[new_guy]

Congratulations to the author for this achievement.

> Over the last 3 months I've consistently published 4-5 articles a day, of 500-3,000 words each using software I've developed myself. It's allowed me to learn, create, and publish 100x faster, with 10x better quality, without ANY writing (outside of deleting and organizing), and without ANY knowledge of the topics or SEO target keywords. WTF? I know, I know. Too good to be true, right?

But that said this is exactly the kind of blog spam that would be instantly axed from a new search engine.

[pjc50]

Yeah, this is "extractive AI": take original articles written by humans and churn them into machine-spam. It's inauthentic, but that doesn't matter, only the ad impressions do.

[mattscyoc]

Do you think there is a world where a human does a search and machines extract answers and teach us about a topic, taking answers from across the web?

[pjc50]

How does the machine know what it's telling us is correct?

This is an extremely complicated philosophical question, and it's not limited to machine-generated text; there's already plenty of human-written blogspam. In order for text to be valuable it has to be trustworthy. That is, we have to be reasonably convinced that the author has made some effort to be accurate, to correspond with some mental model of the world which itself corresponds reasonably well with objective reality.

Otherwise it's just an elaborate generative fiction tool writing fanfiction about tyres to sell tyres.

[xnx]

This has always been Google's goal, and it is delivering parts of it already in their search results.

[wereHamster]

How is that not spam?

[mattscyoc]

I think it depends on your own definition. I think spam is highly subjective, no?

[tsherr]

I'd suggest that any article written "without any knowledge of the topic" is of zero value. I'd define spam as zero value posts/messages. Ergo, it's spam. Not sure how you can argue it isn't.

Not attacking you, I'm just interested in your defence of this sort of thing

[mattscyoc]

"without any knowledge on the topic" refers to the time BEFORE the user uses the tool. During and after the tool the user will certainly have knowledge after reading and curating the questions and answers, right? Just like, before you read about a topic you "have no knowledge" but after, you might say that you have some now.

[city41]

The issue is you have no knowledge of the subject. You said so yourself:

> without ANY writing (outside of deleting and organizing), and without ANY knowledge of the topics or SEO target keywords

So your content can't be trusted. It's being curated by someone who has no idea of its accuracy.

[tsherr]

So when you say "without any knowledge" you meant, you picked a topic you didn't understand, researched it thoroughly, then made the post?

So you didn't weeks/months becoming an expert before making the post?

Then it's not spam.

[tata71]

Same, for the record.

[PedroBatista]

No, it isn’t.

I really don’t have a major problem with this, after all you’re just another in a million.

But I have a problem with you trying to sell yourself as a good guy all full of virtues.

[mattscyoc]

I think it's possible to separate virtues from this. It's a research tool, ultimately. All the sources/sites are cited and links given. That is encouraged, of course. The user is ultimately in control of the tool to change, add to, curate, etc. the research. This just makes that process a lot faster.

[glup]

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

[mattscyoc]

Hey, I'm the author of this post on Indie Hackers. I added some data and evidence at the bottom of that post. The content and site is performing really well.

I'm curious, why do you think this is spam?

[xgbi]

I’m sorry I’ll be bashing your content but this is, to me, the worst spam of all: the one that doesn’t add a single thing to the problem, an endless list of subject-verb-complement with phrases like “this tire is cheaper than other tires”. This is the epitome of taking people for idiots and you having the hubris to tell others that this is not spam is just wrong to me. You’re making people lose time while you rack up their eyeball’s worth of ad revenue.

See your article: https://www.car-engineer.com/general-altimax-rt43-tire-revie...

This is NOT a review, this is an alternate serp where you don’t even have the correct sources. People will read that, spend time figuring out this is just rolling them into fake words, and close the page in rage because they just lost 5 min. Nowhere in that site is there any sign of expertise, value add, or just the barest human touch. You’re alone maintaining the illusion of a professional website where in reality you don’t have a single clue of what your bot is writing.

Sorry this is harsh but I have the baffling feeling that people like you are taking over the internet and waste immense amount of time for the 99% of people who use the web for actual, hands on, research about any topic.

[jacques-noris]

Your software just copies what others have written. This is q tool to create blog spam, this makes the web worse and punishes people who create original content, that you just copy

[mattscyoc]

Do you think GPT3 is spam? Where does it get its information? Are Google quick answers spam? While all A.I. be considered spam? Interesting questions.

The way that I see the value is that it assists the user with research by pulling together answers across thousands of sources, doing work that a single person would struggle with.

Then the user can change, add on top, or modify the research however they want, saving a lot of time in the process.

[Brian_K_White]

You just asked a question. How about I don't answer the question but just tell an ai to grab some random stuff about spam and pretend I wrote that as my answer to your question.

Your site and your action are the worst form of parasite infesting the web.

You aren't even providing the tiny added value of a broker or legit curator or aggregator.

The material you "sell" all came from other people who you didn't pay. The way you derive income is by perpetuating the ad model that makes everyone's browsing experience horrible and inefficient and even dangerous thanks to malware delivered through ad networks.

I do not congratulate you. You have not earned a penny or generated a penny, you have merely figured out a way to collect a penny from thousands of people through a mechanism that is difficult to audit and prevent. No end user would agree to pay you what they are all paying you, if they actually understood the whole picture and had any practical way to choose.

How can you NOT consider this spam? Answer: the Upton Sinclair quote someone already posted. Although there is another version from Williams Jennings Bryan 40 years before that: "It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest."

[tata71]

Does it add value, at any level?

If you get the info in front of new eyes, I'd say yes: IF it's good info!

You have a lot of intellectual liability, here, and that's a huge thing to throw into the wind for $5k.

[mattscyoc]

Would you mind expanding on "intellectual liability" a bit more?

[tata71]

If you post others' words as truth, you're either amplifying good information, or amplifying bad information.

If you're confident your sources are never gravely wrong, or cool with a more poorly informed society (now potentially in part due to your tool!), then, keep on rocking in the free world.

[mym1990]

Could you expand on the content performing well? If it is useful and informative and accurate, I wouldn’t consider it spam. Someone who gets targeted ads for a brand in their email and finds those ads useful for sales probably doesn’t consider the email spam. Similar line of logic here for me.

[mattscyoc]

Absolutely. The link contains research, screenshots, etc. to show how the final content looks, how it is performing, etc. Feel free to take a look.

If you create a webpage that has 10s or 100s of different answers to questions for a topic, and it saves everyone time researching; then I would consider that useful and not spam. Just my opinion of course. And I'm not saying this is a substitute for creative content, and I don't think it is an either or. Informative content vs creative content is just different in my opinion.