The fact is unless these models are not what they promise to be, there's no way of weeding out generated content from not without meaningful false positives.
On the other hand, if the models are in some way deterministic, then it stands to reason there's some plausible method of detection.
But if that's the case then there's a tremendous flaw in the foundation of these techniques...they aren't at all what's been promised.
So far that doesn't seem to be the case.
Finally it's worth pointing out that Google et al really shouldn't care if content was generated by a machine or not. The problem isn't content creation, it's content quality. So what Google actually cares about is delivering a result that meets a certain quality threshold. It's very difficult to believe Google cares much about the process of content creation.
I want to preface this that I think the work your company does is important. SEO is much like advertising and marketing in that it often gets a bad rap by techies, but they are nonetheless important because otherwise one is strongly handicapped when it comes to developing and selling a product.
Nonetheless there are degrees to this and pushing a set of features designed to automatically generate text that closely mimics what other high-ranking content looks like has an outsize impact on the quality of the "commons": in this case Google or any other index of internet content. As other commentators have pointed out, the current state of AI means that while the style of the text is likely to be in line with other content, the actual content of the text may be either useless or actively wrong.
Given the prevalence of such articles already in search results, it is unlikely that the normal mechanism of human perusal of search results will be an effective quality filter.
It is true that, as I allude to, such articles already exist and in this sense Contentedge is not enabling a novel new harm per se. However, it drastically changes the ease of doing so, and doing the same thing, just at a larger scale and higher efficiency, given sufficiently big values of "larger" and "higher" can have a qualitative impact on the harm rendered.
Hey folks, CEO/Founder of Contentedge here - you have it totally wrong. :)
It seems like you equate SEO with blogspam, which is just false!
We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people. Google is the gateway to the internet. I don’t view it as gaming the system; we’re trying to empower smaller businesses and writers to get found.
I clicked through to your website and I didn't sign up, but I did watch the video on the front page.
What's the intended usecase for creating AI content other than blogspam-style bait and switch? Shouldn't these businesses already have content of their own?
It would make more sense to me if your product was aimed at helping websites SEO-optimize the content they already have, as I can't see how a human would ever find your AI-written content useful.
This comment does nothing to convince me that it isn't the subset you're targeting, because that last sentence sounds a lot like you're describing blogspam.
(parent comment was edited after I wrote this, read "last sentence" as referring to the paragraph beginning with "We help businesses create more useful content and get it to the right people.")
Hi Ryan - I created an account to give your free trial a shot.... it required me to enter a credit card ... which I reluctantly did. Now I am going to cancel and it won't let me. It asks for my password, which I don't have, because I created my account with SSO. There is no support menu / phone / email anything to request help. What kind of half baked crap is this?
SEO garbage is destroying the internet and google's complicity or indifference is forcing even legitimate content creators to turn their pages into mountains of meaningless duck speak that makes you feel like you're having an anuerism just long enough for the visit to count as a view rather than a bounce.
If any company poses a credible threat to Google's monopoly on search, it's surely Apple, IMO.
I think after the underwhelming launch of Apple Maps, a lot of people don't think Apple could make a truly great search product, but Apple Maps quietly has gotten pretty good and Apple has the resources and data to actually compete in search.
The tl;dr summary of this post is questioning whether or not it's even possible for TikTok to rank higher in Google than YouTube. People are searching for TikTok influencers on Google, including the branded term "tiktok" in the query and all the top search results are YouTube links. This is a real problem when people can search for your brand and Google can show their own properties ahead of you. That being said, TiKTok has still managed to make some impressive strides with SEO growth over the past 6 months that is worth calling out.
> 1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search.
Again that's vague. And once there are such guidelines who enforces them? Will it be law applicable to all companies? Will there be a special govt office enforcing this? What kind of punishments? Fines?
> 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results
Who and how will determine if treatment is favorable? Auditing code and internal comms for signs for favoritism? Otherwise if you can go only by appearances then how do you keep this system fair to the companies subject to this scrutiny?
> 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly
Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people? I can argue that I think the lawmakers representing me and other citizens need to figure out the details without myself having figured out the details. I can point out a problem and ask someone to fix the problem without know what the specifics of the solution look like. I know healthcare is absurdly complicated but I still think single-payer is the right idea and I want my law makers to do something about that - and if there's problems, it's on them to try to communicate that with me or to work around it. Same principle here. "Regulate Google as public utility" is actually fairly specific since we've got lots of public utilities already that we can model this off of.
I haven't searched exhaustively, but nonetheless you'd think there would be more specific proposals being talked about given how hot this topic is.
There is very little precedent to regulating tech companies on such a granular level. The closest thing I can think of is various EU regulations that usually amount to shaking down US giants for money once in a while. It's hard to compare this to regulating something like electricity or water delivery which is much more stable technologically. Google has changed tremendously over the years and still is innovating rapidly.
And as to healthcare, well, I do think people should actually go through the same thought exercise. Tons of totally broken overregulated healthcare systems out there.
"Lawmakers" usually effectively ends up being a combination of lobbyists, politicians and public pressure.
So, to be clear, are you saying that someone should make such a proposal or are you saying that advocating for this change requires there to be a proposal? Because I'd be in favor of the former but I think the latter disrupts conversation and is unreasonable. The way you wrote your post sounded strongly like "I have a knock-down argument against any advocates until they have legislation written up." Which would be an unreasonably high bar.
Well, I'm merely saying that a lack of proposals indicates a lack of workable solutions.
By proposal I don't mean an actual bill ready to be passed, just a high level overview that does talk about the implementation. Obviously doesn't need to be a sound legal document.
I think it's perfectly fine and important for people to speak out against perceived injustices committed by tech companies. But yes I do also think that calling for "regulation" while being very vague is also a bad idea.
We've seen this play out with GDPR. Tons of people were (and are) calling for more stringent data privacy regulations. So EU came up with this monstrosity nobody fully understands in its consequences (because you can't). Enforcement is totally random. Some websites ended up just banning EU users. Many now come with very annoying cookie popups. Those that try to "comply" can never be sure they fully do. Very few people are happy or have benefited from this thing in any way.
I think this is exactly what you get when you want something done but don't know what.
The most common proposals I've seen are to break Google into multiple companies, particularly with search being separate. This seems adequately specific. (Though obviously different from the public-utility plan in this article.) Is that not specific enough for you? This seems vastly simpler than GPDR in scope and with much more relevant precedent to draw from.
Well a breakup is definitely easier to define. But you should specify along which lines. YouTube is the obvious one. Maybe a bunch of other acquisitions that aren't too techy can be rolled back.
What about other products? Gmail? Maps? Android/App Store? Chrome? Google News? Shopping? Translate? Docs? Should these be separate companies?
Only once you define that can the plan be criticized.
This is so much easier to do as one only needs to list up to 20 names (and perhaps some minor obligations), yet we're still not seeing too many people spell this out. I think for exactly the same reason - it becomes obvious how unpractical it is.
This is an example of why I think you are placing the burden of detail too high. The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down. Even in the case of a fairly clear proposal, it's not detailed enough. Search is Google's biggest monopoly and a proposal to separate that out would be obvious. Is Shopping really relevant? To the lawyers figuring out the details it is, but not for this discussion.
Anybody can list a bunch of names to be broken up in a few minutes. I gave you plenty of examples to work with. Nothing to do with lawyers.
Google search is approx. 60% of Google's revenue according to the latest 10-K. And may be an even bigger portion of the net income. If you keep that intact you won't kill Google's golden goose nor will you solve many unfairness issues as relating to search.
AdSense et al. is 13%.
YouTube is 10%. These 3 are most of revenue-generating Google.
It is important what happens to their many other products. Most of which are not bringing in big money (in an obvious way) but are widely used.
Does everything not-search become one company consisting of Google leftovers? (this may be what you're proposing, but it's not clear)
The goal of any such action is to benefit the consumer in some way. When you actually do start defining how things would be broken up it becomes more obvious how consumers could suffer. And it becomes more obvious how you're not de-monopolizing anything.
> The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down
This may be what the original linked article talks about. I started this thread talking about how instead and it never discussed the why. It's merely a thought exercise aimed at illuminating what I consider a lack of workable solutions. Not telling anybody they cannot be interested in yet-undefined solutions.
> Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people?
In a world where the question of "Should we attempt to do a thing?" depends in part on whether or not there's a way to do it that brings more help than harm, I think it might be worth considering that these could be seen as reasonable questions.
Given that regulated utilities have occasionally produced massive messes like California's ongoing issues with PG&E and wildfires, do you think it's worth being cautious and considering possible consequences?
You've misread me if you thought I said specifics aren't important. Rather, that it's possible to advocate for "someone needs to figure out the specifics" without yourself knowing the specifics.
Does YouTube get favorable placement in search? I see video results from other sites like Vimeo. I just did a search for a recent sporting event and 6/12 video results were YT. The only "problem" is that YT has such a large share of the online video market.
wrt #3, no, I don't want businesses to control the information I get when I search for them, because I want neutral and true-ish information, not ad copy.
With that 25% of the screen real estate regulation now Google has an incentive to break its search results down on multiple pages.
Search results would be available for navigation in a card UI (one screen per result) where 25% of the screens real estate being devoted to Google on a products would get them a lot more impressions.
