I don’t really play games at all and the only system I own is a Nintendo Switch. I played the new Zelda and am really enjoying it. When I get stuck or have a question I google it. When I google it, I note that the top say 10 sites that answer my question all have similarly-formatted articles and also have the same mistakes in the answer to the question.
I expect nearly all the sites pointing to Zelda tips or FAQs are not original in any way and are instead just regurgitated from one another through AI to form a webring of shit.
At least I use ad blockers and block JavaScript so they don’t get some ad revenue.
Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads.
I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.
I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination.
Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years.
To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer.
I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
Recipes sites too. Recently I was looking at recipes for a dish I wanted to try and noticed that two blogs had identical recipes for "Grandma's X". I scrolled back up to the obligatory five page essay and those were almost identical too--one of them had clearly stolen the story from the other and run it through one of those AI "paraphrase" tools to change words here and there. It was pretty easy to tell which was the original and which the copycat based on some strange word choices in the paraphrased version.
"hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style"
Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000.
Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
Seems like an oddly high risk process. Not only are you risking bad taste from major missing ingredients like salt, but also ruining things with the wrong temperature/ cooking times.
A reasonably comprehensive cookbook like The Joy Of Cooking or something specific to your preferences seems like less effort overall vs Google or a LLM.
> Not only are you risking bad taste from major missing ingredients like salt, but also ruining things with the wrong temperature/ cooking times.
they are operating under the assumption you are a decent cook. any decent cook will know how to taste for salt and what is safe temperature wise. if you blindly follow instructions you are not a decent cook.
I don’t read “have even a middling amount of kitchen experience” as being a decent cook. IMO, a decent cook doesn’t really need full recipes they can just wing it based on a basic idea, but it takes a long time to get to that level.
It... really doesn't, though? Cooking is hardly by any means trivial, and achieving recipe-quality results based on a quick skim and winging it from there is certainly more difficult, but I'd argue that anybody who can't make something decent without religiously following a recipe isn't even of "middling kitchen experience".
I may be biased though, "skim a recipe and wing it" is my default style anymore after all.
I’m not talking about skimming a recipe and wringing it.
Think easting something in a restaurant then replicating something similar at home the next day just based on the flavor. Doing that for a few things is easy, but it takes significant time to get to that level across a wide range regional cuisines.
It really, honestly isn't a high-risk process at all. You just have to think a little bit. All I can say is try it yourself and see. For me, half the fun is seeing what it comes up with based on what I feed it, especially if I encourage fusion cuisine. I've hit some real winners that way.
Also, portion adjustments are quite useful, as I mostly only cook for one or two people. Scaling isn't always linear, so that's been a helpful step.
I would treat it analogous to asking ChatGPT to code for you (but for food) - some times it works great, other times you gotta nudge it a bit.
The tool is currently best used by people who already know how to code/cook and don't want to spend too much cognitive bandwidth, but have the skills to mofidy as needed.
That's pretty much exactly how I see it, too. Offload a good chunk of the scut work, but I'm sanity checking the results. Still a strong net positive, at least in my experience.
Yep, article spinners were the thing as early as 2010, probably earlier. Even more surprising that they are back in search results as I remember them being absent for a while.
Back when I used to do Mechanical Turk now and then, I would see rewording tasks show up pretty often there too. I assume they were for this kind of purpose. Typically they were just one sentence out of context that you were supposed to reword. I guess they pasted the article back together out of the reworded sentences?
>… understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines
On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
Indeed. And if you have to click through a couple of results to find an actual answer, they get ad revenue X times over answering your question with the first result.
There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
I just checked to see if GameFAQs was still active and thought that Tears of the Kingdom would be a good game to see if there were any active users still making guides.
There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them.
I was an active member when GameSpot merged then took over (my account missed the LUE cutoff by less than a year, if you know you know). It was something the owner promised would never happen, and then he repeatedly said it would never go farther then it did. GameFAQers hated GameSpoters. Merging was the beginning of the end IMO, it hurt the community and that was the main thing they had.
But they do know. They are incentiviswd to send you to the sites with the most ads, not the site which is most relevant, because they make a ton money off those spam sites and less of dedicated fan sites.
At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
Yeah I don’t get it - without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable. Why have they allowed search quality to stagnate while pouring billions into random tech areas where they have little competitive advantage?
Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
> without search dominance google’s entire business model is highly vulnerable.
I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us.
In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
Google earns money on all the ads on all those trash websites. So their immediate incentive is to drive traffic to them regardless of the longer-term reputation cost.
Oh Google certainly could moderate their search results or augment them with human knowledge. They'd need a dozen people per country, at most, for such a task. The problem is, Google is already threading a very fine line regarding anti-competition and bias especially in Europe... and say, they would choose "Computer BILD" (a German tabloid) over Heise or Golem (actually respectable media), or the other way around - the outcry would be massive and so would the coming lawsuits.
Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query.
The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
> Yep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads.
I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site
(warframe)
I think the top of the crop wikis are the ones for Runescape, OldSchool Runescape and Guild Wars 1 & 2. Wowhead is kind of in a league of its own though.
That is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.
It does get deeper than just your mentioned surface level of served ads.
Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".
What I find amusing is that even when ChatGPT responds to my gaming questions I find the response to be unusually wordy with a surprisingly heavy into paragraph before it answers my simple question.
Very similar to those few advertisement sites with a huge block of wonky into text taking forever to get to the answer.
Moderating on a subreddit where people are definitely trying to spam their way in with LLMs, that's becoming on of my big tells. At least the way they are tuned now they are really prone to wordy and pointless intros and outros. (At least in my personal opinion, while intros and outros are fine they should do something more than just summarise again, especially the outro, even if it's just trying to end on a joke.) I recognise there's no reason to believe that is fundamental to the tech, but right now it's a tell. (Though "subtle errors of the type humans don't make" is both a stronger signal and more relevant one.)
What motivates you to continue volunteering your time to moderate a Reddit forum when the host has demonstrated a clear and repeated lack of respect or care for the time and concerns of moderation staff?
Secondly, I was helped by a lot of people when I was a young developer and this is how I give back. Since it's a sum of maybe 10 minutes a day, which I was largely already using for this anyhow, it's nearly free. If it ever became a job I'd stop.
This is the default behavior from the way it is fine-tuned and from its system prompt. But you can always tell it to give you answers that are short and to the point.
And trying to remember what specific enemies are where is not fun for me. Is it fun for anyone? The Compendium doesn't keep track of them when you fight, despite the fact they respawn every blood moon.
I want another Savage Lynel Bow. Where did I see that Silver Lynel? I can't remember, but I'm not hunting it all across the map hoping for the vague ping of my Purah Pad sensor when I'm already on top of one. Should I be making my own notes as well?
The log is a great idea, but there's lots of stuff it doesn't capture. The quest descriptions often aren't sufficient and markers are often the person that started the quest. Great(!)
I appreciate the subtitles, but why is so much of the game unvoiced?
Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping?
Even with internal FSR and AA disabled so it doesn't occasionally dip to smeared potato quality, it can be hard to spot things if you don't know explicitly where to look, even for hawkish eyesight. The Ultrahand glow can help, but it's a rubbish solution.
No colour blind settings. WTAF.
There are so many missed opportunities to make this amazing game vastly more accessible. Nintendo has made it clear they don't care about accessibility. It's a real shame, because accessibility makes things better for everyone.
> Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping?
I'm not sure if this would be exposed in whatever emulator you're using, but the Switch does have console-wide button remapping in the system settings. This obviously isn't sufficient though, since at the very least it presents a huge hassle for having different input settings per game or if multiple people are sharing the same profile. Unfortunately, Nintendo either doesn't recognize the limitations of only having a single system-wide remapping or doesn't think it's worth prioritizing better solutions within their first-party games.
I think Yuzu has per-game emulation. I'm just playing on a 360 controller though, with mostly default mappings. So long as I remember X-Y and A-B are the wrong way around, I'm golden.
I think it's pretty clear Nintendo just straight-up doesn't care. They do the bare minimum, if that.
ToTK would want per-mechanic remapping ideally. Like the ability to remap vehicle stuff, archery stuff, throwing stuff, mecha spirit thingy separately.
But per-game stuff would at least be a step towards this decade.
The lack of colour blind settings and QoL stuff (that are accessibility for cognitive), and the lack of voice content, are the things that really rustle my jimmies.
Stuff that would immediately make the game more accessible to everyone, not even just disabled players. Not doing that isn't just scummy, it's lazy.
There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods.
I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for.
As far as color issues, I too share color vision deficiencies but everything I have encountered has been carefully designed with shapes in mind so that color is only an enhancement. I STRONGLY believe that this approach to design is much, much, much more accessible than any toggles and filters buried in menus. Could you share with me some examples of where color was key to solving a puzzle or identifying an enemy or item?
>There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods.
>I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for.
I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding my complaint, and/or if I'm misunderstanding that part of your comment.
It's my fault for being overly succinct. The interpretation of mine seemed obvious when I wrote it, but reading it back now after your comment, mine is definitely ambiguous.
I don't really care that the onscreen prompts doesn't match the controller labels I use for the emulator. That's very much a "me" problem that I could solve if motivated. I'm playing on a 360 controller so I am not motivated.
(Thank you for the info about a mod manager, but I'm fine with manual mods too. It was implied but not stated in my OP that I'm already using some. At the moment, DynamicFPS at 30FPS, with TotK_1.1.2_ChuckPatch=FSRDisable+QualityReduceFix+Shadow1024+1008p.)
My deep frustration is that Nintendo make it clear they don't care about any sort of accessibility, the lack of in-game button remapping in ToTK on Switch is just one of many symptoms of that.
Say, for a hypothetical example, I am someone with limb difference or someone with issues with muscle memory, using a licensed controller. I can't just scroll across the ToTK menu to settings and move "jump" to A and "use" to Y etc. Why?
Button remapping is a standard feature for most games elsewhere, not least because it's something non-disabled people want. And nobody thinks, "I hate this has an option to map buttons how I want."
Another related symptom is Nintendo, unlike the other two competitors in the space, don't have an accessibility controller. It took Hori to step in to do that. (The Hori Flex. MS have the widely praised XAC, Sony's PS5 Accessibility Controller is on pre-order with a launch here in December.)
Nintendo was leading the way in making cardboard origami robot controllers and a fucking fitness hula hoop though.
As for examples of colour blind issues, Ultrahand welds are green.
radic202 on GS:
>I have Protanopia (unable to tell the difference between Red and Green), hence it makes is sooooo difficult when using the hand to move and assemble items. I do manage though by targeting well or by pure luck. There are some other instances where I can't see a cliff or item located in the grass but that is OK for the most part.
I wanted to give an example image before realising that if you too have colour vision issues, this may be an especially dumb idea on my part.
But to illustrate Ultrahand as radic202 above when sticking some wood together, I took a screenshot of the first decent Ultrahand video I found on YT and shoved through pilestone's Color Blind Vision Simulator with the R/G Blindness option.
Possibly a relatively extreme example but I picked a random frame to screenshot that had a lot of green weld and brown wood in it: https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz
Yeah, you can manage to use Ultrahand, but it's vastly more difficult than if you could just set the weld colour to blue.
Nintendo didn't bother adding options for customisation of stuff like this for people with different needs, knowing that about 8% of men are colourblind and there are lots of people with limb difference or other physical difficulties.
Hell, those of us who played Zelda on the NES have a worryingly increasing risk of deteriorating eyesight, arthritis, and dementia in our near future. Old age is a bastard.
But instead Nintendo put in a menu option to turn off the HUD for prettier pictures or whatever... Thanks Nintendo(!)
Any real accessibility for people with differing needs in Nintendo games is by accident, not by design. Any accessibility stuff that's only needed by people with different needs isn't even an afterthought because "fuck those people".
And there are SO MANY named locations, and many things refer to them only by name, but no way to search through ones you've found! I've spent quite a lot of time browsing through the map at maximum zoom to try to find the named area, only to discover hours later that I wasn't even in the right quadrant.
It's quite frustrating at times. I broadly have fun with it, but improving these things would make the game a lot more consistently enjoyable.
I don't know if you intended to sound as patronising and passive aggressive as you did. I mention it in case you hadn't intended sounding like an ass.
I'm afraid I may be matching your tone here...
>Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map?
No, I use a better map that other people made. My comment specifically links to it.
>Or do you need a developer to do everything for you?
It would be nice if the developer made their own in-game map and Compendium better, yes.
I am incapable of re-writing Nintendo's own map and compendium code. Even if I were technically capable, I couldn't sign it so it wouldn't run on an unmodded Switch anyway. So fixing the issue properly is indeed something I cannot DIY and would require Nintendo for.
And while it's not an explicit "need" for me, not everyone has the same set of needs. That's a thing about accessibility. It would be a really nice QoL improvement for the game though.
Remembering where everything is on the sprawling multi-level world is obviously an issue that even Nintendo recognised. Some Compendium items do have location info in the Compendium. But not all items in the Compendium though, coz it's a shit implementation.
Is "remembering where shit is" a core mechanic that brings you joy or otherwise enhances the game? One would assume not, but it's not a rhetorical question, please feel free to answer.
You suggested the solution to a half-assed map and compendium is "use pen and paper", instead of asking, "why did the devs half-ass the map and compendium they put in the game?". Do you not think you may be looking at this from the wrong angle?
I do. But there are only ten different ones and they don't tell you what thing you've stamped. So if you're stamping enemies, which one is "skull"?
Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map?
Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?
On Kagi I just block that shit since it's relatively obvious. Some trustworthy sites in this space are gamefaqs(!) and IGN (and game magazines and others I can't recall now).
Yea, its tragic. When I was a kid I would often just go to GameFAQs because that was the only real source, and the guides would be surfaced in google. Its still around but Google gives me 20 crappy ad riddled sites that require a new page click, listicle-style, to get through a 5 minute area
The other problem with static sites is that it's trivial for some jerkface to copy your content and repost it. The first case of that I heard about was almost 20 years ago when it happened to a friend. The social circle of the subject matter was small enough that she could name and shame to get it taken down. Today I don't know what you could do.
It happened to me about that long ago too and I was just flattered, but it also wasn't done by some crappy scammer ripping random content to stuff it full of ads and SEO it to death hoping make a quick buck off of my writing. I have no desire to stop people from copying and sharing whatever they can, but when it's being done with a profit motive it feels a lot more exploitative and dirty.
I would love to see a federated hosting solution where person A can write content and persons B and C can help host it. That gives you the upsides of someone copying your stuff without the downside of them misrepresenting it as their own work.
But yeah, SEO has so ruined the internet I expect some sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon solution to spring up to fix it.
Undoubtedly it had many hits, but a lot of the greats have also since been remastered and can be enjoyed on newer platforms with HD graphics and modernized controls.
I broke mine out a few years ago and the load times are kind of irritating, and repeated unskippable cutscenes in some games cooled my retro enthusiasm.
I mean that in between them being solid machines, the amount of content that still gets put out around it, the custom hardware people are designing for it and homebrew software the scene is still very much alive.
I noticed the same thing with Zelda. The marketability of game FAQs was realised up to a decade ago, but AI content generators, optimised by time-honoured SEO, has evidently accelerated the time to market for new platforms.
The success of TOTK, and the availability of articles and Reddit posts has made it ripe for the picking.
If I was dang I would permanently ban every user who did this stupid bit of posting chatgpt crap in threads about chatgpt. It's not funny, it's not clever, it's just obnoxious.
I haven't posted anything that was accused of being generated by AI yet, but I assume it's just a matter of time. Having to create new accounts because of false positives would quickly get more annoying than the odd AI comment.
it's fine tuned specifically for that tone. The base model without fine-tuning will tend to be a lot less corporate, and respond more to the prompt (chatGPT can still imitate other styles reasonably well if you ask for it, so long as you don't trigger one if its safeties)
The thing is, you (we) only identify chatGPT generated content when it has that generic voice. Maybe there's a lot more generated content here, but it isn't so obvious. It's a selection bias, we see mostly what's easy to see.
I don’t think this voice is emergent, it learned this from its training data. If you gave me a video game review script written by ChatGPT and another one written by Ganeranx, I doubt I’d be able to tell the difference. They both have a style of just vaguely referencing lots of different things that different people have said without really saying anything at all or offering any concrete opinions.
Absolutely, 'content spinning' in gaming is an issue, but it can still aid players. Encouraging original content and source acknowledgement is critical. Balancing user experience and ad revenue is tough for gaming sites. For unique discussions, try platforms like Reddit or game-specific forums. Your insights could greatly enrich Zelda content creation
Haha, I made https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io (the site is my way of poking fun at crappy AI startups, I won't spoil how).
Now, one of the biggest sources of traffic for me (ca 70-80% at times!) are crappy AI app catalogues which not just include my MeatGPT but also hallucinate the most beautifully stupid descriptions of what it does.
I couldn't imagine this stuff working better to be fair: taking that juicy slab of meat from my site and then proceeding to repeatedly slap themselves in the face with it screaming "please give me more".
I mean, I love generative art, and built a self-publishing medieval content farm[1], but this thing just writes itself, across multiple sites.
> But again, there’s nothing to stop this. These subreddits can’t only fill themselves with joke articles to screw up a site like this, even if this one specific example is good for a laugh.
Most threads will be normal conversations, and reddit (and other discussion sites) can serve as a simple way of summarizing and generating news for 'free'.
I'm thinking that HN too could serve as a source for tech related news, couldn't it? Summarize the target article, then join it up with summaries/sentiments of the top comments in the thread. I didn't say I'm doing it, but if I could think of it, someone's probably way ahead of me already and has tried it.
I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results.
Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.
>I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value.
When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.
I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head.
Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.
If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.
> All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.
Sorry to be blunt but, that's not games. That's games journalists who want to be activists in their own fields. That, just as the gorillionth take on how this or that is problematic, is just people wanting to inject their politics into a hobby and it can't disappear soon enough.
I don't see that as an advantage of journalism. I see that as an evil to endure for a good that isn't there.
How is exposing malfeasance and illegal corporate activity activism?
I hate to retreat into platitudes here but good journalism shines a light in the dark, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, that’s kind of the name of the game.
If you’d prefer these topics go unaddressed and companies continue to take advantage of their workers or whatever, not sure we have enough in common to have real discourse on the subject. Sorry to be blunt lol.
That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? The vast majority of content that people see is low effort garbage that is pushed by media companies that are just looking to make a quick dime off of advertising revenue, and that’s very easy to do with AI.
Ad-based “news” is always going to have this problem, because getting clicks just requires getting people to the page; the quality of the content doesn’t matter nearly as much as the headline. The incentives for quality content just don’t exist in the current business model.
Paywalls obviously aren’t the solution, either, because news is nothing, now if it can’t be shared, and paywalls stop that dead. It also takes time and effort to build a brand, as you rightly stated before. The other important factor is how easy it is to lose trust in that brand, which means high stringent and transparent fact checking needs to be a part of the solution, alongside _proper_ retractions when someone _does_ get it wrong.
The only way I can imagine things improving is for independent journalists to get together to ditch the big media outlets and find some real solution to monetizing their work and keeping everyone accountable to accurate reporting. Obviously that’s much easier said than done.
> As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
At a revenue level how do you quantify that value? Unless you are a brand (TIME, Washington Post, etc) the only metrics are page views and time spent reading the article that eyeballs wander across ads.
Arguably a clear well written article may perform worse than an AI generated article that bleeds over on to a second page. Some of the most valuable content on the internet is not well written pieces on the political climate, but "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" with a 75+ image one per page photo gallery.
How do I quantify the value of reporting? As a writer and reporter, not a finance dude, I'm really not qualified to answer that. But it's interesting you say 'unless you are a brand' because I feel like the brand is what you get from building up years and years of trust with excellent reporting.
In your second paragraph, I don't think your assertion is correct. It isn't 2008. While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years. The New York Times is still the most valuable brand in journalism and it's thriving against its competition. Not only other legacy brands, but let's be real, look where Buzzfeed is at today. Shitty content lost revenue-wise as well as on a moral basis. The only way to reliably make good ad revenue is to spam articles but it's not a profitable (or serious imo) way to run a journalistic enterprise. I believe paywalls/subscription models will continue to dominate while the losers fight for scraps.
> While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years.
The LA Times makes $380,116 per employee. Outbrain, one of the largest click farms makes $841,768 per employee. Taboola makes $784,780 per employee. Combined the latter two bring in enough revenue to equal 1/4 of the entire print media industry. That isn't even counting hybrid companies like media.net that do a combination of clickbait and traditional advertising.
Hey sorry, I thought we were talking journalism. Outbrain is an advertising/recommendation engine company right? Know zero about them but doesn’t look like they produce anything. Interesting you went with revenue per employee though because I think market cap tells a different story. They’re worth 256 million today and NYT is sitting at 6 billion. I don’t doubt clicky clicky makes money, just that brands in journalism that rely on clicky clicky don’t make as much as those that produce years and years of high-quality content.
I return to Buzzfeed because I think they’re a good example of a place that tried to do both but because they had so much low-brow clicky clicky, the brand ultimately suffered. Despite winning a Pulitzer in 2021 it really has a terrible reputation among non-industry folks who haven’t forgotten how the brand came to prominence.
That was specifically my point. You can't quantify any value gain of good journalism. Hiring a 10% better writer doesn't earn you 10% more money. I quoted the revenue per employee numbers because they highlight the fact that hiring another engineer to build better click bait farms will earn you more than hiring another writer.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good journalism. 90% of the world does not and they just want to be spoon fed garbage at a faster rate. Look at the most popular shows on TV for example, they aren't National Geographic documentaries, but instead trashy reality television.
As a common man someone who hates what journalism has become: I hope "AI" swiftly replaces your industry which has become a cancer and plague upon society. I would rather deal with a used car salesman than a journalist.
Journalists today only provide unnecessary exposition and emotional poetry (read: wasting my reading time) and actively cause more problems and conflicts in society than they address and resolve (sensationalism and fearmongering is what brings in the clicks and thus the money).
I have no sympathy whatsoever for such a rotten, morally devoid, worthless industry, and while I doubt "AI" will bring about any fundamental difference or improvement it will at least make the process of journalism better reflect the actual value of the final product.
In case it wasn't obvious, I didn't bother reading or even clicking on the article. Not the least because it comes from the cesspool known as Forbes, of all places.
- ask the AI to filter out the ones that are not tech-related (bay-area topics, politics)
- scrape selected articles
- write summaries
- publish static website
other sources are reddit subreddits and rss feeds (official languages' blogs and github's releases page).
The AI is quite gullible. That can be avoided by giving it more context and having a review step where you make sure that you are enforcing your editorial rules.
Another thing that I've been wondering is having a cheaper model (gpt-turbo-3.5) write articles and then use a more sophisticated to review them (gpt4)
I'm curious, can you ballpark how many tokens you use for the round trip of link ingestion and article creation? I haven't really tinkered with LLMs, so I'm trying to wrap my head around the cost of projects like this.
I run the script every 6hrs. When a candidate list is built, it has around 15 items + the prompt. That usually goes around 1k tokens. When generating an article, the prompt has 1k tokens and the response has around 1k tokens (I ask for text with up to 250 words). If the source article is long I just truncate it - it should be enough to create a summary presenting the topic. It is possible to batch article creation, submitting the prompt once alongside 2-articles, but I don't think that it would be worth the hassle. I'm getting billed 1c for every 12-15 articles generated (using gpt3.5turbo
I particularly appreciate that you have a disclaimer at the top stating that the article was AI generated. I wish more sites that used AI did that. Nice execution too.
Even if you don't want to just summarise the comments, you can view the comments section for most articles as crowd-sourced research on the topic. You can easily walk away from most interesting discussions here with a shortlist of topical articles, books, etc, and often some colour commentary straight from the horse's mouth.
Anon because I know startups working on that exist and should not talk about it
Information wants to be free; right now it’s a browser plugin that reads DOM and allows tagging; that human work is fed into a training system
The idea started as make Twitter community notes it’s own thing as browser plug-in and then expanded into model training to look like a user browsing the web and read DOM
Not hitting an API, so no fees yes? It’s the user making the interaction choice
Rate limits are going to be the only defense against AI trained to look like doom scrollers
They can't only do that but they can embarrass someone who's passing an AI writer off as human. At minimum, they'll have to message in some way that the article was written by AI lest this trick is pulled to embarrass an author which was otherwise considered to be human.
This is happening on a lot more gaming news sites than just this one.
I'm regularly seeing articles in my Google News feed that are summarizing Reddit threads with questionable accuracy in their coverage that are clearly AI generated.
All that said, when it does work correctly it's actually kind of useful and timely.
For about a year now since seeing the advent of decent generative text AI, I'm starting to dream of the day I no longer use my devices to go online and just get a phone call from an AI voice that tells me if I have anything urgent in my email or summarizes news I'd actually give a crap about.
The web has gone from something I truly loved to an abusive relationship so entrenched in my day to day I can't boot it from my life.
I for one welcome an AI intermediary that needs to suffer through reading SEO spam and click bait headlines and nonsense comments to synthesize a useful summary of what's important to me.
Exciting! This looks and feels a lot like the counter culture experience I had in the 80s as a hacker. The sense of fighting The Man may now be taken up against The AI. Well played game nerds!
I always like how this just brings to the surface the lack of respect the creators of the thing, in this case AI, that it will be abused by the public. The public doesn't care how/what the devs want it to do. The public cares about what they can make it do. See hot rods, overclocking, or any of the millions of other examples.
Yep, and even if the US regulates it, the public will take it underground, and overseas will keep pushing on. The cat is out of the bag.
I would still like to see these companies try and fix any negative externalities mind you. If they just throw their hands up at helping accelerate SEO spam then that'd be disappointing.
That's the thing that makes me laugh at the pageantry of this time waste. Do people really think that US companies are the only ones working on this tech? I love how the US still has the notion that the rest of the world gives one iota about its "morality" dictates.
I feel like we've seen this any time that the tools are new and powerful enough - the folks unburdened by hierarchical structure can and do move fast, so when there's a sea change they can get in there and do some good damage until the behemoths catch on and steer their resources towards shoring up what they perceive as defects (frequently identified as anything that reduces their control over any system or it's connected parts).
My hope is that things get faster and more chaotic as we move forward. The best stuff happens when the empowered are scrappy and in it for the love and not the money.
Yeah. But on the other hand, this is Made For Advertising (MFA) content. The worst thing that can happen to it isn't notoriety, it's getting on the naughty list with Google or the programmatic ad markets. The former can gut its traffic, the latter can gut its ability to monetize.
Ironically, it's looking like the war on trash AI content is going to be fought by adtech firms who need to plausibly claim their customers aren't going to be wasting money on worthless inventory.
Whatever it is they do for money, people visiting in this context are unlikely to convert, taking it down also mitigates a little of the reputational damage at least.
The site is run by a competitive game tournament company (that I briefly worked at) and I think eyeballs on the article would have actually converted since it's different branding.
I was trying to find out about video stabilization options on Linux yesterday and stumbled over an article that extremely confidently was discussing a tool that’s maintained by the „authors of ffmpeg“ … which surprised me. So I googled it and couldn’t find it. Then I put the name into quotes and found three articles mentioning it, all by the same company.
So it’s actually starting to happen. LLM generated content filled with hallucinations are flooding the web. The internet will soon become completely useless as the signal to noise ratio plummets until it’s practically impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.
That AI transformer paper really is Pandora’s Box.
They aren't as funny and elaborate as they once were, but yeah, they still do post something every year. In the early days of WoW they used to publish really good fake patch notes that were right on the line of credibility with a couple fake bombshells mixed in. The forums would melt down with posts from people who forgot it was April 1. Good times.
I don't doubt that the redditors caught this company using an AI, but frankly the generated text doesn't look that different from what an underpaid human would write. I'm sure most of these gaming websites have a "content calendar" and "pipelines" for paying their outsourced writers $0.80 per word with instructions to source new content from relevant subreddits. With AI they've just found a way to do it more cheaply.
$0.08-$0.12/word is the rate for a quality short story in a moderately respectable science fiction magazine like Clarkesworld or Asimov's Science Fiction.
This is also a generally-quoted rate for blogspam.
The blogspam rate will crater in response to ML but still I expect the short story to become a dead format. Many good ones will be written but there will be nowhere valuable to share or find them.
They'll need to create some sort of reputation system to make it work. Alternatively, move back to typewriters and not publishing online. AI reversing the internet again.
at first because of the context, I read it as ¢0.80 cents per word, but my brain got all tripped up over the dollar sign. I then started thinking about looking for a way to apply for that job. For $0.80 cents per word, I could wax poetically for pages upon pages of nonsense. I could even make it more beneficial for me by never using more than 2 syllable words. Using 3+ syllable words would start costing me money.
Write $5, not $5 dollars. The dollar sign denotes the unit, there is no reason to add the word after. Alternatively you could just write "5 dollars", there is no need for the dollar sign when you write "dollars" right after.
That way you dont have to worry about keeping your redundant units in sync.
The article quotes the OP saying they hope it gets picked up by bot-driven news sites. While it’s possible, I don’t think a human would include that bit.
80 cents per word sounds amazing, your comment is worth like 50 bucks at that rate. If it took you half an hour to write you'd still be getting a pretty good rate.
Every time someone has used an automatically publish feature of any type, it always ends poorly. Either personal information gets posted they didn't intend, incomprehensible grammatical errors, or as in this case completely falsified information gets released.
It's a very old lesson we should have learned from newspaper days but I guess with how fast people in AI are moving they don't care about "old lessons".
Outside of that, it's interesting to see how people try to combat and highlight AI platforms. Jokes like these, paywalls, limited invites, increasing API costs, and so on. Very interesting times for online information.
About ten years ago there was an Agile conference that published a hashtag where anything that used that tag would automatically get shown on the monitors around the building. 4chan found out, and well, things went predictably.
Automatic publishing is always going to be vulnerable to content poisoning.
That's why it's important to suspend the axe above the wires ahead of time. It's also important to to remind the AI that the axe exists. The Axe of dAImocles
I know you're joking, but I do actually really enjoy a handful of their YouTube reviewers, and more than once have used their reviews to make a purchase decision for a game.
Only gripe is the kind of always float between 7-8 scores for games that really should be ranked lower or higher, but the content of the videos are normally good enough outside of the score given.
All of the guides on this site are written by top-ranked players and backed by simulation data. Most of the guides can be customized to your character's talent selections and the leveling guides let you set your current level so as not to show things you don't currently have.
Breadth isn't a word a cowboy would typically use though
EDIT: after further thought, height isn't a word a cowboy would use either. around here, there is a staggeringly large number of people that say "width and heighth"
Ah, well I was factoring in the British influence. I could see such a modified phrase being used in an academic setting for sniping between intellectuals.
I don't see the problem. They are deep. Not as deep as a lake but they are deep. They are also shallow. Not as shallow as a divot made into a sheet of paper (which doesn't go all the way through) but they are shallow.
Weird article. The way it vilifies what this site does -- aggregating and summarizing social media activity -- but then does exactly the same thing is hilarious irony, and perfectly encapsulates the anti-AI contradiction.
Similarly, it celebrates that some random site published wrong information, when the cause was a subreddit publishing wrong information. e.g. Some rando happening into that sub would be just as misled.
It's some crappy gaming app that aggregates "news". Who cares? This is such a meaningless bit of outrage about nothing of any consequence at all, beyond "AI will not replace us!" luddism.
I think it's a bit hilarious that you work for Buzzfeed. The single and only reason I am aware of Buzzfeed's existence is that they endlessly post listicles that are simply aggregating reddit posts, tweets, etc.
I expect nearly all the sites pointing to Zelda tips or FAQs are not original in any way and are instead just regurgitated from one another through AI to form a webring of shit.
At least I use ad blockers and block JavaScript so they don’t get some ad revenue.