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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.

People often bring up horses and cars, but think about the timescale of how long it took to make that shift. Horses still played a role in WW1, decades after the automobile was a thing.

The other factor is the non-existent cost barrier. Think about the transition from typewriter to word processor -- it took a relatively long time for computing to become affordable enough to be accessible meaning that the transition from typewriter to word processor manifest over a large span of time allowing for labor to adjust.

AI is practically being given away for free and prices are constantly dropping.

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> I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.

that's if hype will be supported by quality eventually. I think it is still not clear if AI can automate even some trivial clerks jobs without failures.

I am working in a 4-person team building AI powered authoring tools and we are already seeing this happen.

maybe you could expand on your experience, what do you see? Massive productivity jump in some scenarios, or high level of automation in some tasks?..

Both.

The authoring tool allows retailers and brands to generate hundreds of articles a day which would have taken a team of human writers days if not weeks to put together. Some of the work straight up couldn't be done previously because the number of people required would be too exorbitant for the returns.

Some of the content augments existing content on the retailer and brand websites. Some of the content is feeding into SEO.

And its good enough that we are ranking #1 in Google just a few weeks in for some customers in competitive search terms.

depending on your quality threshold, this could be classified as SEO spam, which I agree LLMs are likely good at.

I’m sincerely looking forward to when/if search engines get better at recognizing LLM content and start penalizing it heavily.

I wonder if spam (for human consumption) is just a temporary thing... the real value to capture is where the purchasing (or other kinds of) decisions are to made. If consumers embrace AI agents, the money in influencing their decision via their attention to influencing the AI training material directly.

I think search engines won't have a spam problem for long... but AI training will start to have a spam problem as a side effect of developing into a marketplace. The influence market moves from people to machines.

So you’re a spammer?

If the content is good, is it still spam?

We can't check if it is good

If the search terms are "competitive" what's the moat that keeps your customers' competitors from leveraging the same foundation models until that term is flooded with marginally-optimized copy? High-quality copy used to be a signal that the retailer or brand had enough success and therefore capital to afford to invest in the copy. Now anyone can do it, even retailers and brands that are terrible or maybe even fake. So what's the value of Google search if all it's surfacing is the highest-quality AI authoring tool? Maybe you can play the spread between now and wide adoption but it seems like eventually you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.

There's a lot of expertise and work involved in getting the context to generate really good content that is contextual and informative.

This is all of the work we do before even getting to the LLM.

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