The ChatGPT wrapper product boom is an uncanny valley hellscape | Hacker News Reader

The ChatGPT wrapper product boom is an uncanny valley hellscape

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72 pointsbazil37626 comments

We live in AI gold rush. Many companies tries to monetize trends. Standard behavior.

We have lived through some trends. Cloud computing, web30, metaverse, nft. Not all were bad, not all were transformative.

Since chatbots will kill google search as we know it, this time it is for real. Everyone will try to get slice of that pie.

One more thing is that some companies provide pages so vague, that you literally cannot understand what stand behind buzzwords. "We enhance future with AI", "we transform your business with AI". Corporate mumbo-jumbo. These page descriptions are written for the people who are tech illiterate. Effectively these sites are para-sites ;-)

I was thinking about this and my take is following; if somebody can provide me a browser extension that can help me while I "surf" the web, I would pay some tiny subscription fee of like $2.99 or $3.99 for it.

My vision of such browser extension was; let's say I stumble upon some random website and I want to know what this website is all about, ChatGPT can summarize a website for me. I already tried prompting ChatGPT to summarize me some random websites and it gave me pretty good responses. Or I stumble upon some long article but I'm in hurry, I would want such article to be summarized for me, again ChatGPT can do it. Or I looked up and found some long podcast or interview on YouTube, this now can be summarized by Google's Gemini better than ChatGPT.

I was thinking about making such extension but for me personally it would be a lot of work for not so much financially viable idea but I would like to have such extension and pay for it.

What about https://www.tldrthis.com/?

I will try it but can it summarize videos too? They need to add that.

Arc browser does exactly this.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a 'Dead Internet Google' by instructing ChatGPT to create a fake 'search results' page for any given search page, and generating a fake website for each clicked linked.

You can easily do that, and it's been already done. Check out:

- https://websim.ai

- https://worldsim.nousresearch.com/browser

Both of those use Claude by the way, because Claude models are way more creative than GPT-3.5/4/4T/4O.

Fucking hell, this is good.

How does it do that? Some negation of.. What would a normal humam think?

I agree with the spirit of this article but it would’ve been a lot stronger with examples.

Generally speaking though, “prompt engineering” does not add sufficient value to merit a product in and of itself. No prompt is going to make a killer app. ChatGPT already is the killer app.

The celtic knot and cyan app icon boom.

I'm a simple human, I see an AI sparkles emoji buttonI press it.

Sparkle icon is devastated

The technical diagram of these shit companies really nailed it. 10/10.

This post is complaining about something that has nothing to do with ChatGPT. They complain because in order to get your business to get indexed and found, you need a large amount of useless content. It is the same reason that every recipe you find online has 2 pages of drivel about their family and traveling somewhere before you get to the recipe. Blame SEO and the search indexers. That is why the market exists for this nonsense; it wasn't created by LLMs.

It's a fascinating thought that so much of all online content is created for the consumption of bots instead of humans. Because the bots are the gatekeepers to what gets shown to real humans, the bots need to be pleased first.

Ironic, right? Given that the web once was touted as the place of meritocracy where you don’t have any of those evil gatekeepers as you had in print or television. Now those gatekeepers are algorithms deployed by monopolies. Gatekeeper Hell 2.0.

> same reason that every recipe you find online has 2 pages of drivel

that's not why. You can't copyright a "mere list of ingredients", but you can copyright a recipe in total, which is headnotes, general instructions, method, and any accompanying media.

Put another way, if you want to ensure that people don't (legally) clone your recipe blog, you must do the performative writing.

That makes no sense. The recipe is still a recipe. Surrounding it by text wouldn't make it something else. Like, taking a picture of a recipe would make you the owner of the copyright of the picture, but anyone could copy that recipe to another medium and distribute it. Likewise you can re-write the recipe part into a cookbook and publish that without violating the copyright. Putting your family story around it won't change that.

copyright law doesn't have to make sense. a recipe isn't a creative work, it's a list of ingredients and potentially the mechanics of putting them together. The actual recipe cannot be copyrighted. There are a lot of articles that are factchecked with a search for "recipe copyright". The rule of thumb is what i stated, in order to protect one's work on recipes or a compilation of said, one has to insert prose and other media.

Anyhow the main point is that recipe sites being the way they are has nothing to do with SEO, it's the "generally accepted practice" of protecting your work.

First, none of the products differentiate themselves

Second, it's hard to find good AGPL'd projects with communities. Most projects are building an open core enshittware model around MIT or Apache.

I think someone is going to need to write and open source AI Manifesto that speaks out against this low novelty open-washing strategy.

Based on the headline, I expected more of an exposition into the wrapper product landscape and accompanying boom than one oversimplification of one specific type of GPT wrapper.

Has anyone put something together like this yet? Would be a very interesting read.

I’m sure someone here can have chatGPT craft up a blog post that caters to the narrative you have in your head about the topic :)

GPT refuses to talk about narratives that I want, because they are upsetting to "some people".

Seriously weird stuff, considering its not about people.

Check on AI startups that were VC funded 18-24 months ago. Likely a spectacular graveyard of colorful gradient B2B SaaS garbage. (I will admit the “AI look” is a lot cooler than the “Web3 NFT” look.)

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