Comment by AstroBen
14 hours ago
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
14 hours ago
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?
Sadly these aren't monkeys. These are more like termites eating at any and all wood they can find. They'll eat at the foundation and move to the next trend to eat at.
Spam by its nature is low effort, low yields anyway. They don't particularly care about making scraps since their pipeline is nearly automated.
One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement
The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations.
Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.
Marketing departments are already speaking of GEO - generative engine optimization. When a user asks an AI for the best X, you want it to say your X is the best.
I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general.
Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it.
In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
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Pretty sure Google attempting to curb SEO tactics is what led to whatever nerfing you are talking about.
There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable
We're fighting slop with condensed slop
Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.
I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait
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