A senior Google exec recently addressed this topic during a Q&A at a conference, and they said something along the lines of 'we prioritise usefulness over who it was written by' i.e. they don't really care if it's written by AI if it answers a user's questions/need.
Yeah, and Google motto was "don't be evil" and that changed so I am not going to trust them on that.
The reality is that once everyone jumps on the bandwagon of AI generated content, then the search engines will have to respond in some way. It may take a year or 3 but the response will be swift.
I actually read a TW thread by a guy who had 3 websites with many posts. One was completely generated by AI, the other one was a 50-50 mix and the last one was all human written.
After the last Google update, the AI generated blog was obliterated, the AI assisted one stayed about the same and the one written by a team of humans actually saw an increase in impressions/clicks.
Maybe the AI they were using was crap, who knows, but if content can be created cheaply then, this is the opportunity that you should not let go.
By that I mean, it is the time to differentiate ourselves by providing content that is truly genuine.
Do things that dont scale as its been told many times here.
But that is just my opinion, maybe I am wrong and everything will be fine. I don't have a crystal ball.
I think there's a big difference between having AI just automatically generate a bunch of keyword-stuffed garbage, and using AI to support you in fleshing out genuinely valuable content. It should always be seen as a tool/aid rather than a standalone resource, otherwise Google will likely pick up on it. I think if you're using it sparingly, sometimes just as a brainstorming method (that's how Notion is framing their idea too) then Google likely would never be able to tell.
I wrote about how that should be the same rationale for designers with the whole text-to-image craze i.e. see it as a new tool in your arsenal, rather than as something that's going to do the job for you or take your job.
I agree with your take on it. It is a tool that can be used for good(brainstorm ideas) or bad (generate hundreds of blog posts in 1 hour).
My comment was simply related to us indie-hackers. We know SEO is important, we also know that we need to rank quickly and the best way to do that is to get our blog posts , tweets out there as fast as possible.
We also know that 99% of indie-hackers don't like marketing so having an AI that comes up with ideas for you and writes the content for you seems like an amazing idea.
But this is where my warning comes in, this is an unproven technology in terms of impact in the SEO world.
Could it be that AI generated content becomes so good that Google cannot virtually assess if a blog post was written by an AI or by a human and therefore gives up the fight and starts ranking high quality AI generated blogs/blog posts?
Or is it possible that Google turns around ans says something like, we only want original, human written content to rank? Nobody knows.
The algorithm is a black box and maybe those changes are already coming and we don't know about them.
My point is, lets not put all our eggs in the same basket. The risk is too great IMHO but i speak only for myself.
Yeah for sure, I don't think anyone should see AI content generation as their golden ticket to SEO dreamland. No doubt we'll hear a bunch of edge case stories in a few months like 'how I made 100k from an AI blog' and suddenly everyone will think it's the best idea ever when actually it's a rarity that it works etc...like the rest of tech success stories haha.
I don't how they measure usefulness, but for the last few years, search results quality has been getting progressively worse imo. SEO blogs full of keyword spamming and self-promotion always dominate the top results for me
Yeah definitely, though I've heard that they've recently been making changes to address that. I think the trouble is that those most incentivised to write online are driven by the money it can earn them, so it naturally ends up being self serving/self promotion
Just isn’t any way to determine if it was written with AI assistance. On a similar note I predict there will be a general counter movement against cyberspace (AI will help highlight how “fake” it is). Real life deserves more attention.
Fingers crossed. I have no interest in reading AI generated content or communication. Same thing will happen with social networks, people are already using AI to generate tweets and DMs.
"Looking forward, we’re excited about the possibilities of what Notion AI will be able to do. It’s an important step in achieving our mission of making software toolmaking ubiquitous, helping more people unlock the true capability of computers to augment intellect."
Notion is where all my creative ideas start. Every video, newsletter, social caption, etc I write is written and stored in Notion. If they have good AI that can help me write better/faster that would be a huge benefit for me.
Yep, Notion AI has defeated Sigma and has been the top 1 on the ProductHunt board.
But AI is useful for writing??? I don't think I need AI to create the content for me.
Hi @joshdance, I added Nuro to the list, I didn't know if there are any other requirements! I also had a look at your substack and was fascinated by your post about generative AI for music.
I'm not sure I agree about your analogy that music is a collection of sinewaves though. Digitized uncompressed music (the WAV format) is more of a succession of numbers in a one-dimensional fashion. The way I understand it, a WAV file is 44,100 boxes in a row that each contain a number that says how "loud" (between 0 and 1) we should be playing that infinitesimal little bit of time. You can imagine it as showing the total displacement of the membrane of a loudspeaker (0 = at rest, 1 = pushed to the max). If you move the position of the membrane 44,100 times in a second you can generate almost any sound you want. So there is only one waveform.
Therefore there is less data in a second of music than a second of video if the video is larger than 210x210px.
Problem 5 is a non-issue I believe, because AI music doesn't need to be "played" with virtual instruments, the same way that DALL-E's diffuser doesn't "paint" the image with a virtual paintbrush but just prints out the total output from a random noise image.
If we were trying to have AI generate a music sheet than the instruments could matter (and then we're back to generating a much smaller volume of data : kilobytes not megabytes, so it solves problems #3 and #5) , but if we just want a finished file, then we can generate "real-sounding" music, not MIDI-style music, it's not easier or harder, just like DALL-E doesn't have a harder time doing a Monet impression (which might be more work for a human artist) than a crayon sketch.
I'm not sure about #6, for the same reason. It wouldn't be a missing note or a wrong note (which would be equivalent to DALL-E missing half of the image or having a completely different chunk of image in the middle of the result). It would be like, having a wolf cry in the background instead of a female backup singer's voice. And just like your example with the hand, we'd probably be fine with it and move on.
All in all, I love how well-researched your publication is. I think I will be a long-term reader :-)
The question is: how does it compare to professional tools like Jasper?
If you are looking at this to be able to create easy blog posts for your business and/or promote your brand, I would say be careful.
I would not be surprised if Google and other search engines start penalizing pages for being completely AI generated.
A senior Google exec recently addressed this topic during a Q&A at a conference, and they said something along the lines of 'we prioritise usefulness over who it was written by' i.e. they don't really care if it's written by AI if it answers a user's questions/need.
Yeah, and Google motto was "don't be evil" and that changed so I am not going to trust them on that.
The reality is that once everyone jumps on the bandwagon of AI generated content, then the search engines will have to respond in some way. It may take a year or 3 but the response will be swift.
I actually read a TW thread by a guy who had 3 websites with many posts. One was completely generated by AI, the other one was a 50-50 mix and the last one was all human written.
After the last Google update, the AI generated blog was obliterated, the AI assisted one stayed about the same and the one written by a team of humans actually saw an increase in impressions/clicks.
Maybe the AI they were using was crap, who knows, but if content can be created cheaply then, this is the opportunity that you should not let go.
By that I mean, it is the time to differentiate ourselves by providing content that is truly genuine.
Do things that dont scale as its been told many times here.
But that is just my opinion, maybe I am wrong and everything will be fine. I don't have a crystal ball.
I think there's a big difference between having AI just automatically generate a bunch of keyword-stuffed garbage, and using AI to support you in fleshing out genuinely valuable content. It should always be seen as a tool/aid rather than a standalone resource, otherwise Google will likely pick up on it. I think if you're using it sparingly, sometimes just as a brainstorming method (that's how Notion is framing their idea too) then Google likely would never be able to tell.
I wrote about how that should be the same rationale for designers with the whole text-to-image craze i.e. see it as a new tool in your arsenal, rather than as something that's going to do the job for you or take your job.
I agree with your take on it. It is a tool that can be used for good(brainstorm ideas) or bad (generate hundreds of blog posts in 1 hour).
My comment was simply related to us indie-hackers. We know SEO is important, we also know that we need to rank quickly and the best way to do that is to get our blog posts , tweets out there as fast as possible.
We also know that 99% of indie-hackers don't like marketing so having an AI that comes up with ideas for you and writes the content for you seems like an amazing idea.
But this is where my warning comes in, this is an unproven technology in terms of impact in the SEO world.
Could it be that AI generated content becomes so good that Google cannot virtually assess if a blog post was written by an AI or by a human and therefore gives up the fight and starts ranking high quality AI generated blogs/blog posts?
Or is it possible that Google turns around ans says something like, we only want original, human written content to rank? Nobody knows.
The algorithm is a black box and maybe those changes are already coming and we don't know about them.
My point is, lets not put all our eggs in the same basket. The risk is too great IMHO but i speak only for myself.
Yeah for sure, I don't think anyone should see AI content generation as their golden ticket to SEO dreamland. No doubt we'll hear a bunch of edge case stories in a few months like 'how I made 100k from an AI blog' and suddenly everyone will think it's the best idea ever when actually it's a rarity that it works etc...like the rest of tech success stories haha.
I don't how they measure usefulness, but for the last few years, search results quality has been getting progressively worse imo. SEO blogs full of keyword spamming and self-promotion always dominate the top results for me
Yeah definitely, though I've heard that they've recently been making changes to address that. I think the trouble is that those most incentivised to write online are driven by the money it can earn them, so it naturally ends up being self serving/self promotion
Just isn’t any way to determine if it was written with AI assistance. On a similar note I predict there will be a general counter movement against cyberspace (AI will help highlight how “fake” it is). Real life deserves more attention.
Fingers crossed. I have no interest in reading AI generated content or communication. Same thing will happen with social networks, people are already using AI to generate tweets and DMs.
I do not feel that this fits into the current Notion use cases, but maybe creates some more, let's see
(Emphasis mine)
They have a lot more planned.
Notion is where all my creative ideas start. Every video, newsletter, social caption, etc I write is written and stored in Notion. If they have good AI that can help me write better/faster that would be a huge benefit for me.
Why did you only share the notion link instead of an informative article?
Loved it! Can't wait to see how it changes the world, well its already doing it haha
Can't see it yet on my account
how far along the queue are you? There seems to be a bug as I've been stuck at number 1 in the queue for 6 hours
It's over! I'm canceling the AI Sub service I was subscribed to.
Here is a writing AI use case I found super compelling and made me a believer. Powered by Lex and the folks at Every the AI generates information and context. If Notion's AI can do something like this, that would save me hours of work... https://twitter.com/AdamRy_n/status/1582789755623731200?s=20&t=LlHoSEMMTGubgzid2pnb9A
So everybody is in the race to create AI content-generation tools.
But who's going to create the first AI content detection tool 😁, probably Google.
They already have.
Yep, Notion AI has defeated Sigma and has been the top 1 on the ProductHunt board.
But AI is useful for writing??? I don't think I need AI to create the content for me.
I don't see this being particularly useful for my use-case on notion but will be open-minded
Added it to the open spreadsheet list of AI writers.
I feel like AI is going to be a tool like spellchecker that most writing platforms are going to adopt.
Are byword and lex in the spreadsheet?
Yes. Sorry I meant to post the link as well. Here it is.
Add any you think are missing!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1czYc4u0XxNYuvwHJQ2EbiRHTqlJ-iomoDvUApgQDmBM/edit#gid=0
Hi @joshdance, I added Nuro to the list, I didn't know if there are any other requirements! I also had a look at your substack and was fascinated by your post about generative AI for music.
I'm not sure I agree about your analogy that music is a collection of sinewaves though. Digitized uncompressed music (the WAV format) is more of a succession of numbers in a one-dimensional fashion. The way I understand it, a WAV file is 44,100 boxes in a row that each contain a number that says how "loud" (between 0 and 1) we should be playing that infinitesimal little bit of time. You can imagine it as showing the total displacement of the membrane of a loudspeaker (0 = at rest, 1 = pushed to the max). If you move the position of the membrane 44,100 times in a second you can generate almost any sound you want. So there is only one waveform.
Therefore there is less data in a second of music than a second of video if the video is larger than 210x210px.
Problem 5 is a non-issue I believe, because AI music doesn't need to be "played" with virtual instruments, the same way that DALL-E's diffuser doesn't "paint" the image with a virtual paintbrush but just prints out the total output from a random noise image.
If we were trying to have AI generate a music sheet than the instruments could matter (and then we're back to generating a much smaller volume of data : kilobytes not megabytes, so it solves problems #3 and #5) , but if we just want a finished file, then we can generate "real-sounding" music, not MIDI-style music, it's not easier or harder, just like DALL-E doesn't have a harder time doing a Monet impression (which might be more work for a human artist) than a crayon sketch.
I'm not sure about #6, for the same reason. It wouldn't be a missing note or a wrong note (which would be equivalent to DALL-E missing half of the image or having a completely different chunk of image in the middle of the result). It would be like, having a wolf cry in the background instead of a female backup singer's voice. And just like your example with the hand, we'd probably be fine with it and move on.
All in all, I love how well-researched your publication is. I think I will be a long-term reader :-)
Sébastien
Love the feedback! I will include it in round 2 when I update the text to music article.
Thank you!
Where's the open spreadsheet?
😬 copied hte link but didn't paste.
Here is it >
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1czYc4u0XxNYuvwHJQ2EbiRHTqlJ-iomoDvUApgQDmBM/edit#gid=0
Notion was already bloated with features before.
Instead of increasing / fixing the UX, they blow it up even more.
If you are looking for a tool, dedicated to note-taking - check out ERA.
I think visual creation also will come soon!
Today we've launched https://prompt.cafe on Product Hunt!
We've created a simple Prompt Template.
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