sohois
18hr ago
Low cost in the sense that they aren't literally paying the participants for their quotes, sure. But low cost in the sense that the marketer does not need to expend a lot of salaried time? No way. Just the lead time for gathering everything would add months to the timeline, whereas a typical SEO blog is going from brief to publish in under a week.
Like the other articles on the page you mention, these are so much more typical of what SEO blogging actually was:
3 Reasons Why Going To Law School Has Become Popular Again
10 Ways To Make A Case For Yourself As A Lawyer
4 Tips To A Successful Maternity Leave While Having A Solo Practice
The latter 2 actually go the extra step of having some custom work with infographics, so slightly higher effort, but these are clearly written as very standard SEO articles. There is nothing remotely interesting in them in terms of content or style, and nothing to distinguish them from a typical AI written blog
Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible
This is obviously not true though. Yes it's interesting that these are same company, same topic, but the early example is very clearly not some low effort, low cost article. It quotes actual people ffs!
I have worked in marketing for a number of years, and produced a good deal of SEO slop. I'm sure I'm not the only person here with the same experience either. I daresay that every single person in such a position will say the same thing: gathering quotes, even internal quotes, is a ballache, and immediately adds a bunch of extra time needed to any given project. The Medium article has multiple dozen quotes. It is like the highest effort piece of SEO work you will ever see.
edit: I figure I should provide an actual example of SEO slop. Here's a topic I actually remember publishing on once (not this specific article, just the search term)
https://www.integrate.io/blog/7-key-differences-between-data-lakes-vs-data-warehouses/
Data lakes vs data warehouses. A simple enough technical question that a lot of B2B data companies would compete for. This is a very standard SEO article: it's got a nice list hook in the title; Good number of links, both internal and external; Couple of CTAs; etc. etc.. And it's all pretty low effort: no custom design work, no diagrams, just the 1 stock cover image; no quotes, no insight; it's just a very standard presentation of the basics on this topic.
sohois
4d ago
I'm not disputing that, I'm saying that the argument is very often "This thing is not that useful to me, and therefore, to anyone"
sohois
4d ago
As per my earlier response, this is not a claim that externalities don't exist or that local communities have no right to regulate local construction. I am remarking on the argument that construction shouldn't proceed because there is no demand, and this lack of demand is unevidenced and based entirely on the vibes of the objector
sohois
5d ago
I'm going to make the same point I've just made to Bombadil: the point of the meme reference is that the third party in this case has zero relevance to the transaction. There is party A, wanting to buy AI services, and party B, wanting to sell AI services, and then party X, saying that the demand doesn't actually exist and this transaction isn't real.
I'm not trying to make a fully general counter-argument against regulation here, and the above example would be different if party X felt that the AI services being traded carried dangers or externalities for the wider public. But for the specific quotes above, no one is making that case, they are simply claiming that because they don't see a value in a product or service, the value must not exist.
sohois
5d ago
Right, but that's a different argument. OliveTapenade quotes the article:
They clearly saw it as like a widget — a toy — and maybe there are these risks, maybe there’s the job stuff, but fundamentally they were like: This thing is not that useful. I don’t really see in my personal life how this could justify these gigantic valuations.
And adds his own opinion:
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable.
This isn't saying that cities can't regulate what gets built nearby, it's saying that regulation is needed because they don't believe that a market exists for building X. To use a much simpler example I've seen in the UK, it's saying that you can't open up a new chain coffee store in my town because there are already several coffee stores nearby and it's not needed - essentially saying I know you're willing to invest your own money in this business venture, but I've decided I know better than the markets.
sohois
5d ago
Markets: I consent
Investors: I consent
Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
In the UK we don't really have the same data centre showdowns described in this article, because the UK is already such a planning hellhole that no one would bother. Battles tend to be a lot smaller, focused on random businesses and housing developments. Nonetheless, so many of the NIMBY arguments seem to apply regardless of scale, one of the biggest of which is some kind of weird, communist, demand-management approach. "We don't need that here". "No one wants that". "Why are they building X instead of Y?"
Well, who the fuck cares about your market opinion, random local? Why are you the arbiter of supply and demand? Very obviously, somebody wants it; that's why people are putting their time and money down to build these things, whether it's a data centre or a bakery.
Now, I do accept that there is one difference when it comes to scale: data centres are so massive that a failed construction could leave you with a giant ruin somewhere, destroying local environments for nothing, whereas a small housing development or business won't have anywhere near the same impact. But even in this article, the first example is a proposal to replace the treasured, historic ... industrial wasteland. If something goes wrong there, you end up in exactly the same position!
It doesn't seem like any of the opponents in the substack even made a general "AI bubble" or similar argument (and that's putting aside the fact that data centres are the backbone of all modern infra, not just AI. There'd still be a ton of data centre construction if LLMs didn't exist). Their complaints are much more local, and concern about the companies doing the building is rooted in general distrust of corpos rather than anything AI specific.
These are identically worthless articles.
You should try to get someone to find you 10 pre-AI and 10 post-AI articles and see if you can find any consistent preference. I would be very surprised if it existed without the prior knowledge of one being AI written
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