago

> Isn't this shortsighted in the sense that it removes all incentive for the creators to create?

When I was young and naive, I learned guitar so I could make tunes, not realizing I'd failed to search engine optimize narratives about my journey for ad placement to fund my spotify pay for play to get myself concert gigs to sell hats and t-shirts until I could land sponsors.

I'm sad to think in my naïveté I might have encouraged future children to create music for themselves and put it out there to see if it resonates with others, instead of enroll the kids into creator influencer classes teaching how to content mill for the idiocracy.

I'm ashamed I thought personal joy and fulfillment was a valid incentive, taking away their drive to generate and grow rich.

j1elo · a year ago

It would be a good thing that it removes incentives for the creators to create. Read between the lines: for the majority of current low-content creators, who are driven by the incentives that exist today.

That would leave us with another set of new creators that would emerge, those people who would be driven just by the desire of sharing a tiny piece of their lives or knowledge, purely for the fun of it, without needing more incentive than the joy of doing it.

you know... like the internet was in the begining.

I'd like seeing that :)

smallerfish · a year ago

> Isn't this shortsighted in the sense that it removes all incentive for the creators to create?

Before ~2006, we all had blogs, and posted regularly with no financial incentive; imagine a web where people posted to share their expertise, and that's what the early internet was. Money ruined this.

Also, early youtube (and google videos) had plenty of stuff to watch. Would youtube be full of "professional" "content" with no ads? Probably not, but there is a world in which youtube subscriptions actually gated videos that required a budget to make.

wat10000 · a year ago

It’s not my job to incentivize people. I’m under no obligation to view content in the exact form the creator wants. If this breaks their monetization scheme then they should figure out something else, or put up with it and rely on the readers who don’t do that.

sorokod · a year ago

With a risk of oversimplifying - that an entire unit of content (such as a page) can be usefully compressed to a short list, indicates that the original content had low value to start with.

An information theory centric angle that is interesting to think about.

muc-martin · a year ago

pretty cool idea!

- 140 million daily engaged users - 600,000 active content creators - 1 million hours of free content available - Features include playlist creation and community engagement - Tailored video suggestions - Option to subscribe to Pornhub Premium for exclusive content at $9.99/month with a free week trial available.

hertg · a year ago

I feel like this title is misleading, all this does is make an HTTP request to the site and let an LLM summarize its content. It does not just "cut the crap", it cuts everything and boils it down to AI slop. Point it towards a high quality scientific article, and you'll see that it doesn't just cut "crap", but any information that might be valuable.

I get that this can be useful for some sites, I've used Kagi Summarizer (https://kagi.com/summarizer) in the past, which does basically the same thing. To me, it doesn't seem like the solution to AI slop would be to turn it into shorter AI slop, the better "solution" would be to avoid AI slop and to block SEO optimized slop websites from showing up wherever possible.

cmeacham98 · a year ago

Highly unethical in my opinion to not disclose the tool is summarizing via an LLM. As a matter of fact, in the right circumstances it may not only fail to do what the title says, but do the opposite - add hallucinations or other AI generated garbage!

cowboylowrez · a year ago

fighting AI slop with more AI slop, it just keeps getting more ridiculous in tech world.

talkingtab · a year ago

Kiro · a year ago

I don't understand what "AI" is referring to here. Seems like it's removing useless fillers in general, which makes the title underselling it. I thought it was a service removing AI images or something, which wouldn't be that interesting.

Yes, that's true - actually i meant distilling the key points from articles and removing AI generated SEO fillers among other things

philipwhiuk · a year ago

> removing AI generated SEO fillers

We had SEO filler rubbish before we had AI.

Is it actually looking for AI at all or was this just included as the current buzzword.

PUSH_AX · a year ago

So then isn’t it easier to just summarise? I realise this wouldn’t be as novel and is kind of a solved problem.

igorguerrero · a year ago

Sure... You just wanted to add your own clickbait because AI is popular, ironic huh?

verelo · a year ago

The irony of AI removing AI content. I used this for my marketing generation (using AI of course) real estate business and it misinterpreted examples as the actual listings.

Also if you use Https instead of https in the url field it gives an error…

chamomeal · a year ago

> The irony of AI removing AI content

We love novel ways of wasting fossil fuels!!

Nothing directed at OP here, I actually love this idea and I’ll totally use this for recipes

abraxas · a year ago

Just like the crypto the AI craze maybe be another instantiation of Bostrom's paperclip maximiser running on a hybrid human-machine topology.

VTimofeenko · a year ago

In a sense, it's like machine filtering out machine-generated text to get to the stuff that the human needs. Like grepping logs, but less deterministic.

skeeter2020 · a year ago

I guess "fighting fire with fire" is a valid response, but historically it's also lead to the much worse arms race in many situations. Instead of trying to win a game I believe is illegitimate, I prefer not to play.

This chain is also kinda funny: "Cut the BS!" > Streamlit App > Streamlit bought by Snowflake to push their pretty low value (IMO) but very expensive AI play. You should figure out how to run this against the output of Snowflake AI; you'd probably end up with an SQL query result set :)

dylan604 · a year ago

> Instead of trying to win a game I believe is illegitimate, I prefer not to play.

We were given this advice way back in 1985 with "the only winning move is not to play. how about a nice game of chess?"

tempodox · a year ago

Say what you will, this “AI” hype has top-notch entertainment value. I mean, getting people sold on the idea that they need “AI” to lessen the impact of “AI” on their lives is a level of absurdity that other marketing scams can only look at with envy. Interesting times.

wussboy · a year ago

When I expressed concern that AI generated responses might make inaccurate claims about our products, I was told by the cloud rep to just put the answer through AI to make sure it was compliant…

sensanaty · a year ago

Lol we're getting the same, except we do customer support software. An actual quote I've heard multiple times from PMs and even our CTO:

"If the AI returns an inconclusive response, we should send that back to the AI and tell it to think about it!"

And other variations of that. It feels like I'm surrounded by lunatics who have been brainwashed into squeezing AI into every nook and crany, and using it for literally everything and anything even if it doesn't make an iota of sense. That toothbrush that came with "AI Capabilities" springs to mind.

queuebert · a year ago

I pointed it to PornHub, and it returned this curiously wholesome summary:

Were you required to provide a drivers license number for the AI to view that?

8organicbits · a year ago

PH blocks users in jurisdictions that require invasive age verification. They do not collect drivers license numbers from viewers.