Google pays publishers to test AI tool that scrapes sites to craft new content

The problem I have is that it's usually junk fluff pieces with way too much text for SEO optimization.

I feel anything computer generated should be short bullet points or comparison tables, not long form text as it's just not good at that.

For example think of a blog post where the author walks you through its thought process, trial and error and ultimate solution. That is very humane and relatable, something an LLM can approximate/copy but it will never be genuine. I'd prefer in that case just the raw solution, not a fake and deceptive walkthrough.

Whole swaths of the internet became uninteresting to me a long time ago. AI promises to make the rest of it worthless to me as well.

The fact that AI models are being trained on public-facing web content without the consent of the authors has already driven me and others to remove all our content from the public-facing web, as there is no other way to protect ourselves. That eliminates a large part of the value of the web right there.

Google only cares about these types of sites now, because they are the ideal customer for Google Ads. They churn out content constantly, they advertise heavily, with Google getting a cut of every click and impression.

And let's face it, YouTube is basically QVC for electronics, toys and makeup, all multi-billion $ industries that Google is happy to slap ads on top of.

There's some things I really care about the human experience for, but much content it just matters to me if it's a joy to ride.

Maybe very little in the scheme of things but not a 'view' or click from me.

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This has been going on for a long time. The same low-quality sites that you ignored 2 years ago are just getting slightly better content that you’ll never read.

There's even tools like Tracery that let you construct grammars and vocabularies as a form of textual generative art.

/s

To give you an optimistic perspective: I don't think it qualifies as pessimism to point out obvious issues with some of the "approaches" currently developing in this field. If enough people do it, maybe something will change for the better?

I didn't think you were right. But you're right.

create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.

I guess Google want adfarms with adsense copying their content?

Sounds like Reddit, minus the AI part. Any time someone might be on the verge of an original thought there it gets shot down with something akin to "[citation needed]", followed by strong social pressure for the user to stop participating if they can't manage just rewording "inspiration sites".

What's special about AI here?

This entire thread is a reminder as to how out of touch and naive most HN commentary are when it is outside their area of a very narrow field of expertise.