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.
This is the fundamental reason why I am in favor of a ban on simply posting AI-generated content in user forums. It isn't that AI is fundamentally bad per se, and to the extent that it is problematic now, that badness may well be a temporary situation. It's because there's not a lot of utility in you as a human being basically just being an intermediary to what some AI says today. Anyone who wants that can go get it themselves, in an interactive session where they can explore the answer themselves, with the most up-to-date models. It's fundamentally no different than pasting in the top 10 Google results for a search with no further commentary; if you're going to go that route just give a letmegooglethat.com link. It's exactly as helpful, and in its own way kind of carries the same sort of snarkiness with it... "oh, are you too stupid to AI? let me help you with that".
Similarly, I remember there was a lot of frothy startup ideas around using AI to do very similar things. The canonical one I remember is "using AI to generate commit messages". But I don't want your AI commit messages... again, not because AI is just Platonically bad or something, but because if I want an AI summary of your commit, I'd rather do it in two years when I actually need the summary, and then use a 2027 AI to do it rather than a 2025 AI. There's little to no utility to basically caching an AI response and freezing it for me. I don't need help with that.
It's been interesting to watch this play out in microcosm in different spaces. Danbooru and Gelbooru are two anime image boards that banned AI image content, largely to their benefit in my opinion. Rule34 is a similar image board that has allowed AI images and they've need to make tagging and searching adaptations to add to handle the high volume of AI images versus human artists. I'm glad there's an ecosystem of different options, but I find myself gravitating to the ones that have banned AI content.
I fully agree with this, besides that if an AI could auto-generate a commit message that I can edit to make actually correct and comprehensive, it will probably be a better, more descriptive message than whatever I come up with in usually ~3 minutes.
The value is a nice starting point but the message is still confirmed by the actual expert. If it's fully auto-generated or I start "accepting" everything, then I agree it becomes completely useless.
> It's because there's not a lot of utility in you as a human being basically just being an intermediary to what some AI says today.
To be fair, there has never been a lot of utility in you as a human being involved, theoretically speaking. The users do not use a forum because you, a human, are pulling knobs and turning levers somewhere behind a meaningless digital profile. Any human involvement that has been required for the software to function is merely an implementation detail. The harsh reality, as software developers continually need to be reminded of, is that users really don't care about how the software works under the hood!
For today, a human posting AI-generated content to a forum is still providing all the other necessary functions required, like curation and moderation. That is just as important and the content itself, but something AI is still not very good at. A low-value poster may not put much care into that, granted, but "slop" would be dealt with the same way regardless of whether it was generated by AI or hand written by a person. The source of content is ultimately immaterial.
Once AI gets good, we'll all jump to AI-driven forums anyway, so those who embrace it now will be more likely to stave off the Digg/Slashdot future.
I don't think better search is exactly what we want. It would also be great to have less quantity and more quality. I think optimizing only search to make it better (including AI) only furthers the quantity aspect of content, not quality. Optimizing search or trying to make it better is the wrong goal IMO.
This only means that the web (websites and web 2.0 platforms) for public usage is becoming redundant because any type of data that can be posted on the web can now be generated by an LLM. LLMs have been only around for a short while but the web is already becoming infested with AI spam. Future generations that are not accustomed to the old pre AI web will prefare to use AI rather than the web, LLMs will eventually be able to generate all aspects of the web. The web will remain useful for private communication and general data transfer but not for surfing as we know it today.
Edit to add:
Projects like the Internet Archive will be even more important in the future.
Editorial guidelines at many publications explicitly state that AI can assist with drafts, outlines, and editing, but not with generating final published stories.
AI is widely used for support tasks such as:
- Transcribing interviews
- Research assistance and generating story outlines
- Suggesting headlines, SEO optimization, and copyediting
- Automating routine content like financial reports and sports recaps
This seems like a reasonable approach, but even so I agree with your prediction that people will mostly interact with the web via their AI interface.
Anthropic cares about that, every individual content creator does not. Their goal is to win the war for attention, which is now close to zero sum with everyone on the internet and there's only 24 hours in the day.
> AI generated web content has got to be one of the most counterproductive things to use AI on.
For something like a blog I would agree, but I found AI to be fantastic at generating copy for some SaaS websites I run. I find it to be a great "polishing engine" for copy that I write. I will often write some very sloppy copy that just gets the point across and then feed that to a model to get a more polished version that is geared to a specific outcome. Usually I will generate a couple variants of the copy I fed it, validate it for accuracy, slap it into my CMS and run an a/b test and then stick with the content that accomplishes the specific goal of the content best based on user engagement/click through/etc.
While I largely agree, I don't think it's quite correct to say AI generated blogs contain no new information. At least not in a practical sense. The output is a function of the the LLM and the prompt. The output contains new information assuming the prompt does. If the prompt/context contains internal information no one outside the company has access to, then a public post thus generated certainly contains information new to the public.
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.
> 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.
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.
if you can’t write your thoughts as something cohesive to begin with i don’t using LLMs is going to solve your problem. writing is absolutely the point if you’re trying to communicate with text. lack of clarity is usually sign of lack of understanding imo, i see it in my own writing
This is so, so wrong. The writing is the thoughts. A person's un-articulated bullet points are not worth that much. And AI is not going to pull novel ideas out of your brain via your bullet points. It's either going to summarize them incorrectly or homogenize them into something generic. It would be like dropping acid with a friend and asking ChatGPT to summarize our movie ideas.
The idea that writing is an irrelevant way to gatekeep people with otherwise brilliant ideas is not reality. You don't have to be James Baldwin, but I will not get a sense for what your ideas even are via an AI summary.
> 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).
Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which turns 200 words of bullet points into 2000 words of prose, though? It's not like there's suddenly going to be 10x more insight, it's just 10x more slop to slog through that dilutes whatever points the writer had.
If you have 200 words' worth of thoughts you want to share... you can just write 200 words.
The writing is the point. A well-structured, well-argued, and well-written article indicates the writer has devoted considerable time to understanding and thinking through the topic — if they haven't, it quickly becomes obvious. A series of bullet points indicates the opposite, and using an AI to hide the fact that the "writer" has invested minimal cognitive effort is dishonest.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
>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.
Readit News
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.
Similarly, I remember there was a lot of frothy startup ideas around using AI to do very similar things. The canonical one I remember is "using AI to generate commit messages". But I don't want your AI commit messages... again, not because AI is just Platonically bad or something, but because if I want an AI summary of your commit, I'd rather do it in two years when I actually need the summary, and then use a 2027 AI to do it rather than a 2025 AI. There's little to no utility to basically caching an AI response and freezing it for me. I don't need help with that.
The value is a nice starting point but the message is still confirmed by the actual expert. If it's fully auto-generated or I start "accepting" everything, then I agree it becomes completely useless.
To be fair, there has never been a lot of utility in you as a human being involved, theoretically speaking. The users do not use a forum because you, a human, are pulling knobs and turning levers somewhere behind a meaningless digital profile. Any human involvement that has been required for the software to function is merely an implementation detail. The harsh reality, as software developers continually need to be reminded of, is that users really don't care about how the software works under the hood!
For today, a human posting AI-generated content to a forum is still providing all the other necessary functions required, like curation and moderation. That is just as important and the content itself, but something AI is still not very good at. A low-value poster may not put much care into that, granted, but "slop" would be dealt with the same way regardless of whether it was generated by AI or hand written by a person. The source of content is ultimately immaterial.
Once AI gets good, we'll all jump to AI-driven forums anyway, so those who embrace it now will be more likely to stave off the Digg/Slashdot future.
What we got: more content polluting search, aka worse search.
Edit to add:
Projects like the Internet Archive will be even more important in the future.
AI is widely used for support tasks such as: - Transcribing interviews - Research assistance and generating story outlines - Suggesting headlines, SEO optimization, and copyediting - Automating routine content like financial reports and sports recaps
This seems like a reasonable approach, but even so I agree with your prediction that people will mostly interact with the web via their AI interface.
For something like a blog I would agree, but I found AI to be fantastic at generating copy for some SaaS websites I run. I find it to be a great "polishing engine" for copy that I write. I will often write some very sloppy copy that just gets the point across and then feed that to a model to get a more polished version that is geared to a specific outcome. Usually I will generate a couple variants of the copy I fed it, validate it for accuracy, slap it into my CMS and run an a/b test and then stick with the content that accomplishes the specific goal of the content best based on user engagement/click through/etc.
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.
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.
If you just want to get the information out then just post the bullet points, what do you care?
If you want to be recognized as a writer, then write.
This is so, so wrong. The writing is the thoughts. A person's un-articulated bullet points are not worth that much. And AI is not going to pull novel ideas out of your brain via your bullet points. It's either going to summarize them incorrectly or homogenize them into something generic. It would be like dropping acid with a friend and asking ChatGPT to summarize our movie ideas.
The idea that writing is an irrelevant way to gatekeep people with otherwise brilliant ideas is not reality. You don't have to be James Baldwin, but I will not get a sense for what your ideas even are via an AI summary.
I think if writing more than 200 words is painful for you, blogging probably isn't for you?
Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which turns 200 words of bullet points into 2000 words of prose, though? It's not like there's suddenly going to be 10x more insight, it's just 10x more slop to slog through that dilutes whatever points the writer had.
If you have 200 words' worth of thoughts you want to share... you can just write 200 words.
Writing _is_ thinking.
1- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect
Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
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.
(Context: I told it to write at "will" after a session of explaining Rene Girard's mimetic desire in the styles of various authors)
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.
I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. 2 hosting companies use this in every single weekly spam email they send.
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