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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm building https://sflow.io and part of that includes generating SEO articles

Honest question, not trying to be rude, but how do you sleep at night knowing that you're actively making the web^H^H^Hworld worse? I assume you must, because you have a super handwavy "ethics" section on your site that says ~"we'll look into it". Do you have a vision of the world where your SEO articles provide net positive value to the public? Or is this just for shits and giggles, consequences be damned?

[edited: you're right. this doesn't just harm the web]

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In places like India I know that bribery and misinformation is more widespread than anyone could ever imagine.

Instead of a writer writing a clickbait article / low quality SEO (written by someone off-shore) article in 5 minutes, they could generate an article with our AI (provided they give us quotes, context, etc.) within that same 5 minutes. The difference is that we can iterate on our models and integrate our cross referencing fact-checking algorithms to ensure we generate meaningful articles.

> In places like India I know that bribery and misinformation is more widespread than anyone could ever imagine.

> Instead of a writer writing a clickbait article / low quality SEO (written by someone off-shore) article in 5 minutes, they could generate an article with our AI

So you acknowledge that there is something harming the world, and you want to make that harm even easier to do. And if you can profit from it, so much the better. Did I get that right?

Bribery and misinformation is harming the world. We allow you to have that same pace of writing, but we generate meaningful articles via our cross-referencing models.

Otherwise people would write whatever comes to their mind: clickbait/misinformation without proper cross referencing/fact checking.

I am very disappointed that another human being would pitch SEO spam, and automated SEO spam to boot, as something positive when we've seen for years how it rapidly and unequivocally destroys everything it touches. It is spam. It is pollution.

> Bribery and misinformation is harming the world.

Spam is harming the world, factful or otherwise.

> but we generate meaningful articles

It sure sounds like you generate SEO spam. You even advertise that you generate SEO spam. Your Show HN title is even "AI Generated SEO Spam".

> Otherwise people would write whatever comes to their mind: clickbait

SEO articles are literally scammy clickbait. Therefore, you generate scammy clickbait. "Fact checking" is orthogonal when your product is SEO spam.

> you're actively making the web worse?

Don't stop there. This is making the world worse.

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