[HN Gopher] Anthropic's AI-generated blog dies an early death
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Anthropic's AI-generated blog dies an early death
Author : Sourabhsss1
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-06-09 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| paxys wrote:
| It's fascinating how creative these large AI companies are at
| finding ways to burn through VC funding. Hire a team of
| developers/content writers/editors, tune your models, set up a
| blog and build an entire infrastructure to publish articles to
| it, market it, and then...shut it all down in a week. And this is
| a company burning through multiple billions of dollars every
| quarter just to keep the lights on.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The joys of wealth transfer from the poor and the middle class
| workers to the asset owning class via inflation and the
| Cantillion Effect [1].
|
| 1- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to nowhere
| as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning class to the
| middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures crash and burn
| with nothing to show for it.
|
| Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest
| (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > I've always thought of these VC fueled expeditions to
| nowhere as the opposite. Wealth transfer from the owning
| class to the middle class seeing as a lot of these ventures
| crash and burn with nothing to show for it.
|
| That would be the case if VCs were investing their own
| money, but they're not. They're investing on behalf of
| their LPs. Who LPs are is generally an extremely closely-
| guarded secret, but it includes institutional investors,
| which means middle-class pensions and 401(k)s are wrapped
| up in these investments as well, just as they were tied up
| in the 2008 financial crisis.
|
| It's not as clean-cut as it seems.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Can VC's get their funding from mutual funds and pension
| plans?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think that is the 'find bag holders' part of the plan?
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the chilling effect on mom and pop businesses
| undoes all of that. When they (we) disrupt and industry the
| power consolidates but in new hands. The idea is to get it
| away from the entrenched interests but like a good cultural
| revolution the second tier ends up in charge when the first
| tier gets beheaded.
| swyx wrote:
| it's fascinating how you think being creative is an insult.
| an-honest-moose wrote:
| It's about how they're applying that creativity, not the
| creativity itself.
| bowsamic wrote:
| What makes you think they think that? If someone says
| "finding creative ways to murder people" you think they're
| saying the problem is the "creative" part?
| pscanf wrote:
| People use AI to write blogs, passing them off as human-written.
| AI companies use humans to write blogs, passing them off as AI-
| written. :)
| anon7000 wrote:
| AI generated web content has got to be one of the most
| counterproductive things to use AI on.
|
| If I wanted an AI summary of a topic or answer to a question, a
| chatbot of choice can easily provide that for you. There's no
| need for yet another piece of blogspam that isn't introducing new
| information into the world. That content is already available
| inside the AI model. At some point, we'll get so oversaturated
| with fake, generated BS that there won't be enough high quality
| new information to feed them.
| echelon wrote:
| Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web could
| be a tool to get people off of Google and existing social media
| platforms.
|
| I'm certainly using Google less and less these days, and even
| niche subreddits are getting an influx of LLM drivel.
|
| There are fantastic uses of AI, but there's an over-abundance
| of low-effort growth hacking at scale that is saturating
| existing conduits of signal. I have to wonder if some of this
| might be done intentionally to poison the well.
| tartoran wrote:
| > Using AI generated content to mass-scale torpedo the web
| could be a tool to get people off of Google and existing
| social media platforms.
|
| How? Fill the web with AI generated content or just using
| LLMs to search for information? As more junk is poured into
| training LLMs this too will take a hit at some point. I
| remember how great the early web search was, one could find
| from thousands to millions of hits for request. At some point
| it got so polluted that it became nearly useless. It wasn't
| only spam that made is less useful, it was also the search
| providers who twisted the rules to get them to reap all the
| benefits.
| h1fra wrote:
| hear me out: seo
| saulpw wrote:
| This is pretty reductive. Many people want to pump some new
| thoughts they had into an AI to generate something tolerable to
| post on their blog. The writing isn't the point; the thoughts
| are. But they can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or
| don't feel like they can, anyway). So the AI is an assistant
| which takes their thoughts and makes them look acceptable for
| publication.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are. But they
| can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or don't feel
| like they can, anyway).
|
| Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which
| turns 200 words of bullet points into 2000 words of prose,
| though? It's not like there's suddenly going to be 10x more
| insight, it's just 10x more slop to slog through that dilutes
| whatever points the writer had.
|
| If you have 200 words' worth of thoughts you want to share...
| you can just write 200 words.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Blogging is a pretty niche activity in general these days.
|
| I think if writing more than 200 words is painful for you,
| blogging probably isn't for you?
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are
|
| This is so, so wrong. The writing _is_ the thoughts. A person
| 's un-articulated bullet points are not worth that much. And
| AI is not going to pull novel ideas out of your brain via
| your bullet points. It's either going to summarize them
| incorrectly or homogenize them into something generic. It
| would be like dropping acid with a friend and asking ChatGPT
| to summarize our movie ideas.
|
| The idea that writing is an irrelevant way to gatekeep people
| with otherwise brilliant ideas is not reality. You don't have
| to be James Baldwin, but I will not get a sense for what your
| ideas even are via an AI summary.
| ausbah wrote:
| if you can't write your thoughts as something cohesive to
| begin with i don't using LLMs is going to solve your problem.
| writing is absolutely the point if you're trying to
| communicate with text. lack of clarity is usually sign of
| lack of understanding imo, i see it in my own writing
| Veen wrote:
| The writing is the point. A well-structured, well-argued, and
| well-written article indicates the writer has devoted
| considerable time to understanding and thinking through the
| topic -- if they haven't, it quickly becomes obvious. A
| series of bullet points indicates the opposite, and using an
| AI to hide the fact that the "writer" has invested minimal
| cognitive effort is dishonest.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's ridiculous to expect people to read something you
| couldn't even be bothered to write.
|
| If you just want to get the information out then just post
| the bullet points, what do you care?
|
| If you want to be recognized as a writer, then write.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| > The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are.
|
| Writing _is_ thinking.
| fullshark wrote:
| Anthropic cares about that, every individual content creator
| does not. Their goal is to win the war for attention, which is
| now close to zero sum with everyone on the internet and there's
| only 24 hours in the day.
| jerf wrote:
| This is the fundamental reason why I am in favor of a ban on
| simply posting AI-generated content in user forums. It isn't
| that AI is fundamentally bad per se, and to the extent that it
| is problematic now, that badness may well be a temporary
| situation. It's because there's not a lot of utility in you as
| a human being basically just being an intermediary to what some
| AI says today. Anyone who wants that can go get it themselves,
| in an interactive session where they can explore the answer
| themselves, with the most up-to-date models. It's fundamentally
| no different than pasting in the top 10 Google results for a
| search with no further commentary; if you're going to go that
| route just give a letmegooglethat.com link. It's exactly as
| helpful, and in its own way kind of carries the same sort of
| snarkiness with it... "oh, are you too stupid to AI? let me
| help you with that".
|
| Similarly, I remember there was a lot of frothy startup ideas
| around using AI to do very similar things. The canonical one I
| remember is "using AI to generate commit messages". But I don't
| want your AI commit messages... again, not because AI is just
| Platonically bad or something, but because if I want an AI
| summary of your commit, I'd rather do it in two years when I
| actually need the summary, and then use a 2027 AI to do it
| rather than a 2025 AI. There's little to no utility to
| basically caching an AI response and freezing it for me. I
| don't need help with that.
| verall wrote:
| I fully agree with this, besides that if an AI could auto-
| generate a commit message that I can edit to make actually
| correct and comprehensive, it will probably be a better, more
| descriptive message than whatever I come up with in usually
| ~3 minutes.
|
| The value is a nice starting point but the message is still
| confirmed by the actual expert. If it's fully auto-generated
| or I start "accepting" everything, then I agree it becomes
| completely useless.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> It 's because there's not a lot of utility in you as a
| human being basically just being an intermediary to what some
| AI says today._
|
| To be fair, there has never been a lot of utility in you as a
| human being involved, theoretically speaking. The users do
| not use a forum _because_ you, a human, are pulling knobs and
| turning levers somewhere behind a meaningless digital
| profile. Any human involvement that has been required for the
| software to function is merely an implementation detail. The
| harsh reality, as software developers continually need to be
| reminded of, is that users really don 't care about how the
| software works under the hood!
|
| For today, a human posting AI-generated content to a forum is
| still providing all the other necessary functions required,
| like curation and moderation. That is just as important and
| the content itself, but something AI is still not very good
| at. A low-value poster may not put much care into that,
| granted, but "slop" would be dealt with the same way
| regardless of whether it was generated by AI or hand written
| by a person. The source of content is ultimately immaterial.
|
| Once AI gets good, we'll all jump to AI-driven forums anyway,
| so those who embrace it now will be more likely to stave off
| the Digg/Slashdot future.
| code_biologist wrote:
| It's been interesting to watch this play out in microcosm in
| different spaces. Danbooru and Gelbooru are two anime image
| boards that banned AI image content, largely to their benefit
| in my opinion. Rule34 is a similar image board that has
| allowed AI images and they've need to make tagging and
| searching adaptations to add to handle the high volume of AI
| images versus human artists. I'm glad there's an ecosystem of
| different options, but I find myself gravitating to the ones
| that have banned AI content.
| raincole wrote:
| What we wish for: better search.
|
| What we got: more content polluting search, aka worse search.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I don't think better search is exactly what we want. It would
| also be great to have less quantity and more quality. I think
| optimizing only search to make it better (including AI) only
| furthers the quantity aspect of content, not quality.
| Optimizing search or trying to make it better is the wrong
| goal IMO.
| tartoran wrote:
| Better search implies separating the wheat from the chaff.
| Unfortunately SEO spam took over and poisoned the whole
| space.
| xorokongo wrote:
| This only means that the web (websites and web 2.0 platforms)
| for public usage is becoming redundant because any type of data
| that can be posted on the web can now be generated by an LLM.
| LLMs have been only around for a short while but the web is
| already becoming infested with AI spam. Future generations that
| are not accustomed to the old pre AI web will prefare to use AI
| rather than the web, LLMs will eventually be able to generate
| all aspects of the web. The web will remain useful for private
| communication and general data transfer but not for surfing as
| we know it today.
|
| Edit to add:
|
| Projects like the Internet Archive will be even more important
| in the future.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Editorial guidelines at many publications explicitly state
| that AI can assist with drafts, outlines, and editing, but
| not with generating final published stories.
|
| AI is widely used for support tasks such as: - Transcribing
| interviews - Research assistance and generating story
| outlines - Suggesting headlines, SEO optimization, and
| copyediting - Automating routine content like financial
| reports and sports recaps
|
| This seems like a reasonable approach, but even so I agree
| with your prediction that people will mostly interact with
| the web via their AI interface.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > AI generated web content has got to be one of the most
| counterproductive things to use AI on.
|
| For something like a blog I would agree, but I found AI to be
| fantastic at generating copy for some SaaS websites I run. I
| find it to be a great "polishing engine" for copy that I write.
| I will often write some very sloppy copy that just gets the
| point across and then feed that to a model to get a more
| polished version that is geared to a specific outcome. Usually
| I will generate a couple variants of the copy I fed it,
| validate it for accuracy, slap it into my CMS and run an a/b
| test and then stick with the content that accomplishes the
| specific goal of the content best based on user
| engagement/click through/etc.
| chermi wrote:
| While I largely agree, I don't think it's quite correct to say
| AI generated blogs contain no new information. At least not in
| a practical sense. The output is a function of the the LLM and
| the prompt. The output contains new information assuming the
| prompt does. If the prompt/context contains internal
| information no one outside the company has access to, then a
| public post thus generated certainly contains information new
| to the public.
| hk1337 wrote:
| Depends on the web content. I've been using Claude to generate
| posts for things I am selling in Facebook Marketplace with good
| results.
| ysavir wrote:
| What do you feel sets this apart from the rest?
| neya wrote:
| I can tell you this much - most people who are opposed to AI
| writing blog articles are usually from the editorial team. They
| somehow believe they're immune to being replaced by AI. And this
| stems from the misconception that AI content will always sound
| AI, soul-less, dry, boring, easy to spot and all that. This was
| true with ChatGPT-3xx. It's not anymore. In fact, the models have
| advanced so much so that you will have a really hard time
| distinguishing between a real writer and an AI. We actually tried
| this with a large Hollywood publisher in-house as a thought
| experiment. We asked some of the naysayers from the editorial +
| CXO team to sit in a room with us, while we presented on a large
| white screen - a comparison of two random articles - one written
| by AI, which btw wasn't trained, but just fed a couple of
| articles of the said writer on the slide into the AI's context
| window, and another which was actually written by the writer
| themselves. Nobody in the room could tell which was AI and which
| wasn't. This is where we stand today. Many websites you read
| daily actually have so much AI in them, just that you can't tell
| anymore.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Have you tried gptzero?
| neya wrote:
| Yep, it is not able to recognize. To be fair, it's not just
| dump it into ChatGPT and copy paste kind of AI. We feed it
| into the model in stages, we use 2-3 different models for
| content generation, and another 2 later on to smoothen the
| tone. But, all of these are just OTS models, not trained. For
| example, we do use Gemini in one of the flows.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Counterpoint: GPT-4 and later variants, such as o3 and 4.5,
| have such a characteristic style that it's hard _not_ to spot
| them.
|
| Em dashes, "it's not just (x), it's (y)," "underscoring (z),"
| the limited number of ways it structures sentences and
| paragraphs and likes to end things with an emphasized
| conclusion, and I could go on all day.
|
| DeepSeek is _a little bit_ better at writing in a generic and
| uncharacteristic tone, but still... it 's not good.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| If you ask them to speak in a different voice, they will.
| It's only characteristic if the user has made no effort at
| all to mask that it is AI generated content.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > We asked some of the naysayers from the editorial + CXO team
| to sit in a room with us, while we presented on a large white
| screen - a comparison of two random articles - one written by
| AI, which btw wasn't trained
|
| Needlessly close to bullying way to try and prove your point.
| neya wrote:
| > We asked some
|
| Which part of this looks like bullying? It was opt-in. They
| attended the presentation because they were interested.
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| Did the reporter reach out to Anthropic for public comment on
| this? They list a "source familiar" with some details about what
| the intended purpose was for, but no mention on the why
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Is there an archive anywhere? People can argue to no end based on
| some whimsical assumptions of what the blog was and why it was
| taken down, but it really comes down to the content. I have found
| even o3 cannot write high-quality articles on the topics I want
| to write about.
| linkage wrote:
| Have you tried Perplexity's Discover feed? It's my go-to source
| of news these days. I don't know what model they use to
| generate content but it's really good.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Up until a few weeks ago, my LinkedIn seemed to become better
| because of AI, but now it seems everything is lazy AI slop.
|
| We meatbags are great pattern recognizers. Here is a list of my
| current triggers:
|
| "The twist?",
|
| "Then something remarkable happened",
|
| That said, this is more of an indictment of the lazyness of the
| authors to provide clearer instructions on the style needed so
| the app defaults to such patterns.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| We try things, sometimes they don't work.
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