We have rules of thumb and we'll have a more technical blog post on this in ~2 weeks.
You can break the AI / slop into a 4 corner matrix:
1. Not AI & Not Slop (eg. good!)
2. Not AI & slop (eg. SEO spam -- we already punished that for a long time)
3. AI & not Slop (eg. high effort AI driven content -- example would be youtuber Neuralviz)
4. AI & Slop (eg. most of the AI garbage out there)
#3 is the one that tends to pose issues for people. Our position is that if the content *has a human accountable for it* and *took significant effort to produce* then it's liable to be in #3. For now we're just labelling AI versus not, and we're adapting our strategy to deal with category #3 as we learn more.
Maybe slop will be the general term for that sorta thing, happy to feed Kagi with the info needed as long as it doesn't become too big a administrative burden.
User curated links, didn't we have that before, Altavista?
It's a point often lost in these discussions. Slop was a problem long before AI. AI is just capable of rapidly scaling it beyond what the SEO human slop-producers were making previously.
Wherever the crowd sourcing says.
And to expand: it's a gradient, not black-and-white.
We have rules of thumb and we'll have a more technical blog post on this in ~2 weeks.
You can break the AI / slop into a 4 corner matrix:
1. Not AI & Not Slop (eg. good!)
2. Not AI & slop (eg. SEO spam -- we already punished that for a long time)
3. AI & not Slop (eg. high effort AI driven content -- example would be youtuber Neuralviz)
4. AI & Slop (eg. most of the AI garbage out there)
#3 is the one that tends to pose issues for people. Our position is that if the content *has a human accountable for it* and *took significant effort to produce* then it's liable to be in #3. For now we're just labelling AI versus not, and we're adapting our strategy to deal with category #3 as we learn more.
Hopefully, we'll just blacklist SEO spam at the same time. Slop is slop regardless of origin.
Maybe slop will be the general term for that sorta thing, happy to feed Kagi with the info needed as long as it doesn't become too big a administrative burden.
User curated links, didn't we have that before, Altavista?
It is a distinction without a difference.
Does it matter? I want neither in my search results. Human slop is no better than AI slop.
It's a point often lost in these discussions. Slop was a problem long before AI. AI is just capable of rapidly scaling it beyond what the SEO human slop-producers were making previously.
> Where does SEO end and AI slop begin?
...when it's generated by AI? They're two cases of the same problem: low-quality content outcompeting better information for the top results slots.